“Of course, love makes all the difference.” The girl’s voice sounded almost a note of defiance in the quiet greyness of the room. Young, fair-haired, and fair-faced, she sat forward in her chair, her figure displaying eagerness, her face glowing with the radiance of some new-found joy. Close beside her, on a low table, a large bowl of golden daffodils stood, surrounded by a little glow of sunshine. They were the only spot of vivid colour in the room, and some of the girl’s gladness, her defiance at the rest of the greyness, seemed reflected in their colour and glow.
The woman, sitting on the sofa by the window, turned her eyes from the girl to the daffodils and back again, and felt her heart tighten on a little throb of regret. Just lately, Youth, the things of youth, the colour, the vividness, the joy, had all brought with them this swift power to hurt. She wondered why, and vaguely attributed it to a sense of growing old in herself. At which most people would have laughed, for Maureen Simpson was only thirty-three years old, and at thirty-three one ought not to be old enough for the youth in the world to hurt one. Yet instinctively Maureen took to herself the greyness of the room, and left the glow of golden daffodils to Elise. Elise was so vividly young, the gold of her hair alight with colour, her eyes a rather hard, bright blue. Maureen’s eyes were grey,—grey eyes which hint at sorrow even if there is only laughter in the heart,—her hair was a soft, warm black, her face too pale, her lips too closely held together for much laughter.
“You agree with me, don’t you, Mrs. Simpson!” the eager young voice went on. “Love makes all the difference. To other people Jimmie is just only a very ordinary, perhaps rather dull young man. To me——”
“Yes,” agreed Maureen; her eyes now were looking beyond Elise and the daffodils, were glancing, perhaps, back to the time when she herself had felt like this. “Yes, I suppose it does make all the difference. And when are you and Jimmie going to be married, Elise?”
“Oh, perhaps not for years.” A little shadow fell across the joy. “Father and mother are so fussy, and Jimmie has no prospects.”
Elise jumped to her feet—stillness was impossible to her—and crossed the room to the window, flinging herself down beside the stiffly-held figure there.
“Only I had to tell you, Mrs. Simpson. You’ve been so dear to Jimmie and me, and before you pack up and go away back into the wilds I wanted you to know.”
“That was sweet of you,” said Maureen. She leant a little down for a second; her lips touched against the gold hair. It might almost have been a kiss, though Maureen was not often given to these displays of affection. “And there is no hurry about marriage, Elise. I think your people are very wise.”
“Wise!” pouted Elise. “Wisdom is a virtue of old age.” She looked up quickly, her eyes bright and curious. “And you are not really old, Mrs. Simpson, though you pretend to be. How old are you?”
“Old enough to have learned wisdom,” laughed Maureen. Somehow, in the face of those daffodils, she hated to admit to thirty-three. There is something very commonplace about age after you have passed thirty. Before that date it is just possible that each birthday may be a glorious adventure.
“If we wait so long,” sighed Elise—her versatile mind switched on to another thought—“I shall be old myself. Do you know, I always used to think—this was when I was about seventeen—that I should commit suicide if I wasn’t married before I was twenty-one—and I’m nineteen now!”
“Yes,” agreed Maureen; “but as you grow older you advance the date. I used to plan myself not to bother to wash my teeth and brush my hair much after I was thirty. But I don’t suppose one ever really gets too old for life.”
She laughed again and stood up. “Are you staying to lunch, Elise?” she said. “Do—Tom will be glad to have you.”
Elise jumped up hastily and ran to the mirror, snatching up her hat in passing. “ No,” she said, “no, thank you ever so much. I’m a tiny bit afraid of your austere husband, Mrs. Simpson.” The hat arranged to her satisfaction, she swung round. “May I beg some daffs to stick into my waist-belt?” she asked.
“Do,” Maureen nodded. She stood by the little table, her hands half wistfully touching the golden flowers. “Take them all, Elise—they are more suited to you and your Jimmie than to this room.”
“It’s not a bit of a nice room,” agreed Elise. “I expect you’ll be jolly glad to get packed up and be off. It’s because you hear the East a-calling that you get these fits of the blues.”
“Do I get fits of the blues?” asked Maureen. “Perhaps you are right. Maybe it is the colour and heat, the space and the dust, that I’m heartsick for. Perhaps it is——”
“Well, anyway,” said Elise, a parting shot from the door, where she turned to wave her hand, “it can’t be because you are in love. Before Jimmie proposed I used to get most dreadfully depressed; but I suppose one stops being in love when one is married.”
“I suppose one stops being in love when one is married.” Mechanically Maureen crossed over to the window-seat and sat down again. She had her sewing there. She picked it up, but as her needle went in and out, her thoughts, keeping time with it, slipped back across the years to that day seven years ago when she herself had been married and finished playing at love, as Elise would have said.
Seven years! She could count them over on her fingers. Seven commonplace years of little pleasures, small illnesses, one great disappointment, and an ever-growing sense of disillusionment and despair. No, not so much despair, for what was there in her life with Tom to make anything so magnificent as despair? It was more monotony, and a curiously gnawing weariness of the soul. And yet Tom and she had loved each other—loved each other still, she must suppose, since nothing had really happened to destroy or nullify what had undoubtedly been in the beginning a great passionate desire for each other. Was it only that marriage was as essentially different from young love as the golden daffodils were to the drab greyness of this boarding-house sitting-room? Was marriage a part of the reality of age, and love one of the dreams that are laid aside with the other things of youth? Her heart rebelled against the thought, was as hungry now for the dreams as ever it had been.
In and out went the needle and back went her thoughts. To-morrow was the anniversary of their wedding day. Would Tom remember? He so rarely remembered any of those things. Christmas, he supposed, was a time when you gave presents, but what, in Heaven’s name, was the use of giving presents to some one with whom you shared the common fund? The cheque-book was Maureen’s to do as she liked with—let her buy anything that took her fancy. There was no grudging in his mind, she knew. And yet—well, a cheque-book is not the material to weave a dream from; this comes rather in a bunch of violets—an unexpected, absolutely valueless gift. Her wedding day seven years ago!
She could see herself standing beside Tom in the soft-lighted church, hear the rustle and murmuring of people about her, the hot touch of Tom’s hand, the cold circle of ring as it slipped about her finger—“In sickness and in health till death us do part.” Tom’s voice had been odd and shaken as he said the words. Hers she knew had been firm and clear. She had been playing her part then, conscious that every eye in the crowd was watching her. And she had known that she was beautiful; her glass had told her that. Beautiful, with the soft white veil falling from its crown of blossoms over her dark hair, with her eyes like stars and the radiant colour in her face and lips.
It was afterwards that she had felt shy, when, the journey over, the dinner finished, the lights put out, and the windows opened, she had known herself alone with Tom—with all the night about them like a cloud of darkness shutting out the rest of the world. And she had been afraid—it had come from her in a little sob of terror as she had felt his arms close round her as his lips touched hers. But with fear had come the passionate joy of surrender. That also she remembered.
The work dropped from Maureen’s hands; her eyes came back to the few daffodils that Elise had left. The sunlight had shifted, but it had not been able to deprive them of their radiance—against the grey background they showed up vivid gold. That surely was what love should be like—a blaze of gold across the monotony of life; otherwise why was it allowed to mock you just for a little with its splendour!
There had never been any children—perhaps that was where the bitterness had first come in, though she had resented that thought fiercely. It was not that she had not wanted children; but in love, surely Tom and she should have been all-sufficient to each other! Would baby hands have held them when they drifted apart? It was no baby hand, she knew, that could altogether soothe the aching disappointment of her heart. It was not maternity that had failed her; that had been denied her, but love—love that she had held warm in her hands, close to her heart, and had not been able to keep or hold.
She stirred now and picked up her sewing again. It was very silly to let the chance words of a girl like Elise let loose all this passion of vain regret in her heart. Life was drab and commonplace and uneventful, and she had got used to it. That was what most people did—especially when they were old enough to be wise. It is only in extreme youth that we knock our heads against stone walls.
The slamming of a door downstairs, the sound of firm feet on the stairs, brought a little smile to her lips. How extraordinarily silly Tom would think her if he knew of the thoughts that had been chasing through her head! Tom, so placid, so content with the commonplace in life, so determined that marriage should be as sober and uneventful as possible! Tom, who no doubt loved her, but who kept his love carefully ticketed and put away in the same place as the ordinary Englishman keeps his religion!
They had gone out to Africa after their honeymoon. Tom’s work lay out there. True, he was a doctor, and could have followed his profession anywhere; but he had always loved the wild places of the earth, and Africa had appealed to him. Maureen often wondered why. It had been the first thing about Tom that she had failed to understand. The country had appalled her; the loneliness, the shut-awayness from everything that had so far constituted her life, had filled her first with surprise and then with dismay. She had never imagined life like this. She had always thought that it would be thrilling to live in one of the outposts of the Empire, to be, as it were, a pioneer white woman in a land where as yet there are few of the comforts and none of the security of civilisation. But she had been mistaken. The life that had opened out for her in the small station to which Tom took her as a bride had not been thrilling. It had been comfortable,—if one could call heat and insects and a crowd of black servants comfort—it had been safe, and it had been hopelessly and utterly monotonous. You might be living on the edge of a quiet but ominous volcano. It was just possible that sooner or later the natives—always an unknown quantity wherever the white man meets them—might rise in their hundreds and overwhelm and murder the handful of white people who governed them. It was very difficult to believe or even think of such an event disturbing the placid social life of the various stations. And it was the monotony that ate into Maureen’s soul.
“We are surrounded by hills here,” she wrote to a girl friend of hers during the first year. “There are times when they seem to rise all round and shut one in, as though Uganda were a cage from which there is no possibility of escape.”
At which the girl friend had been rather astonished, and had pondered, shrewdly enough, whether it was not matrimony that was proving a cage for Maureen.
Perhaps if Tom had in any way entered into the spirit of companionship which Maureen had so eagerly extended to him, it might have done much to have helped her through the strangeness of that first tour. She would have looked upon things with laughter had there been any one always at hand to share the mirth. But once back in his own sphere, Tom took up all the old threads of his life with eager hands, and it seemed to Maureen as though she stood outside, unneeded and unnoticed, on the outskirts of the many interests that lay round him.
Simpson was essentially a man’s man. He played games well, he was devoted to cards, and he was immensely keen on his work. In reality his life had been perfectly full and satisfactory without a wife. It was only Maureen’s grey eyes, the way the lashes curved away from them, and, perhaps, the poise of her very delicate head, that had made him forget the other things for a short time and fall in love. And to his love-making he had brought all the passionate intensity of his mind, which was a very keen part of himself, and the freshness of a heart which had so far had very little to do with women. It was no wonder that Maureen had found him irresistible. On tiptoe for love as she had been those seven years ago, this strong, rather stern man, with a reputation for being something of a woman-hater, had suddenly turned and laid the wealth of his nature at her feet.
And if he brought her all the love he was capable of, she also gave him everything that was in her to give—her girl-dreams, her womanly beauty, the purity of her thoughts and hopes. Simpson was to blame in that he took such little notice of all that she brought. He made few attempts to understand, and dreams were things that he had small time for in his busy life. He was very content to have her with him, but the honeymoon over, the desire of possession gratified, he would have been equally content for her to have stayed at home. He would have done his three years’ tour in Africa and returned to her for a second brief spell of lovemaking at the end of that time. Indeed, had it been possible to arrange their married life in such a way without rousing the amazement of Maureen’s relations and the hurt wonder of the girl herself, it is quite probable that Simpson would have retained the reputation of a devout and passionate lover for a great many more years than he did.
As it was, it was beyond him. He loved Maureen, he taught her to love him, and he married her. For him the matter ended there. She was his wife, and to be a wife, Maureen decided rather bitterly in the first year of her married life, was the most monotonous, dream-destroying existence that she had ever imagined. It was the way his other interests—his work, his games, his club—swallowed him up, took him away from her, that hurt her most. She saw so little of him. The few minutes before and at breakfast,—and breakfast was a meal which Simpson, at any rate, felt ought to be partaken of alone, or at least in silence,—the hurried lunch, to which he would rush in and rush away from; even if the work in the station was slack, the rush, she discovered, was the same.
“I’ll swallow my lunch and get half an hour’s laze over a book,” he would say.
And she had so much to talk about! Only for the sake of talking, as she knew right well, not because there was anything definite for which she could truthfully claim his attention.
And then work again till tea-time, and tea, at which he was always more or less sociable, because it was a meal where a woman’s presence did somehow or other seem necessary and comfortable. But even then it was nothing to be lingered over—there were the very necessary games to play. “Must take hard exercise if one is to keep healthy in this country,” he would say. And then on an afterthought, “What are you going to do, girl of mine?”
He never, himself, played games with women. They did not play well enough for one thing,—he had a rather old-fashioned contempt for women’s prowess in the field of sport,—and for another it did not give him enough exercise; but he liked Maureen to play with the other—not quite so good at all games—men in the station. And after games there would be the club and cards. He had always played cards. He could not remember an evening in his life, except during the rather amazing interlude of being in love with Maureen, when he had not succeeded in having a rubber or two of bridge before dinner. It made him late for dinner—sometimes it would be after nine before he would dash into the drawing-room and apologise to a coldly silent Maureen for not being in time to change; but it had always made him late for dinner. Honestly, he saw no reason for making any change in this because he was married.
He saw no reason. That was the thing that hurt. At first she had been surprised to tears over it, then bitterly angry, then proudly indifferent; but he saw none of the changes. He was not a man who conversed very much. To eat his meal in silence and subside at once into an easy-chair with a book was what he had always done. He continued doing it, and fondly imagined that Maureen did the same with equal contentment. But then women were queer creatures. There were days—or at least nights, for at night he was inclined to wax affectionate—when he certainly did notice that Maureen was upset about something. Once or twice he even suspected her of sulking. But moods—to which all women, his medical knowledge told him, were very prone—were not things he had very much time to probe. If she resented his kisses, fought against his encircling arms, he really had very little inclination to find out why; and, generally speaking, he was content to wait till she relented.
She was his wife and he loved her; he was her husband and, presumably, she loved him. Women had their moods, that was all.
Thus simply did Simpson solve the knotty problem of what was, to outside opinion at least, a not very successful marriage. The solving was not so easy to Maureen. She had a certain amount of natural courage; she had a very sweet common sense. Life was not what she had planned it should be. She must make the best of it as it was, she decided. One by one she laid the dreams away; and the dream about love—a very golden affair to most girls—was the first to go. Marriage remained—a thing of grey texture and monotonous calm. Perhaps, if children had come to her—but they had not come; that was another dream that had been laid aside. It never entered either of their heads to end the farce by separating.
It would not have occurred to Simpson, because the innermost heart of him that had very little to do with his outside life, and that had first loved Maureen, still loved her with a depth and intensity that was one day to surprise him. And Maureen—well, such a thought does very rarely occur to a woman unless there is another man in the question. For Maureen, so far, there had been no other man. It was merely that she had come to realise that marriage and love were not the same. And for the rest, the horror against life in Africa faded after her first year.
In a way she grew to love the country. The sunshine, the colour, the strong, riotous life of tree and flower and bird and beast took hold of her, made up to her in some way for the greyness of her own thoughts. She was always glad to get back after their six months’ leave at home. This time she had a feeling that she would be more glad than usual. Perhaps something was stirring within her, some vague resentment at the thought of growing old. London seemed drab and grey and content with its greyness, not dissatisfied any more. She was home-sick, as Elise had said, for the hot fervour of blazing suns and radiant skies and pulsing, throbbing life.
The door of the room opened and Simpson put his head in. “You here, Maureen?” he asked. He caught sight of her and came in—a tall, well-built man of thirty-eight or nine, hair just greying at the temples, resolute mouth and chin, fine, steady blue eyes, that looked all men very squarely in the face. He was a good-looking man, Simpson, admired by women, liked by men. As a doctor he was infinitely more popular with the latter. He had never cultivated a very sympathetic manner towards minor ailments, and he made little pretence at understanding the stomach disorders of babies. But if you wanted a strong hand and firm will to pull you back out of despondency and despair—if you looked for some one who would stand beside you and fight a determined battle against death—then you needed a doctor like Simpson. So all men said, and, presumably, they knew.
Maureen looking up at him wondered, as she had wondered once or twice lately, why it was that all his good looks, his air of manly vigour, had so little power to stir her pulses. Elise came nearer to the divine truth of things in her frank—“To others, Jimmie may be just a dull young man. To me. . .!” Why had the divinity slipped past her and left her cold and grey?
She stood up, and as she moved another man came into the room and stood just behind Simpson—a small, slight man, his thin face alive with intellectual keenness, his green-brown eyes almost womanish in their beauty and in their fringe of heavy black lashes. He was clean-shaven, and his mouth showed firm-cut, yet passionate, the corners drooping in repose, lifting to satirical quick humour when the man smiled or spoke.
He made a striking contrast to Simpson. They stood, each typical of their class: the man of dreams, with strange Eastern blood in the throb of his pulses; and the man of action, cold, methodical in his love, calm in his hate. Maureen, the woman, stood between, her small head lifted, her eyes fixed on the newcomer.
Then Simpson spoke, breaking the silence which even to him had seemed for a second to be charged with something uncomfortable.
“I’ve brought Gerald Kenyon to lunch,” he said. “You haven’t met him yet, have you, Maureen? He wasn’t at Mbale all last tour. But he’s travelling out on the same boat with us, so I’ve dragged him along to be introduced.”
Gerald Kenyon stood for a second or two undecided. There were several ways before him of spending the evening, and he could not make up his mind which to choose. All round him the crowd emerging from the doors of the theatre surged and chattered and laughed, hailed taxis and were whirled away in a confusion of noise and movement. He had just seen Simpson and his wife into a taxi; for he had persuaded them to do a matinée with him after lunch. He had held Maureen’s hand, helped her in while Simpson shouted directions to the driver, and a little of his indecision—the sense of discontent in his mind—was due to the fact that he could not quite analyse his feelings with regard to Mrs. Simpson.
He had heard a great deal about her before he met her. To begin with, he had travelled home on the boat with a Mrs. Donovan, wife of one of the heads of departments in Entebbe—a woman with a surprising knowledge of everybody’s private history. Once, in the early days of his career in Uganda, Kenyon had made violent love to Mrs. Donovan and found her not at all unwilling to respond. The link of mutual attraction—though long ago the passion had merged into the mildest flirtation—kept them very good friends. And Mrs. Donovan, he had always known, took an immense interest in his doings, in his love affairs, in his manner of life as a whole. She was always looking to him to procure some really thrilling scandal in their dull, social existence. For she had once known Kenyon very well, and it was a knowledge she never forgot. So it was Mrs. Donovan who first spoke to Kenyon of Maureen Simpson.
“Ever met the Simpsons?” she had asked, her plump form encased in a vivid-coloured silk jersey, sitting beside him on the cool side of the deck of the homeward-bound steamer. “I mean the doctor man?”
“I know Simpson,” Kenyon had replied. “Why?”
He had turned to look at his companion, and he had found her rather faded but still defiant blue eyes studying him. Mrs. Donovan had been a very handsome woman when Kenyon had first known her. There were still traces of this beauty left, only now the gold hair was too golden,—dyed, the other ladies would have told him,—the pink-and-white skin had grown blurred and patchy, and she was growing fat. No amount of tight-lacing could disguise the fact.
“If I loved a woman and married her and she grew like this, what would she mean to me?” Kenyon had thought with a little bitter glint in the eyes that watched her. “Why?” he had repeated.
“Oh, nothing.” Mrs. Donovan waved ringed hands in the air and sighed. “She is pretty, and she’d interest you, that’s all. Also, I am not sure that she’d be safe for you. There are times when I am quite sure that she is pretty desperate.”
That was the phrase that was taunting Kenyon’s memory now. Of course at the time he had repeated his question, “Why?” and Mrs. Donovan had reeled off a long string of reasons: her husband neglected her; she was astoundingly pretty; there had never been any children; and every one knew that the only love in Simpson’s life was contained in a pack of cards.
“And then she is serious,” Mrs. Donovan had added; “she never flirts with any one. She is waiting for a grand passion.”—she had shivered affectedly—“a horribly dangerous and uncomfortable thing for every one concerned.”
Kenyon had laughed. Waiting for a grand passion! He could just imagine what those words conveyed to Mrs. Donovan. Was any woman capable of it? He very much doubted it. He had had his dreams about that kind of thing in his youth; for, as his eyes so plainly said, he had been given to dreaming. “To love one woman, only cleave to her and worship her”—that had been his ambition. And then he had grown to know women. He would have summed them up as young and old Mrs. Donovans. The first girl that he had loved very passionately had jilted him to marry a wealthier suitor. She had cried as she said good-bye to him. “It is not my fault,” she had wept. “Fate is too strong for me.” Fate was always too strong for women. Mrs. Donovan, and the many others who had followed her, had said very much the same as they yielded to his kisses. It was men who broke their lives, who gave their very souls, and sold their honour for the sake of love. You could not imagine a woman doing any of those things of her own free will. At the most, it was fate or the man’s desire which proved too strong for their carefully planned discretion.
Kenyon’s life had been very full of women. Not that he had exactly meant it to be. He had started youth, at least, with the highest of ideals. If ideals fail the strong, self-satisfied man of action, he is capable of laying them aside and pursuing his path unperturbed, undisturbed by their absence; but when they fail the dreamer, he is apt to go to pieces. Kenyon had gone very badly to pieces. There was a picture of himself that had been done by a fellow-student in their college days,—the man had since become a famous artist,—and into this picture of Kenyon he had put all his swift wakening talent. The boy looked at you from the canvas—his green eyes alive with the wonder of life, his mouth sweet with the generosity of joy. A wonderful young face—eager, confident, and glad, but showing with the uncanny skill of genius all the coming man’s weakness, the mixed blood that warred in his veins, the good and ill weighted with inheritance. For there was Eastern blood in Kenyon—a fact that very few people knew.
His mother had been a Eurasian, beautiful with the exotic beauty of soft, languorous eyes and dead white skin sometimes to be found among the half-castes of India. And Kenyon’s father had been Irish,—to which strain he owed his dreams and hot desires,—a wild, mad Irish boy, who had died, fortunately for himself, before he could realise the tragedy of his marriage or weigh what it might cost his son. There had only been the one child, Gerald, and until the lad was fourteen he had lived out in India with his mother. He had been old enough then to realise the difference between his home and that of most English boys, old enough to know that his mother was of a caste and class different from the other white women in the station.
They had lived in a big white house on the outskirts of the cantonment where his father had been stationed—where, indeed, he had died. It had been Mrs. Kenyon’s home before her marriage; she had returned to it when that brief, glorious episode was finished; she never moved out of it again. Kenyon remembered her vaguely as a large, slatternly invalid with a tendency to tears and a wild, shrill temper. Yet, in the way of a child, he had loved her, and his first few years at home had been bitter with home-sickness and a thought that he would never see her again. And then school and the interests of life in general, pushed her out of his mind, and his father’s people had been relieved to see that he was apparently contented to forget all about her. But Kenyon was inclined to be loyal—that had been one of his ideals. In his first months of freedom, with college behind and a choice of professions in front of him—for he had been undoubtedly brilliant—he had remembered his mother, and his first journey had taken him back to India.
He had found Mrs. Kenyon remarried. His stepfather, his brood of stepbrothers and sisters,— Mrs. Kenyon’s second husband was a sleek, prosperous Goanese clerk on the railway,—had filled him with horror. He knew himself a stranger to his mother. Ideals failed him; for this mountainous woman with her loose, gaudy-coloured clothes and never-ceasing shrill tongue he could feel no love whatsoever. It would have been infinitely better if he had been content to leave her in the kingdom of his dreams. He came back to England shocked and shaken. The episode definitely shut the doors of the Indian Civil Service against him. He could not face the land of his birth, nor the people who might know from what stock he had sprung.
It had seemed a waste of very fine abilities, and an undoubted intelligence beyond the usual run of college boys, that young Kenyon should have taken to planting and drifted out to East Africa. It is a life which extracts much and gives little to its servants. Kenyon’s grandparents would have preferred him to stay at home; they were willing to finance him in whatever profession took his fancy. But a certain restlessness held Kenyon’s soul—perhaps the call of the East was stronger in his blood than he knew, and just then at the turn of his life the girl failed him. England was impossible after that. At all costs he must hie him to some wild, uncivilised part of the world and hide his disillusion from all men’s eyes. He went to East Africa, and from East Africa he drifted to Uganda.
The tropical world took him into her arms, steeped his very soul with her languor, her indifference to ethics and morals, her sensuous, easy life. But ever above all this his ability rose. He was recognised as amazingly clever; he could cope with native questions, and understand the native mind better—so it was said—than any one else in the country. He was one of the very few who, it might be said, had made a success out of his plantation.
And if the reputation of his private life was bad—he made no secret of his native wives—it was impossible for most people not to fall under his charm. Men liked him, though they might disapprove; women, it seemed, found him irresistible.
Behind it all the real Kenyon stayed unknown, unguessed at. No one really knew him; least of all did he know himself. Sometimes he would look bitterly at that portrait of his earlier self, painted so many years ago, and realise only too well in how much he had failed himself. The joy and the charity had left his face; there was only contempt and a cynical indifference left. Yet it is not always easy for a man to kill his own soul; there were times when the real soul of Kenyon looked at you out of those green-brown eyes, and it was that swift, passing expression that had earned for him the reputation of having some hidden tragedy in his life.
Maureen thought she had seen that hint of tragedy in the man’s eyes that day at lunch. It had made her immensely interested in him. And then his ready humour, his dry, quiet wit had intrigued her. She had enjoyed her lunch, and had been able to throw aside, with the laughter that he brought into the room, the heavy thoughts of age and greyness that had been depressing her mind.
Indeed, he made her feel ridiculously young, and it had been with no sense of disparity that she, too, had chosen some daffodils to wear when the matinée had been proposed, and it had been decided that they should go. Clearly Tom liked Kenyon, even admired him. That, Maureen realised, was sufficient passport for any man. She had lived long enough among men to know that the man whom men like is invariably a better product than the man whom women love. At the theatre she had sat between them, and knew that it was Kenyon who shared her pleasure in romance, her thrill of excitement which the colours and the music of the play brought her.
Tom was obviously a little bored. It was a musical comedy not quite in his line, for it dealt more with a serious love plot, had less of the comic element, than the ordinary Gaiety fare which suited his temperament. On the whole, he was accustomed to be bored at the theatre—music-halls and perhaps, sometimes, a cinema were more in his line. But evidently Maureen and Kenyon were enjoying themselves, and that was the main thing.
“Your lips for caresses are sighing,
Your eyes have a marvellous light,
Within them a riddle is lying
For him who can read aright,”
sang the man on the stage, a wonderful fine-voiced singer, if you shut your eyes to his rather complacent face and posed figure. Maureen shut her eyes for a second, and the music trickled across her senses like small flames of fire. She felt the restlessness that she had condemned earlier in the day stir and raise its head. She was not old or satisfied; she was young, young, and she wanted to feel, to sense, to know love. In the early days of her marriage she would have slid a hand into one of Tom’s big, capable hands and known herself satisfied with the calm, friendly pressure. But now—now she was suddenly, intensely conscious of the something that had always, since those first few months, been lacking in Tom’s love for her. She shivered a little, stirring restlessly, and her hand came in contact with Kenyon’s, where it lay on the arm of the chair next hers. It was only a second’s touch. She was angry at the quick sense of fear it gave her, at the colour that rushed to her face under those—so it seemed to her—quizzical eyes.
“Ah, listen to me and I’ll answer
The riddle within your eyes . . .”
The song floated round them and merged into the chorus, and Kenyon laughed a little, leaning towards her.
“Your eyes are full of riddles, too—did you know that, Mrs. Simpson?” he asked.
Tom turned to glance at them. “Now then, young Kenyon,” he remonstrated, “no flirting with my wife. He’s a dangerous fellow with the fair sex, Maureen. You’ll need to watch him.”
So Maureen had been able to laugh, the lashes veiling the riddles to which Kenyon had referred.
“I am afraid Mr. Kenyon would be awfully disappointed if he tried to do any riddle-reading where I am concerned. Wouldn’t he, Tom? But I do like that man’s voice; don’t you?”
Kenyon sat back and watched her, and just occasionally he looked from her to Simpson. He was remembering all that Mrs. Donovan had told him, and weighing in his own mind the probable truth of it. And he was wondering, too, whether it would be worth his while to go on with this riddle questing. Whether the woman sitting next him would give him enough satisfaction to repay the trouble she would undoubtedly cost.
Kenyon’s senses were very easily stirred by music, by atmosphere, by time and place. He found Maureen at the moment beautiful—almost desirable. His eyes strayed to Tom, and he felt no compunction, though Simpson was his friend. Kenyon’s ethics were very simple; he would never willingly take from any man the woman that he loved, but where a husband allowed matrimony to become a rather tiresome yoke, Kenyon felt that he was quite within his rights in stepping in—if doing so appealed to him. Watching Simpson, he came to the conclusion that in that side of her story Mrs. Donovan had probably been correct, and she was also right when she said that Mrs. Simpson gave one the impression of waiting for something. Waiting for what? His eyes came back to Maureen and he felt oddly thrilled.
The play had come to an end in a whirl of music and movement. People thronged out through the foyer into the street. He had managed to secure a taxi for the Simpsons, and had arranged to travel with them down to Tilbury and the boat. Now he was left alone, standing in the thinning crowd, weighing the pros and cons of Maureen’s attraction in his mind. He had been stirred, that was what held his attention, stirred, he vaguely realised, in that real self of his which hid so successfully behind his outward exterior. And it was very long since he could say that any woman had done that for him. Anyway, unless he bestirred himself, he would be left standing rather conspicuously on the pavement, the rest of the crowd having dispersed. With a slight shrug of his shoulders, Kenyon turned, and, lowering his head against the chill wind that blew down Regent Street, moved across the open space of Piccadilly Circus. As his foot touched the opposite pavement a shrill voice hailed him.
“Good gracious, Tiny, you of all people! Take me to tea somewhere and report yourself.”
Tiny was a name Mrs. Donovan had bestowed on him many years ago. He found it oddly irritating; yet, even in the days of his greatest influence over her, he had been quite unable to break her of the habit. Mrs. Donovan never alluded or spoke to any one except under a nickname. She had all the native’s rather uncanny propensity for striking on the really ridiculous, with just that vestige of truth about it which was calculated to annoy. Kenyon was a small, slight-made man—his smallness had always been a cause of annoyance to him. Facing Mrs. Donovan now, he made the best of a bad affair; it would be difficult, he realised, to escape from her clutches.
“Where would you like to have tea?” he asked. “I am delightedly at your service.”
“Then let it be the Piccadilly,” laughed the woman. “I love the mixture there. Tiny, I often wonder whether I was not really cut out to belong to the demi-monde. Is it what you would call my métier?”
“You are excellent where you are, dear lady,” he answered. “And I think your innermost soul is respectable.”
“I keep it well concealed then,” shrilled Mrs. Donovan. “Come, you shall flirt with me this afternoon.”
Kenyon smiled quizzically, standing aside for her to pass through the restaurant doors. He did not feel in the mood to flirt. Indeed he could not define his feelings. They prompted him, he dimly realised, to a sudden dash into the country. He had a feeling that he would like to be in a wood; a dim, hushed place of soft grass and green shadows and daffodils. Yes, suddenly, he had a great admiration for daffodils.
All this he successfully concealed from Mrs. Donovan. She, at least, found the flirtation very satisfactory. Dear old Tiny, there was no one else in the world who could quite give one that delightful sensation of being young and dangerously attractive.
He did not tell her about the Simpsons until he was driving her home in the taxi, though the curiosity to ask questions about Maureen had been on the tip of his tongue all afternoon.
“By the way,” he said, “I’ve met the charmer—Mrs. Simpson, I mean. She is pretty, as you say.”
Mrs. Donovan was all excitement. “You’ve met Maureen Simpson!” she said. “Oh, you fraud, and not a word all afternoon!” She stared at him with her strangely defiant eyes. “And you’ve fallen in love,” she said. “I knew something had happened to you, Tiny.”
Kenyon shrugged his shoulders. “My dear,” he said, “am I not too old and too wise these days to fall in love with some one else’s wife? Once burnt, twice shy, you know.”
“Nonsense,” said Mrs. Donovan crisply. “You never loved me, Tiny. I was never fool enough to believe you did.” Her face seemed suddenly wistful. “You would be irresistible if you ever did love,” she added.
Kenyon laughed also. He closed a quick hand above hers. “You wrong the past, dear lady,” he said. “I did love, and you were careful. Most women are.”
“I’d like to believe you,” said Mrs. Donovan. “You’d flatter the devil into believing that he was good. But Maureen now. I can’t tell you why, but I scent danger there.”
“Danger to me?” quizzed Kenyon. “A broken heart—a ruined reputation! Is either left to me to ruin or break?”
He could not apparently break through her sudden unwonted seriousness.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “But love is dangerous, laugh at it how you will. Anyway,” laughter returned to her, “I shall have you under my eye on board ship. I’ll be able to warn her. We sail, you know, a week earlier than we expected.”
“That’s charming,” agreed Kenyon. He helped her out of the taxi and bowed over her hand. And, for the moment, he really meant it. He had never known Mrs. Donovan to stand between him and anything. She had always been his very good pal. There were moments when it did occur to him that she had in reality given him more love than he had ever asked for. Given it, and been content to go on giving, without exacting or expecting any return.
Her companionship though, her light, silly chatter, her defiant eyes, had dispelled the earlier mood that Maureen’s presence had given. He felt dissatisfied; annoyed with himself that he should have allowed so brief a contact to influence him. Love—he had as much belief in love as he had nowadays in the fairies that had so haunted his childhood. Love, he had taught himself to believe, was an outcome of passion. There were many ways of satisfying that, which did not entail any risk of the danger of which Mrs. Donovan talked so glibly. It was late by now. He would have dinner at some little restaurant where the food would be good and the wine excellent, and then he would go on later to one of those dancing clubs where one met pretty girls, and no one asked questions or babbled about love. It was so very much better to be honest in these matters; to pay one’s honest money for an evening’s amusement and not be hampered by silly sentiment or old-fashioned ideals.
He dismissed the haunting picture of a pair of grey eyes, the turn of a delicately poised head, and soft waves of black shadowy hair, and plunged himself recklessly into an evening of amusement, letting the wine, the lights, the music, the scent that the many women used, waft him forward on an hilarious whirl of pleasure.
Half-way through the night, or rather more than half-way through, for already through the chinks of close-shuttered windows one could see that dawn was awake, he found himself standing beside the girl with whom he had danced most of the evening—a small, elfin-faced slip of a girl, who reached only to his shoulders, with golden hair, and blue eyes that laughed and sparkled whenever they met his. Young—so piteously young—as he would have seen had he been in the mood to look beyond the laughter; far too young, at least, for the flame-coloured audacious frock that clung to her slim body, for the vivid red that spoilt her fresh young lips. Her name was Mamie, she had told him, and it was her first season at this kind of life. My, but she was enjoying it! Other times, what did she do? Oh, she was a mannequin at some fancy-named shop in Bond Street. “Undies,” she had told him, head a little on one side, red lips caught in the pressure of firm white teeth. “Lord love us, you should see them! Cold for the winter, but all right in the warm room where I have to parade them.”
“Is one allowed to attend?” Kenyon had asked, with lazy, admiring eyes on her face.
The girl had laughed, a little elfin chuckle. She was, in some way, absurdly like a sprite; he was tempted to lift the curls at the side of her head and see if her ears were pointed, as pointed and as delicately defined as her chin. “Ladies only,” she had mocked him. “I don’t think!”
“I see,” Kenyon had said gravely. He had looked round him; the room had been emptying lately; there were only a few couples left. Most of the men, he noticed with a sense of scorn, were obviously intoxicated. Kenyon had very rarely known himself drunk. Wine excited him, made him keener in intellect and in passion, that was all. He turned to his companion. “What about going home?” he had asked. “Aren’t you tired?”
She had flashed a quick glance at him, and for a second her face had quivered; it was as though she faced something of which she was afraid, but this Kenyon did not notice.
“Are you coming?” she had asked.
He had nodded, his eyes straying round the room again. “If you’ll have me,” he had said.
Again that curious expression of almost repugnance had swept across the girl’s face. She had turned and moved to the door. “Oh yes,” she had said. “I love dancing, though, and it’s not late, is it?”
“It’s morning,” Kenyon had answered. He had moved forward with her. “But I am yours to command. We’ll dance day in, if you prefer it.”
She had seemed to have recovered her Cockney composure. “Not on your life,” she had said. “I’ve got to be at work by eight.”
She led the way in silence after that, hiding her gaudy finery under a big teddy-bear coat and waving away the idea of a taxi. It was only a step, and she’d like to walk, if he didn’t mind. So they walked up Regent Street and down one of the side streets leading off Oxford Street. On the steps of the house at which she had stopped she paused, with the latchkey in her hand, and faced round to him, looking up at the sky.
“Day kills the stars, don’t it?” her voice a little tremulous, and it seemed to Kenyon that she looked absurdly young.
It was such a strange remark for the girl to have made. He found himself repeating it as he followed her up the stairs. “Day kills the stars!” If you took it symbolically, you might say to yourself it meant that love—the daylight of love—killed these small, wayward lights of the night. The girl, anyway, could not have meant it in that sense. He was annoyed with himself for supposing that she meant anything—these girls never did.
Yet in the quarter of an hour’s pause—for she left him in the silly little travesty of a sitting-room while she went on into the inner room—he found the thought more and more haunting his mind. Haunting him, shadowed by a sudden uncalled-for memory of Maureen’s face and eyes. He was not ashamed of himself,—the thought of shame did not occur to him,—but he was uncomfortable. A great repugnance had descended on him. The idea of getting away out into the solitude of a quiet wood was upon him again.
He put his hand into his pocket and pulled out the five remaining pieces of gold,—one would not cheat a girl out of her money just because of a perfectly absurd and uncalled-for whim,—but as he was about to put them down on the table, the door opened and Mamie came back into the room. She was clad in white now, something soft and diaphanous, a mere light cloud to her beautiful young body, and she had washed the paint from her face and braided her hair into two gold plaits. She could not, he surmised, be more than seventeen or eighteen, and a great wave of shame suddenly brought the colour to his face. This child, this small, slim slip of perfect girlhood, and men—men as he had seen them to-night, the beast looking out behind their drunkenness! Men, good God, men like himself with their five guineas for a night’s amusement! It seemed that she was afraid—or perhaps his imagination was altogether distorted to-night. In his imagination she stood there, wide eyes on his face, asking, pleading for a little charity and grace to save her youth and beauty from his hands. “Day kills the stars!”
“You need not be afraid,” he broke the silence quickly; the money he held fell with a little clink on the table. “Look here, I am going away. You are a long sight too young for this game. Somehow, it makes me sick that I should have asked you.”
“Oh, me1” she answered; I’m all right.” Yet he could not mistake the relief that leapt into her eyes. “Tell you the truth, I am new to it and—sometimes—well sometimes I am frightened. But you are not drunk,” she added quickly, as if to smooth over some hurt. “I’m much more scared of men when they are drunk.”
“Yes,” he agreed, “I suppose you are. You can’t have a very high opinion of men, have you?”
She came slowly into the room, and stood beside the table, fingering the money he had laid down. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, “they always act very square by me.” She looked up at him suddenly. “I’m not good,” she said. “I could keep myself honest if I wanted to, but I love a good time, pretty clothes, and men to make love to me. It’s only”—her face flushed, she lowered her head—“it’s only this part when they are drunk that I don’t like,” she said.
“It must be pretty hideous,” he assented. “I don’t think I have ever realised how hideous until this moment. I’m going now,” he said. “You’ll wipe me off the ugly list, at least, won’t you? Good-night. Good-bye.”
“I can’t take the money,” she began.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” he interrupted, “give it where you please, buy what you like with it. It’s a damned poor sop to my conscience—that’s all.”
She looked up at him, the queer, elfin smile was back—on her lips, in her eyes.
“I liked you,” she said; “do you know, I hoped you wouldn’t ask to come home with me. I am ever so glad you are going. Now I can remember that I liked you.”
And on that he went, closing the door behind him, running down the stairs and out into the quiet, grey streets.
And perhaps she watched him from that upstairs window, and thanked him from her heart for leaving her one, at least, not ugly memory to look back on. Perhaps, however, she just counted the money and went calmly and philosophically to bed.
That, at any rate, was Kenyon’s last night in London. He started for East Africa next day, and with him went Dr. and Mrs. Simpson and Mrs. Donovan.
All along the bazaar street the dust shimmered and swirled. Brick red-dust, full of strange indefinable odours, warm and suffocating. To-day, there was a strange west wind abroad. It could not abate the sunshine, for it seemed itself to blow straight from the open doors of a furnace, and it brought no scurrying white clouds to dim the brilliancy of the sky. The only thing it did was to raise the dust in little whirling pillars—the devils dancing, as the Indians called it—and blow the soiled scraps of paper and general street refuse from side to side. Nuonga is not a clean or a prepossessing-looking bazaar. In fact Munroe, the District Commissioner of Wala, the European settlement thirty miles distant, was apt to allude to it as the plague-spot in his district.
But it was a hiving centre for Indians and, as every one knows, it is an almost herculean task to make an Indian community live in cleanliness according to the sanitary laws of any other civilisation. Especially the Indians who migrate in their hundreds to Africa and the sister Protectorate Uganda. They are calculated to rankle like thorns in the sides of any Administration. The simple, unsophisticated native is an easy enough force to mould and sway and bend to our pattern. In the Indian we come up against an old perverted civilisation; a warped code of morals which nothing can alter; and a passive, flaccid resistance—taking the form of oily submission—to any form of improvement or advance.
Nuonga was Munroe’s plague-spot. Every month or so he would rush through it, stay at the Government rest-camp for a couple of days and issue stringent rules and regulations for the benefit of the bazaar.
These disgraceful, hastily created dwellings of mud and cow-dung, where whole families lived in a state of blissful filth, must be pulled down and burnt. Animals were not to be killed in the public thoroughfare. Liquor was not to be sold to the natives, etc. etc. The rules and regulations were legion, their results were, as Munroe sometimes despondently realised, nil. The elders of the township, if you liked to style them that, would wait upon Munroe. Chandra Lal, fat and consequential, with a deferential smile and well-oiled hands; Manji Mathubog, as long as the other was stout, cringing, and polite; and Sad Bandar, an unimportant-looking little Asiatic who, none the less, invariably did all the talking.
They would stand in a row in front of Munroe, smiling and bowing and listening with much intentness to his widely distributed abuse. Everything that the Lord District Commissioner desired, they would see was accomplished. And in a night, so it would seem, the dwellings would be demolished, the bazaar would be swept and watered, the owners of the various shops would sit, hardly recognisable, so tidy were they and their stalls, and salaam courteously to the Bwana District Commissioner as he took his way homeward. But in a day, Munroe knew, probably in less, the old order would hold sway again. And what could one do when one, in reality, lived thirty miles away?
“If I had my way I’d deport every Indian in the country and never let another one in,” Munroe used to say; and there is no doubt that Chandra Lal and his companions knew exactly the D.C.’s feelings towards them. There is very little with which the Indian does not think it worth his while to keep himself acquainted.
It was fully a month now since Munroe’s last visit to Nuonga. To-day, under this hot sun and the swirling clouds of dust, the place really looked as if it had been for centuries undisturbed by the troublesome hand of the cleaner. Dirt and refuse lay everywhere; danced along the road; were blown against the sides of the houses. The open stalls, with their loads of sugar and rice and salt and sticky sweetmeats and ghee-laden food, swarmed with flies. Natives sat and lounged and lay about everywhere. The Indian stall-holders coughed and spat impartially in all directions; and small Indian babies, with yellow faces and oily black hair, sat straddle-legged on the hips of their native attendants and gazed out on their world with those beautiful mysterious black eyes, the heritage, so it seems, of all Indian babies.
It is not a big place, Nuonga, though it is capable of causing so much work to official minds. A short, rambling street of tin shanties with backyard villages of mud and thatched huts that contain no one knows exactly how many womenfolk and solemn-eyed babies. The inhabitants of Nuonga would have pointed out the centre house on the left-hand side of the road as you faced towards the East, as being the most important building in the town. It was owned officially by Chandra Lal, but the native and Indian whisperers could have told you that its real owner was some one far more important and quite unknown to the Bwana District Commissioner, or any other member of the Government. In which the whisperers—as is often the case—would have proved themselves wrong, for Munroe was not altogether as ignorant as he allowed himself to appear.
The back of Chandra Lal’s house—Munroe had noticed it on one or two occasions—extended well beyond the precincts of any of his neighbours. It was also well and solidly built, with a quaint-shaped roof and windows set very high up, so that short of deliberately climbing and peering, there was no means of overlooking its inhabitants. Munroe had once asked about it, stopping his motor-bike outside Chandra Lal’s shop and scattering the gamblers to a swift appearance of being innocent tea-drinkers.
“That is a well-built house, Chandra Lal,” Munroe had said. “Why can’t you persuade your neighbours to do likewise?”
Chandra Lal had smiled a slow, sleek smile. “Most of the Indians here are low-born, sir,” he had answered. “They have no purdah women.”
“Oh, that’s your harem, is it?” Munroe had asked. “I was just going to suggest inspecting the interior.”
Again Chandra Lal had smiled, raising fat hands in a humble salaam. “Your honour knows the custom of my country,” he had said. “It is not possible for me to take you within.”
“Oh no, quite so,” Munroe had agreed. “It’s a good house; keep it as clean inside as out, and I shan’t grumble.”
Even in those early days he had rather doubted the truth of Chandra Lal’s statement. Had he been able to see inside the “harem” on this particular afternoon, his suspicions would have been more than verified.
If you belonged to the elect you passed through the front of the shop, ostensibly arranged as an Indian eating-house, where Chandra Lal, fat and somnolent, mounted guard over piles of curiously concocted chupatties and rice balls. You circled the little group of gamblers, who sat always round a dilapidated dirty mat and fumbled and squabbled over a pack of cards and innumerable cents; and, pushing open a door at the far end, you stepped into a little, dark passage.
The narrow, shut-in passage led from the door of the shop to the central room of the house. Built in a circle, with the aforementioned high-up windows constituting the only light and air, it seemed peculiarly adapted to the strange motley crowd assembled. There were Arabs, light-skinned, picturesque of face, with heavy-lashed eyed, half-slumbrous in their stare. There were full-blooded negroes—chiefs and peasants—the former recognisable by their European-cut coats, worn on top of their long, national kansu. There were a good number of Indians and one or two of the obviously Baboo type, keen, alert, if sly of face, and suspiciously deft of movement. And every eye, whether native or Indian, peasant or chief, was centred on a marvellously radiant figure that stood by itself on the cleared space in the middle of the room.
To any one who had been in India, the figure was recognisable at once. The word Lahore would move across your mind, and you would see again in a vision the crowded, picturesque bazaar streets, the painted houses, and the dancing-girls that lean out of the windows, or stoop to beckon you from their low balconies of carven wood. Such beauty had this little figure; just such gold-brown skin and shining, wondrous eyes, and mouth of passionate desires. And from the henna-tipped fingers and henna-stained small feet, to the glossy black hair, braided with gold and pearls, her whole being breathed India, and the old wondrous glamour that hangs about the women of Lahore.
She was dancing—not as Europeans dance, but slowly, sensuously; every turn or bend of her hands or head carrying some message to the hot pulses of those who watched. Her stiff, spangled skirt stood out from her small, delicate limbs; a tiny bodice of gold and pearls just outlined the curve of her breasts; her arms were bare, save for the countless bangles that tinkled and clashed as she moved.
So danced Noormahal: “Rose of All the World” to her lovers; keen, sharp-witted foe to her enemies; and real proprietor of Chandra Lal’s house and business.
The dance ended amidst the soft, subdued clapping of hands, and for a second Noormahal stood poised as though the next second’s breath would waft her to flight—her large eyes studying the crowd. There was not a man there who was not stirred by the desire to possess her; whose heart was not beating the faster with the dreams her dancing had brought. Men! Since she had been a child of twelve she had held them thus—swayed them to this madness. The thought brought with it a little shiver of contempt. Her hands dropped, she shrugged her shoulders, and turning round beckoned to a man who sat a little by himself at the end of the room.
“The audience is finished, Ramlika,” she said; “tell them I am tired. And stay yourself. There are letters from home. Much that must be discussed.”
The man she had summoned stood staring down at her. A lean, cadaverous-looking Indian, a Bengalee one would have said from his European clothes and long, pointed boots. It was a striking face; not old, yet lined with old passions, with disappointment, with hope constantly frayed by despair; and the light behind the steady, staring eyes burnt with a flame of madness and fanaticism.
“And am I not then also a man,” he asked, his voice metallic, “that you should say to me ‘stay after the rest are gone, and we will talk business’? The air, Noormahal, is weighted with other things than that.”
She lifted heavy lashes to glance at him. “A man, Ramlika,” she admitted, “but no fool. You cannot cheat me into thinking that a woman weighs for much in your scheme of things. And it is of your scheme I would talk.”
For a second he stood still staring at her, and then, almost as though a hand had passed over his face, wiping away the hunger and fanaticism, he turned from her to the crowd, his expression sleek and impassive.
“Our Queen would rest,” he said. “Much dancing has fatigued her. Till to-morrow, comrades.”
He raised his hand, making some quick signs, and most of the people present copied the movement. It was as though some symbol, some sign, passed between them. Only one or two of the natives remained stolid and indifferent to what was passing round them, their inflamed, hungry eyes still on the woman. There was no attempt to disobey the order, though. One by one the crowd dispersed, sauntered down the passage, stayed to pass the time of day with Chandra Lal in the front shop, and went their several ways down the dust-strewn street.
Till the last man had gone out, Noormahal stood watching, meeting their eager scrutiny with calm, scornful eyes. Then with a little laugh she turned to move, the bangles on wrist and ankles tinkling as she passed to the end of the room, where stood a large wooden-shaped bed heaped high with cushions and soft, glowing stuffs.
Ramlika followed her, and stood waiting while she stretched herself upon the couch like some luxurious cat, reaching out one small, beautiful hand for the opium pipe that stood near. The suppressed passion had left his face cold and indifferent; only his eyes still blazed—they made one realise that this man would be a madman in the things that touched his beliefs.
“Poor Ramlika,” said Noormahal softly. “For ever beating thy head against the walls of things as they are. Does it not content thee to be an exile from thine own country, to have the strongest Government in the world against thee?”
“Content me?” he answered slowly. “What dost thou mean, Noormahal?”
“I have been hearing things,” the girl answered. She pushed away the stern of the pipe, and lay back, her hands behind her head, her eyes looking beyond Ramlika. “Oh, it is my business to hear, and, as an ear, Chandra Lal is no fool. And to-day I have had letters.” She brought her eyes back slowly to his face. “From Calcutta. There, too, have I ears, that wait and listen. I know about thy madness, Ramlika. Of how thou didst attempt to kill the Governor; of the sentence that was passed; of thy escape from the Island where they dreamt to hold thee fast. All this I know, and more I have guessed.” She sat up suddenly, leaning towards him. “What sent you here, Ramlika? What fool’s game would you play?”
Eyes studied eyes, and Ramlika smiled, with his lips only.
“All our world speaks of thy beauty, Noormahal,” he said. “From Lahore to Rawalpindi; from Calcutta to Bombay. I come as a moth comes to the candle.”
The girl shook impatient shoulders. “Such talk is for women or fools,” she answered; “it means nothing to me. Shall I tell you what Chandra Lal whispers in my ear?”
“If Chandra Lal has spoken——” the man began.
She stopped him with a quick gesture.
“Listen!” she said. “ No fool, and more than woman, am I. The strings of many things are in my hand. Canst thou not trust me, O Ramlika?”
The man leant back with a laugh. “Where I have come from we know not trust,” he answered. His mood changed, he moved suddenly, and flung himself beside her, his arms thrown about her waist, his thin lips close to her face. “Oh, more than woman,” he murmured, “thy beauty drives me mad! It is true that I heard of thy beauty from afar—and, hearing, mocked—but having seen thee, my feet are in the net. All things count as nothing to me when weighed against thy kisses, the warmth of thy breast.”
A little angry light showed in the girl’s eyes. She pushed him from her with fierce hands.
“Oh, I grow weary of much talk of my beauty,” she answered. “Last week a man spoke so, and killed himself afterwards because of my scorn. My favours are not won so easily.”
“And how, then, must I win them?” Ramlika asked. One could see that he wavered; there was the weakness of urgent desire about his mouth as he looked at her.
Noormahal drew herself a little upright and leant towards him. The scent of old pressed roses with which her hair was perfumed seemed to rise about her like a cloud, her small, soft hands touched him and smoothed and stroked.
“Tell me, Ramlika,” she pleaded, “tell me—am I not one that thou canst trust? See! I, too, hate the English for good cause. Was not my lover killed in India, by their order? Killed as a dog might be killed, not as a man? And have I not strength to love my lovers? Thou shalt judge, Ramlika, for it is in my heart to love thee. But I cannot be treated as a fool or a woman,”—she sprang suddenly erect,—“I, for whom men die! If I love thee, Ramlika, thou must take me into thy counsels as man to man.”
“As man to man,” Ramlika answered thickly. “And thou wilt love me, Noormahal?”
“And I will love thee,” Noormahal promised, her head thrown back, a mocking smile on her lips. The man sickened and annoyed her, but she sensed behind his presence the kind of intrigue that was the very breath of her soul. And she spoke the truth when she said that she hated the English. Hatred had, so far, been the only real passion in her life.
Ramlika sat stiffly, his hands clenched on his knees, his eyes half closed. He was fighting out the battle of desire in his heart. Every instinct within him warned him against taking a woman into his confidence; and yet, for the moment, this one woman weighed against everything else in his life. He could bring no real strength to fight against her. All his life he had been swayed and blown hither and thither by the wind of passion. It was passion that conquered now.
A couple of hours later Ramlika, pushing aside the door into Chandra Lal’s shop, entered and found himself on the instant face to face with the very last person in the world he wanted to meet. Munroe, the District Commissioner, a short, stout, rather rubicund-complexioned Englishman, with shrewd eyes and a mouth that opened and shut like a trap, stood talking to Chandra Lal—talking impatiently, with swift, sidelong flicks at the flies and his own leggings as he spoke.
“It can’t go on, Chandra Lal,” Ramlika heard him say. “This affair last week, now, it looks nasty. What are you going to tell me about it?”
“The affair of that man, sir?” asked Chandra Lal. His eyes lighted on Ramlika, and he strove to convey a signal that retreat would be advisable. Not in time, however, for at the slight squeak of the door Munroe had swung round.
“Good-evening, sir,” Ramlika said politely, and passed behind the white man to go out of the shop.
Munroe prided himself on having a wonderful memory for faces. He had never seen Ramlika’s, he was convinced, and yet the man was strangely familiar. He turned back to Chandra Lal.
“A new arrival,” he asked—“a relation of yours?”
“My sister’s son, sir,” Chandra Lal lied suavely; “but he is recently arrived from Toro. He has been many years in the country.”
Munroe grunted and dismissed the subject. “Well,” he said, “you’ll have to come round tomorrow, Chandra Lal. The police are investigating this death, and I’ve promised what assistance I can. It happened, anyway, on your doorstep.”
“In the street, sir,” Chandra Lal explained “the street, which is open to all. I know nothing. The man himself was from Wala.”
“Oh, I know all about the man,” Munroe answered. He shot a quick glance at the fat, perturbed face. “And I also know that your house had some special attraction for him. I’m not a fool, Chandra Lal, as perhaps you’ll realise one of these days. To be Biblical—it’s time you set your house in order, and I’m going to help you to do it.”
He turned and went out of the shop. “Filthy,” he snorted, standing on the step surveying the dust and dirt and flies. “Didn’t expect me, eh?”
Geddes, the young Assistant Commissioner, sitting in the side-car of the motor-bike, looked up and laughed. “Come along, Munroe!” he called out. “Your pet village smells nasty, and I want my tea.”
“At eleven to-morrow, then?” Munroe called back to Chandra Lal. Then he departed, in a cloud of dust and steam; and, very punctiliously, but with a great deal of barely concealed venom, Chandra Lal spat on the place where his feet had been—an act noticed with much amusement by the surrounding natives.
Munroe was, as Geddes styled it, gloomy over his tea. Occasionally the seeming stagnation of his efforts to reduce Nuonga to order depressed Munroe. He was a man who took his work very seriously—in contrast to Geddes, who took nothing in heaven or earth as other than a joke or a beastly grind. It was a beastly grind motoring out to Nuonga to find out whether some silly blighter of a native had committed suicide or been murdered. And it was rather a joke seeing dear old Munroe cutting up crusty because he couldn’t persuade a wretched crowd of dirty Indians to keep their houses clean.
“It’s a job for Kenyon,” grunted Munroe, as the last sandwich vanished and the boy came to clear tea away. “I’ll have to ask for him.”
“Kenyon?” inquired Geddes. “Do you mean that odd planting fellow out in these parts? What’s he got to do with it, sir? Does he take on sanitary inspecting in his odd moments?”
Munroe looked at him crossly. “You are an ass, Geddes,” he said, “and you’ve got a lot to learn. Kenyon is, more or less, our secret service man. There’s not another fellow can touch him in native languages, and he can pass himself off as almost anything. There’s trouble brewing in that brick-and-mortar building of Chandra Lal, or I’m very much mistaken—trouble, which no amount of investigating by your excellent but rather antiquated police methods would ever bring to light.”
With which cryptic remark he relapsed into silence, and Geddes quite blissfully banished the item of news from his shallow brain. Trouble was not a thing which he personally ever saw any use in investigating.
“Yes?” said Kenyon; he sat on the other side of the District Commissioner’s office-table and smiled at Munroe. “Braithwaite told me you’d got a job for me. I saw him on my way through Entebbe.”
“I gave Braithwaite the hint,” Munroe agreed. “To tell you the truth, there is so little of this visible to what we may call the naked eye, that I may be a fool. I’m uneasy about it, though, Kenyon, and that is a fact.”
Kenyon stooped forward and, helping himself to a match, lit his cigarette. “I respect your uneasiness more than I do most people’s calm,” he said. “Can you give me the outlines?”
“They are so sparse,” grumbled Munroe. “You know, anyway, all about the Young Baganda movement—a seditious affair, after the fashion of our late Baboo friends in Calcutta? Of course you know about them, for you laid some information before the Government as to their plans, etc., before you went home.”
“Yes,” Kenyon nodded. “I attended several of their meetings. It’s a surprisingly big society, and it takes in most of the young chiefs. Baganda for the Baganda—I don’t know that I blame them.”
“That’s not the point,” affirmed Munroe. “We are here—we are paid to be here, and we have got to do our best to put these people on their feet before we leave. It will be like dropping the pilot too soon if they get rid of us now.” He scowled into space. “A lot of empty-headed boys,” he murmured, “too big for their boots. Education is playing the devil with this country.”
“Granted—it generally does,” agreed Kenyon; “it’s a mistake you English always do make.”
Munroe looked at him. “You always talk about ‘you English,’ Kenyon,” he said. “Where is the foreign blood in yourself, anyway?”
A cloud of tobacco smoke concealed Kenyon’s lips. “My father was Irish,” he said slowly; “it’s foreign enough to most Englishmen. Shall we get down to this job now, Munroe, or are you busy?”
“No,” said Munroe. “I was expecting you this afternoon. I’ve cleared off my other work on purpose. It’s not that I am exactly afraid of the Baganda movement here,” he went on. “You know well enough that the people of this district and the people of that have been sworn enemies for generations. It’s the safeguard for us in Africa, these time-immemorial feuds. No; no chief of mine is likely to follow where a Baganda leads. Does it seem to you absurd”—he stared hard at Kenyon—“to distrust the mild-mannered Indian!”
“In engineering a rebellion!” asked Kenyon. “I don’t know that you get the right material for that among the crowd that flock here.”
“Not as a role,” agreed Munroe. He seemed to hesitate, his eyes still on Kenyon’s face. “I’ve a good memory for faces, haven’t I, Kenyon?” he asked suddenly. “I am not often wrong. Well, the other day—it’s about a month ago now—in Chandra Lal’s shop at Nuonga, I saw a face that for a minute or two stumped me, so familiar it was and yet unknown. Do you remember seeing pictures of Ramlika, the Bengalee, who attempted to assassinate the Viceroy five years ago?”
“I do,” said Kenyon; “a lean, unpleasant-looking devil. He was sentenced to a life period, wasn’t he? Andaman Isles or something?”
Munroe nodded. “That’s the point. Seven months ago he escaped. I chanced on a little paragraph announcing the fact in the E.A.S. I’ll stake my life on his being at Nuonga at the present moment.”
“That’s interesting,” said Kenyon. “And there has been trouble in Nuonga since you saw him?”
“Not exactly,” said Munroe. He leant back, his strong fingers beating a tattoo on the arms of his chair. “Nothing, at least, that the police can scent a rat in. But I don’t know. There’s a woman there——”
Kenyon laughed sharply, a little harshly. “Cherchez la femme—be she black or white,” he interrupted. “The plot thickens, Munroe; I grow interested.”
“Yes,” Munroe nodded, “from the little I can hear the damsel is interesting. ‘Rose of All the World,’ they call her. I fancy she hails from Lahore, and that her profession is the oldest in the world. Last month one of our best-known chiefs, a lad I had more or less trained myself, killed himself on the doorstep of Chandra Lal’s house. Oh, nothing that one can prove; but take into connection Ramlika’s presence and the fact that the dancing-girl is apparently playing havoc with our African natives, and the thing makes me uneasy.”
“It might well,” assented Kenyon. He was stretching himself a little. His eyes looked out on to the cleared space in front of the Boma, the drooping Union Jack hanging from its tall white pole, the groups of waiting natives.
Munroe studying his face came suddenly to the conclusion that Kenyon had changed in some mysterious way this last time at home. He had lost some of his cynicism, had become, in fact, more like the picture that Munroe had once seen. For the two men were very old friends, and Munroe had always loved Kenyon, knowing full well that his affection in no sort of way succeeded in piercing the cloak of indifference under which Kenyon concealed his real person.
“Did you have a good time at home, Kenyon?” he asked suddenly, breaking into the other man’s abstraction.
Kenyon turned quickly, his green-brown eyes curiously alight. “Yes,” he said; “I suppose one could describe it as that. I came out, anyway, with the Donovans and the Simpsons and quite a crowd of other Ugandaites.”
“Ah, the Simpsons! They’ve been sent here, haven’t they?” Munroe asked. “I knew Tom Simpson fairly well in the old days. A good fellow, rattling keen tennis-player. What is Mrs. Simpson like?”
He had an odd idea that Kenyon’s face hardened, as if the man was thinking of something he disliked, which was, of course, absurd. Kenyon was so notoriously a woman-lover.
“She is beautiful,” Kenyon answered briefly. “Nice, I believe. I really only met her the day before we sailed, and all women are much alike on a voyage—especially a rough voyage such as we have had.”
“You’ll stay in Wala for a bit?” asked Munroe. He rose and followed the other to the door. “There’s a room always ready for you in my humble abode, you know.”
“Thanks,” said Kenyon briefly. “No, I’ll get back, and I won’t forget about Nuonga. I’ll sample the wiles and the ways of the fair charmer and let you know. Bye-bye, Munroe.”
He went out into the sunshine, and Munroe returned to his desk. Twice that morning he had been a little puzzled by something he had seen on Kenyon’s face. Munroe prided himself upon being a reader of faces. Once, when the man had stood, not knowing that he was watched, looking out of the door, and the other when Mrs. Simpson’s name had been mentioned. Munroe rather wondered whether it was not just possible that Kenyon, dear man as he was, was not involving himself in some further unpleasant and unnecessary adventure.
“Women play the deuce with him,” reflected Munroe, fat, stolid, and very immovable as far as his senses were concerned; “and it’s a pity, for they always spoil a man’s character sooner or later.”
With which sane reflection he returned to his pipe and the pile of papers waiting for his attention.
Kenyon, meanwhile, turned up the slope of the hill leading to the doctor’s house. He had a great deal to occupy his thoughts that afternoon, and the affairs of the Indian dancer and Munroe’s perplexities had already been pushed to the background of his mind. Day had, in truth, killed the stars as far as Kenyon was concerned. For five weeks now he had thought and dreamt and lived only for one woman. His love for her coloured his days, made the nights blissful. And for once in his life, at least, he had held his hand, content with the dream instead of snatching at the reality. Did she know that he loved her? Had she ever known love? She seemed sometimes as though she passed through life with her wondrous grey eyes seeing only visions, and it was very evident that her inner self was protected by a cold aloofness. Yet, once he had touched near the reality of her soul. He could remember that night on board; would remember it till the end of his life; and yet there had been so little about it upon which a man could rightfully build hope.
There had been a dance, and Maureen had danced with him—once—twice—three times. At the end she had stood near him by the rails watching the crowds disperse, the other couples disappear. The light streamed out from the open door of the companionway, throwing an aureole round her, shimmering on the soft grey silk of her dress. He knew himself stirred beyond the bounds of common sense or caution, standing beside her, his eyes eager on the beauty of her face and hair; and his look had seemed to call to her, for she had turned towards him and just for a second her eyes had met his.
“You are cold,” he had said hoarsely. “Come down to the end of the deck with me before you go in.”
Heaven knows what mad desires throbbed in his voice, for like a flame the colour swept to her face and went, leaving her very pale.
“No,” she had answered a little breathlessly. “No, I must go. It’s late, and I feel tired. Good-night, Mr. Kenyon.”
And she had left him swiftly—passing in to the companion-way out of his sight.
He had never made love to her. God grant he never might. The passion within him welled up too strongly for that. But across the silence of the unspoken word he knew that his love called her; she must indeed be blind if she had not seen it in his eyes. Other people knew. Mrs. Donovan made no secret of it. He was watched, he could realise, by sympathetic, by curious, by scornful eyes. The scorn and the curiosity troubled him not at all; but he resented the sympathy. He had never been so near to radiant happiness in his life as he was in the days that he spent by Maureen’s side talking to her, watching her, learning to know her very soul. Simpson counted for nothing in Kenyon’s category of the things that stood against him; but, in learning to know Maureen, he came also to realise how great and formidable were the barriers that stood between them. Kenyon had known, in all his varied career, few essentially good women. There was a narrowness in outlook about his divinity that at times appalled him. If he had been content just to love and possess her beauty, he would doubtless have succeeded. For she hovered, he could see that, on the border line of love; and, had he pressed his claim, made passionate love to her—as he so well knew how to make it—she would have had to yield. Fate, he had thought once or twice with a wry smile, would be too much for her, and he could not doubt that Fate had intended them for each other.
But here—for the first time in his life—he wanted so much more than just that. It would have hurt him to see her give reluctantly, against the strong dictates of her conscience, that which he would have had her bring to him radiantly, with all the joy of passionate surrender in her eyes. And along these lines Simpson’s figure did loom gigantic and unbearably possessive.
At any rate, the next few months would have to bring some change. He would say good-bye to her to-day, and he would go away, and all his life’s happiness, his soul’s security, would be staked on the chance of her sending for him again. For if she sent, if she took that step along the desert of principle that lay between them, he would know—-most certainly he would know—that she loved him.
At that his thoughts broke off, and he turned in at the gates of the doctor’s house, which stood high up on the side of the hill facing all the beauty of the lake—its garden a mass of roses and beautiful trees. It seemed to his eyes, to be, indeed, a fitting setting for Maureen. And the roses made him think of Munroe’s story of the Lahore dancing-girl. “Rose of All the World”—that fitted Maureen too. His lips whispered it, and he touched the flowers—her roses—caressingly as he passed.
The Simpsons were sitting out on the wide verandah having tea. They had, indeed, been discussing Kenyon, for Maureen had mentioned that he was calling round to say good-bye on the way out to his plantation.
“You’ve liked him all right, haven’t you?” Simpson had asked, helping himself to a slice of bread-and-butter. He had really seen so little of his wife on the voyage out, for they had not been able to share a cabin, and bridge had occupied most of his days, that this was the first occasion upon which he had discussed Kenyon with her. “I’m fond of the little chap; but I half thought he mightn’t be your sort.”
“Why!” asked Maureen—her voice was indifferent. Just lately she had known herself to be acting a part, and she had been more than a little amazed to find how apt she was at concealment. Amazed and sometimes appalled; for there were times when she seemed to realise quite clearly that she stood on the edge of a whirlpool of feeling that might at any moment engulf her and sweep her altogether away from her preconceived—so far firmly held—ideas of right and wrong.
“Oh, I don’t know,” answered Simpson. “He’s a lady’s man. You’ve never struck me as caring for the kind of man that runs after all women.”
He laughed a little, shrugging his shoulders. “Black or white. Kenyon, from all accounts, is not at all particular.”
Maureen flushed, lowering her eyes, and Simpson’s good-looking face took on an expression of quizzical amusement.
“There you are!” he said; “the thought shocks you. To tell you the truth, I expected Kenyon to have shocked you long before this. He doesn’t generally indulge in platonics.”
There was no doubt in his voice, yet Maureen felt the hot shame tingling every nerve in her body.
“I have not seen that side of him,” she said, and felt the lie—for how could she forget the countless messages his eyes had sent her—stick in her throat as she said it.
“Talk of the devil!” laughed Simpson, rising to his great height and stretching himself. “Here is Kenyon.” He crossed to the door, for the whole verandah was enclosed in wire mosquito netting, and flung it open. “Hulloa—Tiny!” it amused him to tease Kenyon with that nickname. “Admiring the roses—and huffing them, I can see.”
Kenyon came forward, the rose he had picked in his hand. His eyes went beyond Simpson’s figure and rested on Maureen’s face, but she did not look up to meet them.
“Yes,” he admitted. “ One very small theft. They are beauties, though. I wish I could grow roses like this out at Mamwirta.”
“That, my dear,” said Simpson, turning to Maureen, “is the name of his rather expensive hobby; his shamba, in fact, where, I may tell you, he grows every luxury under the sun, including asparagus and violets. Come on in, Kenyon,— have some tea. The wife will entertain you. I’ve got to be off to tennis. What are you doing, Girl, after tea?”
Maureen hesitated, and Kenyon answered for her. “I hoped Mrs. Simpson would walk down to the falls with me,” he said. “I am as proud of them as though they were my own. I always like showing them off to newcomers.”
“Yes; that’s an idea!” agreed Simpson. “A walk will do her good. Ought to see about exercising her myself, only they’ve snapped me up for tennis.”
He laughed and went off; they could hear him whistling round the back of the house, and then the whir of his motor-bicycle as it started. A stiff silence seemed to have descended on Maureen. Fight against it as she might, the memory of her husband’s half-chaffing words remained to rankle. She felt, for the second, as though she hated Kenyon, and she dared not lift her eyes and look at him, lest hate should be turned suddenly to something softer and far more dangerous. Conscious of a new barrier between them, Kenyon sat moodily twisting between his restless fingers the rose he had picked. The silence could only have lasted a few seconds, yet it seemed to both of them to have endured for ages, and Kenyon’s voice, when he broke it, was strangely harsh and abrupt.
“You’ll come to the falls,” he asked, “or are you not in the mood for me to-day? Somehow, I feel as though I were on your nerves.”
She was touched to quick surprise. “On my nerves!” she said, and, looking up, her eyes met his. “How silly! Why should you be?” The air seemed suddenly lighter, filled with a curious unnamable joy. “I should like to come.” She rose quickly. “I’ll put my hat on. You finish your tea. We can start at once; it’s a shame to waste any of the afternoon, isn’t it?”
“Are you going to tell me,” he said to her later, as they strolled down the road that led across the golf links to the falls, “what it was that I had done to annoy you when I arrived this afternoon?”
“It wasn’t you,” said Maureen quickly. An unexpected desire to get at the truth came to her. “At least, it wasn’t exactly,” she added. “It was something that Tom had been saying.”
“About me?” Kenyon persisted.
She nodded, lifting her eyes to glance at him. “He said you didn’t believe in platonics,” she said; “that he wondered you hadn’t shocked me long ago.”
“And haven’t I?” he asked.
“Of course not!” Maureen answered. “That would end friendship,” her voice was a little wistful. “And we’re still friends, aren’t we?”
“I hope so; and yet I don’t know that there is not lots about me that would shock you. There’s one thing I do want you to know, though,”—he did not look at her,—“anything that you may hear about me—I want you to believe—is not true since I have met you. Do you understand at all?”
“I think so,” said Maureen. She caught quickly at the vanishing skirt of friendship. “I don’t know why you should say—since you met me—though?”
“Don’t you?” Kenyon answered. “It’s a pact between us, then, that I shall not explain. And, look, here we are. Give me your hand—the rocks are slippery. I can’t see any one stand too near this water without holding on to them.”
They were standing on the built-up wall of rocks jutting out into the lake as it comes level with the falls. Maureen laughed and slipped her hand into his, leaning out to peer down. The lake swept away from them, a clear vista of blue, sun-flecked water on their right, and on their left the churned-up waters swirled and rushed and hurled themselves over the falls. Such a thunder of noise! Such a quick, moving mass of strength! It would mean death to be sucked into that. Death, with the waves swirling up and over you; with the body that had been you, flung this way and that, till it reached at last the stagnant quiet of the river beyond. Death, with life still unlived, with love still unknown! Maureen drew back a little with paling cheeks.
“It frightens me,” she said. “I am afraid of its noise, and I believe it would hypnotise me into jumping in.”
He looked at her with strange eyes, his hand still warm and firm over hers. “It doesn’t do to be afraid of things,” he said; “it’s all a matter of perspective. Look at the fish hurling themselves against that sheet of water—they are not a scrap afraid. Look at those weaver-birds over there he pointed to the trees growing close to the water’s edge on an island of rock that cut the falls in half—“why, they build their nests just over all the noise and tumult. And life has got big forces in it just like that water. Look!” he went a little nearer, drawing her with him. They were very close together, hand held in hand, and the noise and the swirl of the water all round them. “Life pulls you down into whirlpools like that if you are afraid. You need courage to face life, to swim gallantly over the top.”
He drew her back quickly, and for a second they stood face to face, almost swaying towards each other. There was no one in the world to see them, except some very incurious natives and the waterbirds that flew hither and thither with unending clamour.
“Maureen!” he whispered. He saw the sudden terror that leapt to her eyes, the sudden whitening of lips and face, and abruptly he loosed her hands and moved away. “Come over here!” he called back to her, his voice quite altered, as if there had been no second’s knowledge between them. “I’ve got another lesson in natural history for you.”
It was more difficult for her to pretend; nevertheless she came to him and stood, white and silent, while he pointed out a huge crocodile basking on one of the rocks that thrust its head up out of the calmer water.
“Ugly brute, isn’t he?” said Kenyon. He turned to look at her. “You are tired,” he added. “I shouldn’t have let you look over into that whirlpool; it’s made you quite white.”
She lifted her eyes to his. “Is it that!” she asked simply. “I don’t know—I don’t somehow seem to know myself these days.” A memory of her husband’s remarks made earlier that afternoon stirred across her mind, and she moved to go abruptly.
“Let’s go home,” she said, “or at least up to the tennis-courts. Perhaps you are right. I lack courage, and I’ve bean afraid. It’s silly to be afraid.”
She went up the path in front of him, and Kenyon followed. That was all that passed between them, the only memory that Kenyon had to carry out to Mamwirta with him; but he knew that he had seen for a second into her soul, and her eyes that had told him that she was afraid of Love. When we are afraid of Love it is because we stand very close to his presence, and because we are awed by the mighty strength of forces we do not understand. Kenyon knew that he had only to wait, but the anger in his heart against fate was, for the moment, very bitter. It was Simpson that blocked with his shadow the joy that should be theirs.
Wala, like many other small stations on the outskirts of Empire,—or for that matter anywhere else,—offers to the average white woman a life of monotonous calm. There is nothing to do, there is very little to think about, and very small happenings to distract the mind. It is not every one who can say, “My mind to me a kingdom is.” The average man and woman relies entirely upon their surroundings, and falls back as little as possible upon the inner self for solace or amusement.
Work is undoubtedly the redeeming feature of life in the tropics, and in this the men are far more fortunate than their women-folk. For, in a country where custom ordains that the lady of the house shall reign over a multitude of domestics and abstain as much as possible from any exertion herself, there is little for her to do except to supervise, and incidentally nag. Nothing is more soul-destroying than nagging. And long habit of finding fault and fruitlessly endeavouring to implant cleanliness and order into the African or Indian mind, is accountable for much of the weary bitterness visible upon women’s faces who live much in the tropics. Of a truth, this habit saps their health and steals their good looks as quickly and certainly as do malaria or any of other physical ills.
There are very few topics of conversation possible under the conditions of life in the wilds. For the men there are work, games, and pay; for the women, servants and scandal. Not even scandal so much as a general, rather indefinite interest in the doings and sayings of every one else. Books are almost unobtainable; papers come into this quaint, shut-away society about once a month. The doings of the outside world—wars, strikes, and social upheavals—affect them only as some faintly heard rumours. Every one is friends with every one else, the different professions and classes keeping curiously together; but it is most noticeably that class of friendship which is suggested by the phrase “ships that pass in the night.” Behind the hail-fellow-well-met attitude there is very little interest. Like a pack of cards, re-shuffled and re-dealt, men move from station to station, rarely stopping in one place for more than two years, making new friends wherever they go, and forgetting the old.
In such a life it is essential for the woman that there should be true companionship between man and wife, else she will find herself in a strange country, compelled to live entirely on the surface of friendship, and thrown back perpetually on her own resources. Without love, marriage may be a sacrilege; without companionship it is bound to be a failure. And it is easier to condone the sacrilege in a friend than in a stranger. Maureen had expected love to make up to her for much that she found strange and unpalatable in married life, and a love had failed her. Was she herself to blame for that? Had she snatched at a bubble, believing it to be a jewel, only to wake when the thing lay scattered in fragments of iridescent foam? She could not say. There were days when she would go back, over and over again, to everything that had happened in those first months of her marriage, and try to find out where the fault lay and whose it was. But the secret eluded her. Love was seemingly dead between them, that was all, and she knew herself desperately lonely. There is no one so lonely in this world as the married woman when love has failed her and companionship has never existed.
Quite blissfully and unsuspectingly Tom went his way and left her to go hers. It had, to begin with, hurt her astoundingly that he should only seem to notice her presence or need her on the rare occasions when passion stirred within him. It was as though, in this gift of physical love which could in no way take the place of all she had expected, he offered her an insult. Not at all understanding the reason, Simpson had yet not been too dense to realise the aloofness in Maureen’s attitude; but this he was quite content to accept with philosophic calmness. Women are queer creatures; he had always thought that. He was willing, by reason of that knowledge, to excuse many things in Maureen, and it was not in his nature to force a surrender. They had drifted farther apart; but it did not occur to him for a second that it had anything to do with the waning of love. He loved Maureen, as he understood the word; he frequently denied himself to please her; he would have been quite willing to have given his life for hers.
It seemed ridiculous that she should want anything else, and yet the longing for it shadowed all her days. Perhaps it was the babies that she missed; of late she had tried to make herself believe that.
The two other women in the station with her stood out in striking contrast to each other. It was almost as though they seemed to say to Maureen, “Look at us, now. Choose! Which of our two lives do you think would bring you happiness?”
There was Mrs. Munroe, who was almost, but in a gentler, prettier way, a duplicate of her husband. Fresh-coloured, with wide blue eyes, and little light laughter that meant nothing at all except sheer kindness of heart. Mrs. Munroe very rarely listened to what any one was saying; her contribution to any conversation was invariably domestic. It was evident that she lived for her husband and her children. There were three of the latter—a step-ladder family, Mr. Munroe called them—one a year, or at any rate every eighteen months. Mrs. Munroe was always either going to have a baby, or nursing a baby, or weaning a baby—all three conditions likely to produce in the owner a self-concentrated attitude and an undue interest in food and digestion. But with it all Mrs. Munroe was unfailingly cheerful. She had a heart as young as any of her babies, and a worshipping admiration for Mr. Munroe that was very pleasant to watch. Perhaps it was the babies that created for themselves an atmosphere of happiness. You felt it, anyway, as soon as you entered the Munroe household. But to Maureen, watching with brooding eyes, it seemed that the babies were merely an outcome of the happiness, not the cause.
Then there was Mrs. Raymond, the Magistrate’s wife. Here, too, there was a baby—a small waif of a child, white of face, wistful of eye, that Mrs. Munroe had quite openly said several times she would like to adopt. For Mrs. Raymond made no pretence of understanding children, though she was, in her own slightly erratic way, quite fond of Dulcie.
“My dear, I shall never forget the horror of Dulcie being born,” Mrs. Raymond would tell you—her delicate pointed face quite pale with the memory. “I said then—it was the first thing I said to Dick—‘For God’s sake, Dick, don’t let us ever have another.’ And Dick is a dear, we haven’t.” And then she would shake a head of very saucily contrived curls, and laugh, dropping her voice to a whisper in order to impart all sorts of rather surprising information.
Mrs. Raymond was tall and slight and—she liked one to say so—ethereal-looking, and dear Dick was a nonentity. There was no concealing that fact. Mrs. Raymond, herself, never attempted to hide it. He was Dulcie’s father, and his role in Mrs. Raymond’s life seemed to end there, except that he quite probably provided a certain amount of money for Mrs. Raymond to spend. Mrs. Raymond was a lady who made no secret of anything. She would spend long mornings in Maureen’s drawing-room; for even the least hard-worked man is generally not available in the morning, and Mrs. Raymond had to talk to some one, recounting unendingly her love affairs.
“My dear, the letters he wrote me, poor, silly man,” she would say. “But after all, it’s love, isn’t it, that makes the world go round? I should die of dullness in this place if some man did not make love to me. And you know, dear Mrs. Simpson” (this with a sly glance at Maureen, for no one was under any delusion as to the Simpson ménage), “one does get most dreadfully bored with one’s own husband—doesn’t one?”
Maureen had begun by disliking Mrs. Raymond intensely; it was perhaps a straw showing which way the wind was blowing, that she found herself, after a time, making excuses for the woman with her irritating chatter and shallow laugh. At any rate she saw far more of Mrs. Raymond than of Mrs. Munroe, for the latter had small time to spare from her husband and family, whereas Mrs. Raymond would cheerfully waste whole mornings in talk. It is something to have some one to listen to when your own mind is suddenly a swirling jumble of thoughts you dare not face, and longings of which you are ashamed.
Maureen, at this period of her existence, stood at bay against herself, and the terrifying thing was that, brought into contact with this unknown self, she found it stirred and swayed by desires and impulses for which she could have nothing but contempt. To fall in love with a man who was not and could not be her husband, was against every rule of moral conduct that Maureen had ever set.
Her unknown self took this contract with righteousness, and before her shamed eyes tore it into a thousand pieces. To be moved by a sense of desire for a man, by a passionate longing to feel his hands about her, to dream of his kisses, and wake weighted with a sense of hopelessness because he was not there to share the days—these things filled the old Maureen with amazed contempt and a struggling sense of living in a nightmare.
Her mind groped back to the teaching she had had as a child, and a girl. She had been brought up in a fairly strict school. Her wonderful old grandmother, who had much to do with training her, had been a rigid Scotswoman of the earlier days of Presbyterianism. To long for a chocolate had been, under those grim, old eyes, almost a carnal offence of which the child Maureen had been ashamed. Self-denial had been the keynote of the grandmother’s life—it was the war chant of her religion. With a stern disregard of youth she impressed it on the child left in her charge, and, loving with the whole strength of her hot, little heart, Maureen accepted and imbibed the doctrine. To want a thing very badly made the possession of it sinful; the giving up of it as near the Divine example as poor weak humanity could hope to get. When very young, Maureen had learnt to give up things.
It was strange that none of these things helped her now. It may be that the elemental in our nature, which, after all, we rarely have to face, is not in any way beholden or under subjection to our early training, or the force of good example.
It was the elemental woman in her that called out to the elemental man. Her old self could only stand aside, a little sick and shaken, and terribly ashamed.
It was just at this time, about three months after Kenyon’s departure from Wala, that Maureen received her first love letter from him. It came at the end of a morning spent in Mrs. Raymond’s company, which always meant a certain, almost imperceptible, weakening in Maureen’s moral side; for it is quite true that we cannot condone without in some measure sharing in the wrong-doing. Simpson brought the letter up with him and tossed it across to her as they sat at lunch. He did not ask who it was from, and he certainly did not trouble to guess. He ate his luncheon very quickly, as usual, and retired—as was his invariable practice—for a brief rest and a little light reading before starting out on his rounds again.
In the big, wide, verandaed house they had their separate bedrooms—one at each end—with the sitting-rooms in between. When it was necessary to put up a guest, Simpson would move over to her side of the house, his camp-bed occupying a small space of the side verandah. But even on those occasions he seemed to be no more in her life than usual; only his shaving things, littered about on her dressing-table, proclaimed his presence.
To-day, she sat for a little while after he had gone to lie down, with the letter unopened on her lap. She could not have said why, but she felt that the letter was in some way momentous, perhaps a turning-point in her life, and she wanted to sit quite still and feel her way back through the years to her grandmother’s stern presence before she opened it. She had loved her grandmother, and her grandmother, she knew, had loved her. Perhaps Death had served in some way to wipe the grimness out of the old soul. It felt, anyway, as though her grandmother were beside her now, stroking her hands, telling her not to fret, as Grannie had sometimes unbent to do on the occasions when Maureen had really hurt herself.
And this thing coming into her life was going to hurt—instinctively Maureen felt that in every nerve of her heart. Would Grannie understand and condone? unbend as she had used to do in those old days, and offer sympathy where before she had shown stern disapproval? The question, anyway, was unanswerable, and Fate never waits for us to solve these little problems of imagination. Maureen opened her letter, and read and forgot everything else in the radiant glow of happiness that came to her after three months’ gloom.
“Dear Heart of Mine,—You won’t read any further, I don’t expect, and I have no earthly right to address you like that; but that is how I dream of you, and a man’s dreams are sometimes stronger than his waking actions. I love you, my dear—a thing I never meant to tell you, not, that is to say, until you gave me leave, for I know you know I love you, and sometimes I have flattered myself that the knowledge was not bitter. Oh—one woman that I have loved with everything that is in the very least good in me—if anything that I ever did or said brought you a moment’s sorrow, I would quite gladly die to efface it. That, in its way, is why I am writing this; for life to me is not worth living without you, and yet if you decree to shut me for ever outside your life, I will go quietly, silently, dear one—only glad of the fact that I have known you and loved you.
“So this letter leaves it in your hands. If you make no answer I shall know myself torn up and thrust into the waste-paper basket—it is where hands like yours should put any one as little worth your loving as I am. But if, dear heart—the wonder of that ‘if’ leaves me silent. I feel you sway against me! I see your eyes! There is only one thing that matters in this world, Maureen—that we should be true to ourselves. If this love of mine hurts your conscience, dear, push it aside as ruthlessly as you would a snake. I love you enough to tell you that.”
The reading left her numb and quiet. She sat on, looking in front of her with unseeing eyes. Simpson called out good-bye to her on his way through the verandah. She did not seem to hear—she certainly made no answer. Presently she rose—a little stiffly, as though the old age she had once so dreaded had definitely set its hand upon her—and slowly moved into the house. The envelope of Kenyon’s letter fell on the floor; but the letter she still held as she moved, and slipped it into the bosom of her dress. The action seemed quite instinctive; but it would have solved a great many doubts in Kenyon’s mind had he seen it.
And for the rest, she made no answer. Not at the time, that is to say. Desperately, with a pathetic attempt to hold on to the things in her life which she had always felt mattered, for a while she turned to her husband, openly asking for the companionship which he had never thought of giving her unasked. Could he not go for walks with her instead of playing games? Must he go to the club every evening?
“I am so horribly lonely, Tom,” she would say sometimes. “I think I shall go mad with loneliness.”
Simpson found his wife’s new mood rather trying and very difficult to understand. It made him appear selfish to ignore such open pleading; and no man, however selfish he may be, likes to appear so. He tried to put the matter tactfully to her. How could he possibly keep well if he did not play games? People would think it so strange if he gave up going to the club for no reason at all. “Besides, what in Heaven’s name should we do from six till dinner-time, Maureen; we have never been great chatterers?”
“Do I count for anything at all in your life?” she asked him once, hurling the question at him during breakfast—a meal which, it may be remembered, Simpson felt ought to be partaken of in solitude and peace. “Would you mind if I left you and went with some other man?”
The idea, in itself, was indecent, made him unreasonably angry, or it may only have been its time of delivery.
“I don’t believe the country is suiting you this tour,” he answered coldly. “It might be better if you went home for a bit.”
Even shallow Mrs. Raymond would notice what he quite failed to see. It was obvious to Mrs. Raymond that Mrs. Simpson, for whom she had developed a very real affection, was passing through some acutely nervous crisis. For nerves Mrs. Raymond had only one cure—distraction and amusement.
“There is a ball on at Entebbe next week,” she said. “I am aching to go. Couldn’t you persuade your husband to take us? Mine, of course, can’t; some one must look after Dulcie. Or,” this with a sidelong look out of inquisitive eyes, “failing your husband, how about getting that nice Mr. Kenyon to give us a lift in his car? He is sure to be going—he always does. Mrs. Donovan would put us all up.”
It seemed to Maureen as though Mrs. Raymond had suddenly taken her hand and pointed out to her a long, sunny stretch of road opening in front of her feet.
“I’ll ask Tom,” was all she answered.
Of course she might have known Tom’s opinion without troubling to ask.
“Tommy rot,” he answered: “I hate dancing. What’s this new craze, Maureen?”
His voice sounded tired. Poor man, he had indeed found Maureen’s conduct during the last few months rather tiring.
“Oh, nothing,” said Maureen. “I’d like to go, that is all. Mrs. Raymond suggests that we should ask Mr. Kenyon to drive us in. Mrs. Donovan has asked us all to stay. Would you mind that?”
“My dear, if it amuses you,” he answered, “do anything you like. Why not stay on for a bit with Mrs. Donovan. The change might cheer you up.”
“Very well,” agreed Maureen. She did not look at him as he stood up, tall and handsome and indifferent. “I’ll write Mr. Kenyon, since you don’t want to come.”
That, then, was how Kenyon got his letter. It did not tell him much, but in its way it was more eloquent of surrender than any other letter could have been.
“Dear Mr. Kenyon,—Mrs. Raymond and I are very keen to go in to the Government House ball at Entebbe, and we cannot get either of our husbands to take us. Will you drive us in? Mrs. Donovan has suggested putting us all up, and Mrs. Raymond says you make a habit of attending balls.—Yours ever, Maureen Simpson.”
Ramlika as a boy had been a strange mixture of worldly wisdom and fantastic dreams. If the fates had left him alone and not swept him, as a hot-headed youth, into the centre of a riotous faction of Bengalee life, he would probably have emerged into middle age as a prosperous and sleek merchant, as his father had been before him, and his father’s fathers for many generations. The only pity was that Ramlika had, in a sense, been educated above sleek prosperity. He had been sent to England, he had gone to Oxford, and had returned to the shop and his complacent rice-eating family, a fiery product of all the weird jumbles which a Western education can produce in an Eastern mind. He passed like a comet into his parents’ peaceful existence. This was not quite the return that they had expected for the outlay of their money. Old Ramlika had thought to see his son come back the wiser for Western wisdom; more prudent, more calculating. He had hoped to watch the results show themselves in a wonderful increase of trade over and above their less fortunate neighbours who had not been wise enough, or rich enough, to send their sons to England.
But Ramlika brought neither prudence nor wisdom to bear on the business; he went instead nigh to wrecking it. He talked madly of the rights and wrongs of Freedom. He breathed what old Ramlika vaguely recognised as treason against the white Government; he grew moody and irate with any of his own people who were prepared to accept what he defined as the yoke of slavery. Old Ramlika washed his hands of his first-born; there were—by the mercy of the gods—others to take his place; and shut his eyes to as much as he could of young Ramlika’s doings. So Ramlika had drifted.
There was an eager faction of self-educated, large-brained, and poor physiqued young men to make him welcome into the society of young Bengalee fanatics. The seditious party—the Nihilists of India—took him to their hearts. He had as many brains as any of them; he had his English education; and he had far more fire and earnestness of purpose than the majority. For it was at this period in his career that Ramlika became a fanatic; raising to the level of a fiery patriotism what in the others merely amounted to a spiteful desire to prove themselves as good as their masters. It was Ramlika’s brain that evolved the plot of assassinating the Viceroy on his way to the Royal Durbar at Delhi. It was Ramlika’s hand that fired the shot, and it was the vague dreamy side of Ramlika’s nature that, more or less, spoilt the whole affair.
Up till the moment when he stood, fast pinioned, between two policeman, and faced by the man whose life he had tried to take, things had still been in the balance for Ramlika. He was really a dreamer more than a doer. He had planned to deal death; but as he had fired the shot, he had been smitten with horrible, soul-shaking remorse. He had felt sick and bewildered. His eager imagination, as ever, leaping ahead of his deed, saw the dead body of the Viceroy roll to his feet, heard the clamour of swift horror surging from the crowd, realised himself as that thing accursed in all nations—a murderer. All that in a second; and then the silence, the sudden halt in the procession, the hands of the men that had caught him, dragging him forward, the clear, unmoved English voice weighted with scorn: “The weapon was obsolete, sir—I expect it’s the act of a silly boy.”
It was the scorn that turned Ramlika from a fanatic into a madman. That they should mock so carelessly the thing which he had done, the doing of which had torn his very soul asunder! It did not matter to Ramlika in the very least that he should be tried and found guilty, that the sentence should be life transportation, which showed, at any rate, that they considered him dangerous enough to keep out of the way. None of all this counted to Ramlika. The scorn in that young English voice was all he heard, and, with a mind swaying between madness and sanity, Ramlika swore everlasting hatred against the white man. No one knew of this vow. The fanatic had worked for the honour of his country, and working so had called on others to help him and follow where he led. The madman worked for his own sweet vengeance.
And as the fanatic had dreamt, the madman dreamt, building up for himself fantastic visions of the deeds which his vengeance should accomplish. And as the dreams had, in their way, spoilt the plans of the Empire-builder—for the weapon had been obsolete, and Ramlika had never learnt to shoot—so did the dreams, as month followed month, stay the hand of the madman.
It had taken Ramlika seven years to escape from captivity. Seven years which had in truth eaten into the soul he once possessed. That is where civilised law goes so far astray. For surely it is better to kill a man’s body than to kill his soul; to cut off his ears for stealing than to imprison him for a term of years; to use corporal punishment instead of degrading him whom God intended to be free.
In this the old savages are wiser than we are. It is only as our white civilisation takes root in a country that jails spring into existence. Places where men without hope—unless it be of escape—without initiative or desire, are kept and fed and looked after much as we look after the animals in our Zoological Gardens. “All that man unto man has done”—our method of improving the evil in the world must surely make the angels of God weep. Unless, indeed, God be after our own image, as some people would have us believe—and has constituted Hell as an everlasting pattern for our jails.
Anyway, escape Ramlika did. India was shut to him. It did not occur to him to go back to her. All that part of the great ambition which included a passionate love of the country that his fathers had possessed, had died in the dying of his soul. Very different things from that which had first started Ramlika on his seditious career. Only vengeance and hatred were left. He had drifted to Africa. For years the scum of India, thrown out by the Motherland, has drifted in that direction. The whispers grew up about him wherever he went—were sent forward from bazaar to bazaar. He had come—so it was believed—to engineer a rising. It was through the possession of Africa that the Indians would be able to help their brethren in India. There were a hundred tongues eager to help him, though the hands, as Ramlika would scornfully observe, were kept well out of sight for the moment. He let them talk. It all meant so very little to him now; but he did see in the vision of an African rising some of his dreams of revenge emerging into the light of day.
To begin at the North, the farthest point from the sea, was the initial idea. Ramlika drifted to Uganda, heard of Nuonga and the energies of Chandra Lal; came into sight and, for the time being, possession of Noormahal. Here the dreams swept up again, drowning for the time being all else. His passion for the girl wrapped him round like a flame; he saw nothing but her face, heard nothing but her voice, felt nothing but her hands. Chandra Lal waxed indignant. Noormahal was part of his household, kept at a great expense for the furthering of certain plans that his own evil brain had devised. It looked as though Ramlika’s passion brought a pause to all this. Ramlika might be a name to conjure money and promises from among the Indians; it carried very little weight with the natives. Noormahal was the bait intended to attract their eyes, and, through their senses, their allegiance. And Ramlika had absorbed Noormahal; was furious if she danced; allowed no other man to approach her. In his anger, Chandra Lal rounded on Noormahal, to be met with mocking laughter and a faint shrugging of her perfect shoulders.
“With patience, friend, the thing will pass,” mocked Noormahal. “Does not love pass from all men? A month—two months—a year. What would you have me do? Am I not here to wait and serve those who come?”
“A little more serving like such as you gave unto Obaya, the Chief, would suit me better,” grumbled Chandra Lal. “I grow weary of Ramlika.”
“And I, too,” whispered Noormahal. “Have but a little more patience, Chandra Lal.”
It is very certain that she did weary of Ramlika, and yet, in a way, the man’s very madness held her enthralled. There was very little of anything real in Noormahal’s composition, but what there was, was essentially, instinctively cruel. Like a cat that glows and purrs and plays, watching the wounded mouse’s attempts to escape, so Noormahal glowed and purred, listening to Ramlika’s dreams of vengeance. They appealed to her, because they were enriched with all a madman’s cunning. She had her own small spite to vent against the white men. Had not a white man once pushed her aside, with indifferent contempt for her beauty, when she would have bribed him to her will? Had they not hanged her Pathan lover?—as she had told Ramlika.
Polishing her small finger-nails, staining the henna into her perfect hands, Noormahal would listen to Ramlika’s schemes, fan his hate by her own intense sensual love of cruelty. But for the rest the man wearied her, his love woke nothing but disgust. It was as though she stood poised beside him, waiting for the first possible attraction to appeal to her so that she might leave him.
There came an evening when Chandra Lal, angrily breaking through all pretences, told Ramlika that sufficient time had been wasted upon a gratified passion. Noormahal was in the country for a purpose—that purpose must be fulfilled. He had sent round notices stating that the “Rose of All the World” would dance for her lovers that night. He expected a large attendance of native chiefs—there were a good many of them in the district, thanks to the imminent arrival of the District Commissioner; he would thank Ramlika, if he could not contain his insane jealousy, to stay away.
“The girl is a dancing-girl,” he added hotly. “She is for all men to take. You must look elsewhere, Ramlika, for the woman who will stay purdah to your desires.”
Ramlika looked at him with half-shut eyes, behind whose blackness a dull flame burnt. He did not, however, attempt to refute the argument, and that night the central room of Chandra Lal’s strange house was once more thronged with a motley crowd of Indians and natives. Noormahal danced for them, wrapped round in rose-coloured draperies from which her face looked out, a mystic flower of beauty, with gold bells on wrists and ankles and brow. She had very graciously persuaded Ramlika to be absent.
“Heart of my heart,” she had whispered, “how can I dance for others knowing your eyes are upon me, and how shall I dance for you where there are others to see?”
“You do not dance for others as you dance for me?” Ramlika had asked, and her lips upon his had been the answer.
Easy to hoodwink if he believed it. Still, undoubtedly, his absence gave her a sense of relief. Now, as she danced, her eyes sought hither and thither through the crowd, searching for some new fancy that would rouse again her ebbing desires. And as she danced she sang a curious monotonous chant—not Indian, altogether African in its monotone and in its language that her lips found it a little difficult to frame. Chandra Lal had been at some pains to teach her words and music. It was an old witch chant, telling of the glories and greatness of a departed day, and he watched, with keen satisfaction, the effect that it had on his native guests. They moved and jerked and mouthed in time to the music like drunken men.
Her song and dance finished, Noormahal paused, swept low to the ground, her rose-coloured skirts opening round her like the petals of a flower. As she lifted her head to fling the defiance of her eyes at these men her charms had swayed, she became acutely conscious of a face that looked at her from among the other faces. The man—scarcely more than a boy he seemed, so lithe and small-limbed his body showed in contrast to the negroes round him—stood leaning against one of the pillars of the room. He was dressed, as were a great many others present, in the flowing trousers and long-skirted coat of an Afghan, and an unwieldy turban, carelessly wound and well pulled down over his eyes, threw most of his face into shadow. The clean-cut lips seemed a little mocking, the eyes derisive. For a startled second Noormahal fancied that they studied her with contempt. Then the man’s companion, a huge native in the long kansu and white cap of the Baganda, stooped to say something to him, and they both moved away together towards the door.
The fancied contempt had brought a frown to Noormahal’s face. Light as some bird or butterfly on the wing, she was after them, the tinkle of bells heralding her coming. Whom she fancied in the crowd, she chose—that was the understood order of events. Chandra Lal turned to stare after her, and shrugged heavy shoulders. Any one was better than Ramlika, and the young Afghan was a stranger to the place; he rather approved of her selecting a stranger.
The man swung round at the touch of a soft hand on his. It was, instinctively, a defensive movement, and if any one had been watching very carefully they would have seen his hand go quickly to his loosely swathed belt. Noormahal, however, saw only a pair of compelling light-coloured eyes. They stirred her strangely. For probably the first time in all her life of adventures she felt unsure of herself, nervous. The quick flutter of her hand showed that.
“You did not like my dance?” she pouted. “I would know why.”
The light-coloured eyes studied her, the man smiled, and at that his negro companion put a hand on his sleeve, and twitched it, as if anxious to remind him it was time to leave.
“Your dance was beautiful,” the man said; he spoke in Swahili, a language generally used by all the mixed races in Africa. “It was your song I could not understand.”
“Oh, that,” said Noormahal; she shrugged her shoulders and glanced at his companion. “It is for these others. Come with me—to you I shall sing the song of the land where you and I come from. It will be beautiful in your ears.”
The negro looked uncomfortable, muttering something under his breath, and the young Afghan laughed. “He is afraid of you, ‘Rose of All the World,’” he said softly, his eyes on her face. “ He is afraid lest your eyes madden me—your beauty drive me to despair.”
“And are these things impossible!” asked Noormahal. She leant towards him.
“Not impossible,” the man admitted—he cast a quizzical glance at his companion,—“but probably dangerous to one who has a heart to lose and no money wherewith to buy it back.”
“I sell not my favours for money,” said Noormahal, her eyes appraising his good looks, the straightness of his chin and throat.
“Nor I my heart for a smile,” he threw back again, and moved as though to go.
That angered Noormahal. Of all the men in the world there was at this moment only this man, with his light-coloured eyes, that would satisfy her. She would not let him go. With one of her quick movements she flashed round, drawing him with her.
“I am weary,” she called out, her clear tones ringing through the room; “the dancing is finished. I would rest.”
It was her stated method of dismissal, a sign that her choice had been made. The crowd commenced to disperse, Chandra Lal shepherding them out with unctuous smiles. The big negro stood by his friend’s side undecided. He was, it was evident, much perturbed at the turn of events. Should he leave him, the young man, to his fate, or intervene once more to save him? The young man settled the doubt for him.
“Wait at the cross-path for me,” he ordered in a low voice. He spoke, it appeared, as master to man. “And be not afraid, Hamiz; I can take care.” With which he laughed a little, and moved forward, following Noormahal as she passed up the room to her throne.
If the man were indifferent to her seductions it must be because he was made of marble. Noormahal had never met a man thus made. She herself never dreamt of failure, and, quite suddenly, desire such as she had rarely known before was awakened in her, called to life by his eyes. She put forth all her powers to win him, and Kenyon was undoubtedly stirred. The girl was surprisingly beautiful—more beautiful than even the reports of her had said. That she should thus frankly have chosen him from among the crowd, have seen his face and followed, her quick desires evidently kindled by something that she had seen, was amazingly providential. For at first sight of her Kenyon had known that Munroe’s suspicion was correct. Here, in Chandra Lal’s so-called harem, trouble was undoubtedly brewing, and the girl was at the root of it all. Kenyon had heard her song, he had watched its effect on the native chiefs standing round. The girl was there to fan hatred to life, to wake the passionate desire to kill in men whose passions the law and order of the white man barely kept in check.
As he had moved to go, there had been one thought in his mind—Munroe must raid the place before anything further happened. The girl and her Indian male supporters must be deported. Then, as Noormahal had followed him, as she had stood swaying towards him, her eyes dark and passionate with a hundred unsaid promises, another idea had come to him. He had known women of this class before. With them the desire of the eyes is, for the time being, the love of the heart; and when they love they give recklessly, unstintingly. There were probably a great many secrets he could learn from Noormahal in the character of her lover—-secrets which no decisive action of Munroe would bring to life. It had come to him very swiftly, in that moment while he had laughed at Hamiz, that this was what he must do. Poor old, loyal, nervous Hamiz, who hated these secret expeditions of his master more than anything else in the world.
Not that the affair was without danger; Kenyon did not blind himself over that. This fanning of the flame of hatred that he had seen put into play so artistically and quaintly could only be for one end; it could have only one objective. Were Noormahal for one second to suspect his colour, his life, he realised, would have only a moment’s value—at present, that is to say. Later, if she loved him, as it is in these dancing-women to love, nothing on earth would have any value in her eyes except his person.
So Kenyon calculated and schemed and laid his plans, while Noormahal hung about him and put forward all her strength to win him to her will— a very primitive and simple will, which grew in strength and intensity as the man seemed to hold back and refrain. And it was at the critical moment when she had persuaded her new lover (not without some difficulty) to take her soft, yielding body into his arms, and touch the passion of her lips with his, that Ramlika chose to stalk in upon the scene once more.
It was Kenyon who saw the intruder first—Kenyon, with every sense trained to distinguish danger; and it was Kenyon who rose quickly and lightly to his feet, pushing the girl from him, so that even to Ramlika’s jealousy-maddened eyes there was nothing at all equivocal in the position of the two people when he came close enough to see. Noormahal might flame with rage, but she was wise enough to respect at close quarters a madness that she knew was quite capable of slaughtering her before it swept on to its work of destruction. She was beside Ramlika in a second, her flower-like hands about him, her face uplifted.
“Love of my life,” she whispered, “the time has seemed long without you. See!” she swept round to Kenyon—“a boy that I knew in my girlhood. We spoke of old times. He is named Hussein; he knows Lahore well.”
Kenyon smiled to himself. The girl could lie like a Trojan, which might be a useful pawn to play later on. For a second he studied Ramlika’s thin, austere figure, his haggard face. Kenyon could lay no claim to remembering the man, but he knew him for a stranger to Nuonga, and he guessed him to be the man referred to by Munroe.
“Capable of everything,” decided Kenyon, “and stark, staring mad, as the little lady knows well enough.”
He lifted both hands to his forehead and salaamed low to Noormahal. “I will go,” he said briefly. “Farewell, lady of dreams and beauty. Farewell, great lord of darkness and strength.”
“Yes, go,” said Noormahal indifferently; her eyes strove to send a different message. “My lord and I have things to talk of. But come again, friend of my youth.”
“‘Rose of All the World,’ I will come,” said Kenyon, and for a second his grey-green eyes stared into hers.
Then he had turned and gone, and Ramlika had said no word of any sort; only Kenyon felt a small thrill of compunction at leaving the girl—for after all the lady had been very gracious to him—at the mercy of so much blind hate.
Hamiz was waiting for Kenyon at the crossroads as he had been ordered. He had even given up being anxious, the philosophic calm of the African colouring his mind as he sat, his chin on his knees, staring down the road to the bazaar from which Kenyon would come. At this point the white metalled road of general traffic branched out into a roughly cut path that led to Mamwirta, Kenyon’s plantation. You dipped down into a low-lying swamp along this path; but Hamiz sat on the ridge of a hill, and on every side of him the country spread out, miles upon miles of level grass and thorn shrubs, till it reached the circle of hills in the distance. Green everywhere: here and there the darker green of definite swamp land, or the uplifted, more vivid, colour of giant trees.
Under the slow-lightening sky, this world, spread out like a map before Hamiz’s eyes, was strangely beautiful; soft veils of mist, rising from the swamps, tinged with faint colour as they neared the sky, merging into the red of sunrise as they vanished. And everywhere all round him there was the sound of birds, heralds of the day, the insistent chirp-chirping, the louder, shriller cries of crane and heron. To all these things, however, Hamiz was oblivious. There were just two things in life that really interested him—his master and his food. It is only when you become very civilised that food ceases to be of momentous importance; come back to the wild stage where starvation is always an abrupt possibility, and your stomach soon assumes its proper dominion. Of the two, Hamiz displayed more devotion to his master. He was not, at any rate, thinking of food as he sat there, though it was certainly a long time since his last meal.
The average African native is incapable—so the best authorities will tell you—of really deep or lasting affection. He is, as it were, the cat of humanity, walking his lone wild ways, thinking his lone wild thoughts. There may have been in Hamiz some strain of strange blood, leavening this rather chill aloofness. He came from the people of the Nile; he was of huge and massive build, and quite oppressively ugly of face, but his eyes looked out upon the world with the calm good-nature of some large, good-natured dog, and there was undoubted devotion in his service to Kenyon.
He had wandered on to Kenyon’s shamba seven years earlier, a gaunt, starved wreck of a man. Looking for work, he had said; obviously searching for food. Kenyon had given him both, the latter first and in abundant quantity, for there is no use in expecting labour from a starving man. And Hamiz had stayed on. Hamiz had not been his original name, but Kenyon had christened him thus, and it had stuck to him. From working on the plantation he had been promoted to work in the house, and that had been the stepping-stone to his personal service to Kenyon. For Kenyon had found that he could trust Hamiz as he had never dreamt of trusting a native. Without some one he could trust, his work for the Government would have proved ten times more difficult and dangerous. Kenyon was grateful to Hamiz, and fond of him, and Hamiz returned the affection one hundredfold. You might truly say that serving Kenyon was as food and drink to Hamiz—his horizon was bounded by it, he had no other thought in life.
Quite motionless he sat, and had sat, for the greater part of the night; but as the sky behind him flushed to vivid colour at the sun’s approach, a small figure showed itself far down on the horizon of the metallic road—a man riding a bicycle, advancing at great speed despite the hill which had to be climbed. Hamiz stood up, took one quick glance, and turned, disappearing, with a great stooping of his huge body, into a native hut that stood at the side of the path. From this he emerged again just as Kenyon, still in his native dress, reached the top of the hill and jumped lightly off his bicycle.
“Everything is ready, Bwana,” said Hamiz, his eyes on his master’s face. “I have waited through the night and I have been afraid.”
Kenyon nodded. “I thought you might be,” he agreed. “Tell me, Hamiz, in your country is it better to have a woman love or hate you?”
“Both will work trouble, Bwana,” Hamiz answered. “We have a saying—‘Leave all women, save your wife, alone.’”
“And if you haven’t a wife?” asked Kenyon, a sudden bitterness in his voice. He moved to the hut. “You are probably right, Hamiz. It’s a fool’s game I play. Stay here, watch that no one has spied my coming, that no one waits to see me going.”
He disappeared into the hut, and Hamiz returned to his slow, steady survey of the country. It would have been difficult for any watcher to have escaped his keen eyes. But the long white road showed empty, only the birds seemed to be alive in this world of green. Presently, Kenyon came out again and joined him—an English Kenyon now, in khaki shirt and shorts, and a sun helmet on his head. He looked tired, there were shadows under his eyes, and the despondency was very noticeable about his mouth. He too looked down the road towards Nuonga, and sighed a little impatiently.
“I am afraid you probably are right, Hamiz,” he agreed, talking in the man’s language. “Women are bad things to play with. Our Afghan friend is finished for the time being; he has raised too much curiosity as it is.”
“Of that I am glad,” said Hamiz simply. “Has the Bwana done the work he set out to do?”
Kenyon shook his head. “Not quite, Hamiz. I have something to think over, though. Come, we must go. To-day I go back to Nuonga as the Bwana of the Shamba, to see the Bwana District Commissioner about porters.”
“To tell him what we have seen?” suggested Hamiz, who was engaged in pulling a motor-bicycle out of the concealment of the hut. “Those people of Nuonga work not for good, Bwana.”
“Obviously not,” agreed Kenyon. “You know to keep silent about it, Hamiz?” He put his hand for a second on the man’s shoulder, and met the steady, faithful eyes. Then, with a quick order as to how Hamiz was to dispose of the Afghan’s clothes and follow himself on the Afghan’s bicycle, he mounted his own motor-bike and ricketed away towards his plantation.
Over two long swamps, up and down several hills, and then the outlines of his place were before him—rows upon rows of orderly coffee trees, making a patchwork pattern of dark green extending over acres of ground. It had taken him twelve years to lay out and clean and plant and keep clear. He was very justly proud of it. He had built, he was fond of saying, a world for himself out of the wilderness of nature. A path, shaded by tall trees, led up to the house and the carefully laid out garden. The whole place was beautiful with flowers: pink-blossomed creepers hiding one side of the verandah; tall, radiant-coloured lilies growing up close to the walls. He had made his world beautiful, and yet this morning it seemed desolate to his eyes. It was a fortnight since he had written Maureen, and there was no answer to his letter. There never would be one. She had consigned his letter to the wastepaper basket as he himself had suggested that she should do. Yet if she had loved him he could, he knew suddenly, have made his life and hers as beautiful as his lilies made this strip of garden.
Kenyon got off his bicycle and shouted for the boys, and a pack of dogs flung themselves out of the house, barking and baying their welcome. There were no letters for him, the head-boy answered his question. The runner had come in from Wala the night before, for the third time in one week, and reported no letters.
Kenyon shrugged his shoulders and passed into the house. He was a fool to hope, a fool to plan and dream. He would put the thing from him. Had he not promised to go quite silently out of her life? He would turn his whole mind to the problem of Noormahal. She could offer him, at least, excitement, perhaps something else.
“I am a lover of love,” said Kenyon to himself fiercely. “Am I going to let one woman who is afraid to love alter my whole life?”
He had breakfast, sitting out on the verandah. The views from the house were lovely. The coffee trees near the edge of the garden were in full flower, a scattering of snow-white blossoms against green leaves, a very rare and pungent perfume. Inside, the house was cool and spacious; he had designed and built it himself. He had chosen every article of furniture, every book; every picture was an old favourite bought in the days when he had been full of ideals and enthusiasms. It was not the sort of house you would expect to find on a coffee plantation, miles away from any civilisation. No one but Kenyon could have produced it or maintained it. It was part of the man’s charm, this perfection with which he surrounded himself, without which one felt instinctively it would be almost impossible for him to live. “A satyr,” some one had once said of Kenyon. “You know, one of those creatures with hoofs and the most perfect taste in beauty.”
And to most people the man remained that kind of mystery. The reports current in Wala and elsewhere as to the life led and the revels held in Mr. Kenyon’s house of beautiful things, had always been coloured with a little maliciousness. Men, unless they loved him, found him hard to understand, difficult to explain. Anyway, there he had lived, off and on, for twelve years, though there would be months on end when Mamwirta would never see him and when the plantation would be run most capably by his head man.
His breakfast finished, Kenyon strolled out over the plantation, spoke to the head man, saw all the gangs of porters at work on their various tasks, and inspected yesterday’s picking. He noticed in passing that Hamiz had returned to the house on his bicycle. Then he went back, bathed and changed, wrote a few orders, and, in half an hour’s time, was on his motor-bicycle and making his way back to Nuonga.
He passed through the bazaar street as the inhabitants were beginning to stir themselves uneasily to a certain cleanliness in honour of the District Commissioner’s visit. Chandra Lal was on his steps supervising a very drastic sweeping out. He salaamed to Kenyon, waving a fat hand. Kenyon was a good customer; besides, Chandra Lal was invariably scrupulously cordial to the Europeans of the district. A vein of daring made Kenyon stop and enter the shop; he bought one or two quite unnecessary things, and stood looking about him, while Chandra Lal gushed politeness to him.
What was “Rose of All the World” doing? he wondered. Had she succeeded in smoothing down the ruffled jealousy of her extremely sinister-looking friend?
A crowd of natives, a general air of stir and bustle, the Union Jack flapping languidly in a very faint breeze—all betokened the District Commissioner’s arrival in camp. Kenyon left his bike at the gate of the enclosure and went forward. The Government camps in most places consist of a cleared, fenced-in space, and a small, thickly thatched, mud-and-reed building, with the attendant huts for kitchen and servants. The one at Nuonga is of a very superior variety, the local chief having expended much time and labour upon beautifying it. With its reed ceilings and tall, supporting poles it made a house in which it would be quite pleasant to stay for a length of time. Only the nearness of Nuonga bazaar and the constant presence of the “City Fathers,” as Munroe called them, rendered it unbearable in his eyes.
Munroe had finished his breakfast. Plump and pink he sat out on the verandah of the house and gave audience to the various chiefs of the district. They sat round him in a circle of polite attention on the floor,—all save the head chief, who occupied a chair next Munroe,—their hands in their laps, their eyes on Munroe’s face, while the interpreter stood behind Munroe’s chair and translated for the white man as he spoke.
“A wonderful method of governing,” thought Kenyon, pausing on the outskirts. “Through the mouth of a lad at, I suppose, thirty rupees a month. I don’t suppose he ever cheats, either; that is the amazing thing about these people. They’ve jolly little guile.”
Language had never proved a stumbling-block to Kenyon. He could speak Swahili like a native, and one or two other native languages as well. It always surprised him to find this faculty markedly absent in Government circles.
Munroe saw him and waved a hand. “I’ve just finished, Kenyon,” he shouted. “Come along in and have some coffee or a lemon squash.” He dismissed his attendant chiefs with a wave of his hand, and strolled across to Kenyon himself.
“Well,” he said; he had rather the appearance of one of those nimble fox-terriers scenting the air. “Any news, Kenyon? Don’t know why, but I sense a spirit of unrest among that crowd.”
He nodded towards the departing chiefs. “Ever since Obaya died,” he added. “Can’t explain it to you, but my finger’s not on their pulse, that’s all. I talk to them, and they listen, but there is a shifting veil of something in between us.”
“Perhaps it’s the interpreter,” suggested Kenyon, with a crooked smile. He put his hand on Munroe’s arm quickly. “No,” he said; “I’m an ass to say that. You get behind and beyond language, Munroe, and I should be the last to doubt that, as I’ve proved it several times. And here again you are right. There is a shifting veil of trouble. I’ll come in and tell you what I’ve learnt.”
“Yes, come on in,” agreed Munroe; his eyes still followed the chiefs. “I know them pretty well,” he added. There was a note of regret in his voice. “It would surprise and hurt me not a little if they went against me.”
“I don’t know that they are likely to,” said Kenyon; “but I have discovered that some one is trying to make them.”
Under the shade of the verandah he told Munroe of his last night’s experience; of Noormahal and his momentary glimpse of Ramlika. Munroe nodded his head to the description.
“Long, thin, morose, and evil,” he agreed. “That describes him, and, of course, incidentally mad. I shall have to phone through to Wala, eh, Kenyon? and get Pearce to come out and some of his men. We shall have to raid the place. Outwardly we can describe it as a gambling den. I have always had my doubts as to Chandra Lal.”
“That was what I proposed at first,” said Kenyon; “afterwards—” he hesitated a moment, watching his cigarette smoke vanish away into little spirals and rings. “Look here, Munroe,” he went on abruptly, “the thing seems to be bigger than we first gave it credit for. Before we strike, it might be as well to know that we strike at the roots. Now, this girl,—‘Rose of All the World,’ you told me that was what she was called, and the description’s not far wrong,—she knows at least all that Ramlika knows. Supposing, well, supposing that she fell a victim to my Afghan charms? Give me two more evenings, and I think the thing could be worked. The odds are I should get at the bottom of everything. I know these girls—passionate—why, it’s their life—and they are marvellous in their giving where they love. Supposing——” he paused, his lips curled, his eyes hard, almost cruel.
“A hateful idea,” said Munroe, with some bluntness. “But I suppose it’s a clever one. Kenyon, has no woman ever meant anything to you at all? You are always so willing——”
It was an amazingly indiscreet question, as Munroe would have realised had he not been for the moment worried and annoyed. He was startled to see the sudden fierceness that leapt into Kenyon’s face and faded again, leaving its mark of scorn.
“Shall we drop the private disquisition on my moral state and stick to business, Munroe?” was all he said; and also, at the other’s muttered apology, “Oh, it’s all right, old chap. You touched on the raw for a moment, that was all.”
Which gave Munroe something to think about, remembering the Wala gossip about Mrs. Simpson and Kenyon, and the latter’s face that first day in the Boma.
The thing was arranged, anyway, as Kenyon planned. For a fortnight Munroe would do nothing, just go on with his tour; and at the end of that time he would return unexpectedly to Nuonga, and the raid on Chandra Lal’s house should take place on an evening—Kenyon was to see to this—when “Rose of All the World” was holding one of her levees. Meanwhile, Kenyon would find out what he could, and this knowledge should be at Munroe’s disposal on his return.
Kenyon went back to his house, and, three days later, he sent for Hamiz.
“Hamiz,” he explained; “the other day I said ‘the Afghan is no more.’ Yet, lo! to-night, he comes to life again. You must go to Chandra Lal’s house, you must get speech with the woman. Say to her, ‘He, whom thou hast called Hussein, is starving, for his eyes are denied thy beauty.’ Remember that, Hamiz, for women will always listen to such tales. ‘If thou hast any mercy,’ you must go on, ‘let thy slave lead thee but a short distance from here to where my master lies and cries over thy name.’ Do you understand, Hamiz?”
“I understand,” the negro grunted; “but the thing is foolishness, master. How, think you, they will let her come?”
“We leave that to the woman,” Kenyon answered. “As you know well, Hamiz, women are far cleverer than any man. Then you shall bring her to the house of your father’s aunt which, as every one knows, is on the cross-roads. If the lady grumbles at the length of the way, you must even carry her, Hamiz.”
He laughed a little at his servant’s disconsolate face.
“See, Hamiz,” he explained, “what have we to fear? If the Afghan has pleased her eyes, you bring a woman half in love—as soft as a cat well stroked. If she has forgotten what yesterday held her fancy, she will not come. Where is the danger?”
“A cat well stroked,” mumbled Hamiz. “Even so, there are always the claws.”
“And I can guarantee to clip them for the time being, at least,” chuckled Kenyon.
The excitement of the game had gripped him to the exclusion of everything else by the time it had come to eleven o’clock that night, and he still waited for the return of Hamiz. He had arrived at the hut after dark and, changing into his Afghan clothes, had hidden all traces of his European self, his motor-bicycle being concealed in a smaller hut at the rear. Then he had set himself to beautify the hut for his expected visitor. It was a superior form of native hut that Hamiz had had especially erected for his master’s use. The floor was well stamped in cement, and, to-day, Hamiz had strewn it with freshly gathered sweet-scented grass. Near the one small window a tiny fire burnt some form of incense wood that was Hamiz’s own discovery, and which he swore kept away all insects. It made very little smoke, and a not unpleasant, slightly beady odour.
Kenyon had brought down a thick Persian rug and some cushions from the house, and with these he had arranged a divan for Noormahal, and he had thought of providing her with coffee, and a small brass tray of sweetmeats, such as Indian women love. Would she come? Would she stay away? Had her passion for him been of so brief and vague a variety that she could rest satisfied with what had passed the other night? He rather doubted it. And, despite himself, despite the very loyal hunger of his heart for Maureen, he could not but know that the thought stirred him. He sat cross-legged in front of Hamiz’s scented fire and waited. Very Eastern in his pose all except the European cigarette between his fingers, there, in the shadow of the smoke, in the little glimmerings of the fire, he saw many things in his life that had been like this waiting for a woman. He had been right when he had said to Maureen, “I am not worthy for your hands to touch.” And yet—and yet—if she had loved him, everything else in his life could have been swept away as his hand swept away this smoke, and all that he would have offered her would have been clean and sweet and purified by a great love. If—-the thought stung him like a whip. He rose quickly to his feet, flinging away the cigarette, and, at that, a little sound at the door made him swing round, and Noormahal was before him.
She had come, enveloped against curious eyes in the long shroud-like garment of the harem woman; the tight-fitting headpiece; the two eyeholes cut in a mask of black. As she stood there she flung this back, and her beauty shone out against its darkness like a vivid flame. Gold-brown from head to toe; swathed in some gauzy, glittering material; a single flat jewel—a ruby he took it to be—hanging low on her forehead by a thin chain of gold.
Kenyon caught his breath. The other memories were pushed aside. Here was a woman, desiring and desired. He ran towards her, almost forgetting in that moment to play his part. Indeed, he might even have spoken in English had not Hamiz’s familiar and ugly face obtruded itself at that moment above the radiant vision. Then Kenyon remembered. He was not so much a man as a Government servant, pledged to a part.
“You have come,” he said softly in the girl’s language; it was what he had learnt as a child in India, and he had never allowed himself to forget it. “Oh, wonderful ‘Rose of All the World,’ you have come.”
The girl nodded—a light of mischief in her eyes. “Not easily, my friend,” she said. She crossed over to the rug and flung herself down among the cushions. “Ramlika wearies me,” she added. “Else, who knows, I might not be so ready to put myself out for a young man’s requests. And yet” —her eyes, soft radiant eyes, deep wells of colour, caressed him—-“who knows, where the heart calls—the feet follow. Oh, stranger of the strange light-coloured eyes!”
“And the heart called?” asked Kenyon. He sat himself beside her in seemingly timid worship, not daring to touch.
Noormahal closed her eyes for a second, throwing back her head. The light—Hamiz had swung a hurricane lantern from the roof—fell on the uptilted chin and line of throat and breasts. “The heart called,” she admitted. She put out her hands to him. “You love me, stranger?” she asked.
“As the night loves the stars,” said Kenyon; “as day loves the sun.”
“Aye,” Noormahal agreed, sitting upright, her eyes full on his. “But as man loves woman? I care not very greatly for poetry, O Hussein.”
“As man loves woman then,” whispered Kenyon. He still held her hands, and he could feel that she pulled him a little towards her; her eyes and the ripe scarlet of her lips drew him as though in a dream. “As man loves woman, ‘Rose of All the World,’” he repeated, and kissed her full on the lips.
Hamiz might well be disturbed. Like some restless watch-dog he prowled up and down—up and down outside the hut. He could hear the low murmur of voices from within speaking in a language he could not understand—punctuated by long silences. Undoubtedly, the woman was weaving some spell of destruction about his master. What did he think to learn from a woman? Nothing, at any rate, Hamiz felt sure, which would be of any use to the Government. And to run this risk was only madness, for Hamiz knew where the risk lay, having seen Ramlika, and knowing the bazaar gossip. Women—with eyes straining into the darkness, with ears nerved to catch any outside noise—Hamiz came to the conclusion that he had no use for women. And, inside the hut, Noormahal lay curled up like some lovely, weary kitten against Kenyon’s arms, her head thrown back on his shoulder.
“Oh, stranger of the light-coloured eyes!” she was saying. “Shall I tell you something I have guessed about you?”
“Why guess?” murmured Kenyon; “is not love all knowledge, Noormahal? Or at least all the knowledge that matters?”
“Perhaps,” agreed the girl—her laugh was mischievous—“yet the thought that I have guessed pleases me. Would it frighten you, best-beloved, to know that I have vowed a vow of hatred only to be washed out in blood against”—she stirred a little, looking up at him—“against the white people?” It was as though she felt him stiffen, for she put up a soft hand and stroked the cheek nearest her. “Be not afraid,” she whispered, the whisper gay with held-back laughter. “Vows are as nothing to us who dance, and love breaks hatred.”
“How did you guess?” asked Kenyon. It was rather a rude awakening from his self-complacency. He hoped that he kept the dismay from his voice.
“You are not like others I have known,” said Noormahal. “First your eyes told a different tale, and then your love. Ah, believe me, lord of my life, I am well versed in love.”
“Yes, I can believe that,” admitted Kenyon. He dropped all efforts at pretence. “And now that you have guessed, Noormahal?”
“Now that I have guessed,” she chanted, her soft hands about his face, “I take to myself an English lover, and hate is forgotten in love. Listen, I can speak English; I learnt it long ago.” She knelt up in his arms, a ridiculously beautiful child, the womanhood and vice wiped from her face by this new game.
“Good morning!” Her small pursed lips clipped the words. “Have you used Pears’ soap?”
He pulled her to him and kissed her again—yet he was most amazingly annoyed. The thing grew more dangerous than he had any right to like.
“And you know all about me, then?” he asked.
She nodded. “Surely, my lord,” she said. “What there is to know I know. That morning, when you entered the shop of Chandra Lal, I watched behind the shutters. The turn of your head, the lift of your shoulders told me much; and once you lifted your eyes and looked straight at me. Dear, wondrous eyes”—soft as a child’s lips her mouth touched against his lids and drew away—“was I so clever to guess?” she asked.
“Too clever for me,” laughed Kenyon. “I was a fool to think to fool you.”
She laughed in answer and nestled up to him. “Listen, lord of my heart,” she said, “I grow weary of Ramlika and his tales of blood. You, at least, he shall not kill. And I grow weary of dancing for fools to gape at. I will come—is it not so—and live in your house where there are many wonders I have heard. But not yet. Oh no, in love one must have wisdom, and first we must kill Ramlika, or work at least so that he die.” She swung herself to her feet, gathering her black zamak from the floor. “One hour, two hours, they will look for me,” she said. “Ramlika this way”—she lengthened her face, distorted it with jealous passion—“and Chandra Lal with much heaving of fat shoulders. Saw you ever such fat—beloved?”
She stood with the black dress thrown about her. “I go now, but wait for me, lord of my life, I shall come back; and lo! I have laid hatred at thy feet and taken love in exchange.”
She stooped suddenly—it seemed a sweeping curtsy—and laid her forehead on the ground before him, and then she had sprung upon him, arms flung about his neck, lips pressed to his.
Kenyon held her for a second. He hoped she did not notice how numbed and chill his passion had grown. He was feeling most bitterly ashamed of himself. After she had gone he sat on for a long while, staring into the shadows. One thing was clear—he could not carry on with spying along these lines. He would have to write to Munroe and say he gave it up, and recommend a raid at once. And meanwhile—meanwhile, she had laid hatred at his feet and taken love in its place. The thought was hateful, hateful! He had betrayed her with a kiss, and he had never done that to any woman before.
He rode home to his estate without waiting for Hamiz to return. Day was just breaking; the mists rolling away from the swamps; the birds calling and chattering to each other in the trees. The keen damp air of early morning stung his face, settled on his clothes and on the bicycle in little beads of moisture. At the foot of the steps leading up to the house a sleepy-looking figure unrolled itself from a blanket and came towards him, holding out a letter.
“Last night I came, Bwana,” he said. “I was to wait an answer.”
Kenyon looked down at the letter, his face white, his lips stern. He knew at once who it had come from, and in some way, after the doings of the night, the sight of it stung him with intolerable shame. If she had dealt him out contempt it would not have been a quarter as bitter as the scorn with which he looked upon himself. Then he opened and read it, and—such was the way of man—in a second all else was forgotten. Shame, uncertainty, despair. He stood with her surrender in his hand, and all the world seemed to be pulsing with joy.
Munroe got his letter in due course. It followed him to his next camping-ground, and reached him just as his usually patient nature had reached snapping-point.
Things had gone rather badly that morning. There were days upon which Munroe felt that the African natives, fond of them as he might be, did purposely go out of their way, in all their various capacities, to annoy the white man. Breakfast had gone astray. It should have waited for him ten miles along the road of his morning’s trek, instead of which it had come the whole way into camp, and would be very late. Then the boys had lost their heads, and sent no chairs with the cook. They were following behind with the rest of the kit, and that meant that for at least three hours Munroe would have to balance his rather portly person on a very uncomfortable rickety wooden chair leant by the chief. The chief had certainly done everything he could. He had lent his chair, he had produced a teapot with a cracked spout full of banana beer instead of breakfast. But Munroe was in a bad temper and thoroughly unappeasable. Kenyon’s letter was the last straw.
“Dear Munroe,—Sorry, but the thing is no go. The lady in question has pierced my disguise, and, even if I were inclined to carry on with the intrigue, I should be very unlikely to get anything of any value out of her. I recommend a sudden swoop on the place as early as you can manage it. Tonight, if possible. Personally, I’m just off to Entebbe for a week; but as far as my evidence goes, you know it is always yours to command.— Yours, Gerald Kenyon.”
“Damn!” said Munroe. The patient and afflicted chief, upon whose head all the disasters of the morning had accumulated, watched him with perturbed eyes. “I suppose I shall have to get down to it at once.” He rose. “Yeckonea,” he said, “I am going straight back to Wala at once. You’ll have to stop my safarix; send them back to Nuonga, and tell them to wait orders there.”
Without breakfast, hungry and irate, Munroe motored the thirty miles between his camp and Wala, and went straight to his office. Geddes received him cheerfully. Geddes was always irritatingly cheerful when other people were annoyed.
“Hulloa, great chief!” he called out. “Is it yourself in person? Just in time to save me from a sticky fate. There is a divorce case in tow at the Lukiko, and they want the expert advice of the D.C. or A.D.C.”
“Well, they won’t get it,” said Munroe, with some firmness. “I have something else on hand. Ring up Pearce, there’s a good chap. Ask him to call round at once.”
“Anything happened?” asked Geddes, his hand already on the phone. “A frontier rising! Planters sacked and burnt? I am always aching for my chance to come along.”
But Munroe had already passed into his own room and shut the door between them, and Geddes had to content himself with his own imagination.
“You are wanted, Pearce—hot-foot on the wings of the wind. I fancy the gallant police are going to be called out to quell a rising or to hunt lions. But I don’t know. The D.C. is reticent, and—I think I may say it—morose.”
“And you’re a silly young idiot!” retorted Pearce over the telephone. “Say I’ll be round in ten minutes.”
The conclave was held while Geddes was down at the Lukiko hall giving his expert advice on divorce; but when he sauntered back to the office he found a note from Munroe waiting on his table.
“Just off to get some lunch,” it said, “and shan’t come down afterwards. But this evening I want to take you out on a small jaunt which involves being away for the night without your pyjamas. I’ll take you in the side-car if you’ll be ready about six. By the way—if you have a revolver and are not dangerous with it, bring it along. It might be useful.”
News travels in Africa, as it does in India, by mysterious ways not known to the European mind. At twelve noon, while Munroe ate lunch, hastily procured for him by a totally unprepared household—for he should have been on tour for another fortnight—Chandra Lal, fat and consequential, with a momentous frown on his sleek face, was crossing the bazaar street of Nuonga. Five minutes later he had paused opposite an untidy, tumble-down house, and, on knocking, had been admitted into an oppressive atmosphere of darkness and smells. Ramlika lived in the dark these days, like some hunted creature knowing itself mortally ill. He passed the time shut up in a room, of which even the windows were tightly barred against all light. People—the people of Nuonga, that is to say—said that here, in solitude and silence, he worked out his plans and arranged his great scheme for victory and vengeance. But they were quite wrong. For weeks, ever since that night, in fact, when Noormahal had stooped to conquer with her lips, Ramlika had done no scheming or planning. His passion for the girl ate into his very life. It might, indeed, have been called a cancer. Only in the hours when he was with her, did he live at all. For the rest he sat here, his elbows resting on the table, his teeth gnawing and fretting at his nails. Hour after hour, day after day; not eating; not thinking; not sleeping. With Noormahal he fed; sometimes, dragged to seeming peace by her kisses, he would sleep in her arms; but away from her he had no life at all.
Chandra Lal, most astute of his present supporters, was beginning to chafe at this. It was maddeningly annoying that, because of a woman, great ideas and high ambitions should run to seed. Yet without Ramlika how could the project be carried through? There was no one else, so Chandra Lal knew, capable of leading or of inspiring his followers with the requisite courage and fire. No one would look upon Chandra Lal as a leader; or, for that matter, follow him. He was fat and prosperous and sleek. Chandra Lal knew that to his countrymen at least romance is a big factor in success or failure. Now Ramlika was all romance, with his long ascetic face, his flaming eyes. Chandra Lal’s would always have to be the waiting part, the brain behind the power that led. Sometimes it came near to driving him desperate to realise how much damage the woman Noormahal had caused. Not that she did not have her uses. He would have been the last to deny that. If only she had left Ramlika, the mad leader, alone.
This thought was foremost in his mind as he stood, without speaking, peering at Ramlika’s figure through the dusk of the room. Then he shut the door and came forward heavily.
“Ramlika—master,” he said, “there is news abroad that you must know.”
The bloodshot eyes lifted to his. Ramlika spoke, his teeth still grinding against his nails. “Is it of Noormahal?” he asked. “Oh, Chandra Lal, has she spoken? Know you where she went last night?”
“The comings and goings of a dancing-girl,” grunted Chandra Lal. “Content yourself, Ramlika, the jade went on my affairs—as I have told you once before.”
“As you have lied,” murmured Ramlika. He shifted his position a little, and tried to recall some dignity. There were times when he realised, with desperate clearness, that he was mad—when he would, as it were, brace himself to fight against it with all the strength left in his wasted body. “Your news?” he asked, his fingers, holding themselves from his mouth, twitched in his lap.
“The District Commissioner is at Wala,” said Chandra Lal; “he has broken his tour to return. To-night, so Toman, the clerk in the post office, tells me, he will be here—he and the Police Bwana, and the Assistant District Commissioner, with thirty eskaries. What think you they look for, Ramlika?”
“You have told her?” asked Ramlika.
“She was the first to know,” the other answered. “She will have it that in some way or other our plans are known of. ‘They look to catch me,’ she says. But I think otherwise, Ramlika. I think it’s for you they search. You remember”— he leant forward, his fingers on the table—“that day the Bwana District Commissioner saw you? Your face meant something to him. At first he could not remember, but since he has remembered. He looked up old files of pieces cut from the papers. There was a photograph of you. The office clerk has told me this.”
Ramlika sat silent, his eyes glaring into the distance. “Do they think to catch me again?” he said presently, and laughed, a curiously harsh sound. “And what of you, Chandra Lal?”
“Nay,” the other shrugged, straightening his shoulders. “What can they have against me? A place where men gamble? That means a fine. I will humble myself and pay. A dancing-girl? That is not unlawful, even to the English. But Noormahal shall not dance to-night. I have another girl, good enough to charm these English eyes. Listen, Ramlika!” He drew up a chair and sat down ponderously. “The time has come to make some sort of settlement. Not to strike, for that we are not ready. But to plot, to prepare. You know Swadiki?”
“The chief from the place called Kabola?” asked Ramlika. Chandra Lal nodded.
“He owes me three thousand rupees,” he added, “and he is afraid. Oh, for little things, but it’s strange how money mounts up.” He spoke complacently. It was one of his surest stakes in the country, the sums of money for which he had lured the native chiefs of the district to become indebted. “Being afraid,” he went on, “he is our slave. You shall go to his place to-day, bearing a letter from me. It is far from here, three days’ journey, and it is far also from any supervision. There you can work in peace, and here we will stay quiet for a time until this fly of suspicion ceases to torment the District Commissioner—the curse of Shiva be upon him.”
Ramlika had returned to his nails; over the tops of them he spoke, mouthing his words. “And Noormahal goes with me?” he asked.
Chandra Lal frowned, but hid the frown quickly behind a smile. This morning Noormahal had announced that she intended to take her departure and live in retreat for a while. Chandra Lal guessed it would be with some man, wherever her latest fancy rested. As a rule he would have fought hotly such suggestion. Noormahal was of great value to him, and she had cost a good deal of money to procure; he would let her bestow her favours only upon those who bid very high in cash or services. But just at this moment it had seemed to him favourable that Noormahal should disappear, and not with Ramlika; therefore he had acquiesced. And Noormahal had gone; he had seen her himself depart in the palanquin which she had had made for herself on her first arrival at Nuonga. He had not even troubled to find out where she was going. Time enough to discover that when Ramlika was safely out of the way.
“In this matter we must display caution,” he said, in answer to the other’s question. “It were foolish to travel together. There is a son of Swadiki’s here, and he is ready to conduct you, O Ramlika. You will travel quicker and safer without a woman. Noormahal shall follow, that I promise.”
“Your promises!” Ramlika flung himself erect. “I go not without Noormahal; let that be understood.”
“Then,” said Chandra Lal, still suavely, “without doubt the District Commissioner will be pleased with the result of to-night’s work. For they will catch you, Ramlika, and they will send you back to that prison you so much loved. Come now, be wise, great master,” he resorted to flattery as common sense seemed likely to fail. “For our sakes, for the sake of the great rising, go yourself to-day. The woman shall follow. I have promised that. Besides, how should I stop her, for women are more difficult than rain-water to cage!”
“Aye, if she chooses to come,” whispered Ramlika. His lean form shivered, he pressed his hands to his eyes. “But sometimes I doubt—doubt, Chandra Lal! It eats like hot fire into my living flesh.”
Chandra Lal watched him with contemptuous eyes. “All this is foolishness, master,” he said. “’Twere better to take the girl and kill her, so only will you keep a woman faithful.” He rose, moving to the door. “It is agreed?” he asked. “You go this afternoon, and I, myself, will follow with Noormahal in three days.”
He went, and Ramlika, giving full rein to his madness, fell on his knees by the table, throwing out his arms. “Oh, ‘Rose of All the World!’” he whispered. “Oh, beauteous among women, your radiant eyes—your soft, soft breasts! To take life thus and thus,”—it was as though one of his hands stabbed at the table,—“to feel you cold marble within my arms. The whole of your precious body mine to kiss and hold, and then to die myself.” He threw back his head. “Aye, then to die myself.”
He was really a horrible sight, thin lips curled back from harsh white teeth; mad, bloodshot eyes. A young native who had just come in at the door, pushed thither by Chandra Lal, paused and drew back in dismay; and, hearing the sound, Ramlika struggled to his feet, and stood swaying like a drunken man. But there was also some effort to snatch back his sanity, to hide his madness from the other’s eyes.
“You are the son of Swadiki!” he asked, and the lad nodded, dumbfounded by what he had seen.
“There is a porter out here to carry your things, Ramlika,” Chandra Lal’s voice sounded from outside. “I will not stay to say farewell, since your going should be as quiet as possible. Look, then, to see us in three days.”
He congratulated himself on the success of his diplomacy as he sat later in his shop and watched Swadiki’s son, a strapping negro lad of eighteen or nineteen, pass up the street accompanied by the lean, black-clad form of Ramlika, and followed by a porter carrying the latter’s scanty luggage. So far, so good. There remained only to set his house in order, as the District Commissioner had once recommended him to do. A rather malicious smile played about Chandra Lal’s face as he went about his business for the rest of the day, and it is a noticeable fact that he did nothing to warn the rest of Nuonga as to what was in store for them. It would, on the whole, almost be worth his own fine to have the amusement of seeing Manji Mathubog and Sad Bandar dragged up for illicit gambling and frequenting a disreputable house.
The raid, according to young Geddes, was an undoubted success. It was the biggest rag he had so far assisted at in his official capacity. To buzz up the quiet street of night-held Nuonga, himself and the D.C. in the latter’s motor-bike, Pearce and a detachment of eskaries following in motorcars; to pull up at Chandra Lal’s palatial-looking residence and force their way through the closed door of the shop into the inner mysteries beyond, was all absolutely to his taste.
“By Jove, old chap, a harem, eh?” he muttered to Munroe. Then they had dashed—a fine impressive entrance he had decided, enlivening it with a war-whoop of his own—into the large, brilliantly lit central room. “By Jove! they knew how to do things, these old Ba Indies.” Geddes was fond of recounting afterwards details as to the luxuries spread on all sides. The divans; the heaped cushions; the opium pipe; and the dancing-girls. He always ended on them with a sigh of regret. “We should have crept in, Pearce,” he remarked at the time, “and given them a chance of performing.”
As a matter of fact, robbed of Geddes’ imagination, the scene had been disappointing and tawdry. There had been a crowd of Indians there, smoking, drinking, and playing cards on the floor; there had been a fair sprinkling of natives whose chief amusement seemed to be to stand and stare, and there had been the dancing-girls. Rather fat, not by any means beautiful or exquisitely clean, dancing-girls. Munroe knew at once that they had been forestalled. The place wore the appearance of an ordinary house of disrepute. Enough there to extract heavy fines from Chandra Lal, and his fellow city fathers, but nothing political, no conspirators and, above all, no Ramlika or “Rose of All the World.” He hardly glanced at her sisters in the trade, so certain was he that the girl whom Kenyon had seen and undoubtedly admired was not there.
Munroe was bitterly disappointed. He hid it as best he could. It was no use showing Chandra Lal that more had been expected—was still to find.
“Not caught your fish, eh?” Pearce whispered, as he shepherded his captives out of the room, and that was the only word said about it at the time.
They did not even trouble to arrest the dancing-ladies. Their looks were not of the sort calculated to set even the most inflammable material on fire. One thing alone brought Munroe satisfaction. He was able to seize Chandra Lal’s books, and they showed the appalling outstanding debts incurred by every influential native in the district. Surely, with this proof in his hands, he could get the authorities to see that something must be done to stamp out, or at least keep under control, the influence which the Indians must have—with practically every chief in the district in their debt.
Government House, Entebbe, is really more like a country house than anything else, only it can boast this advantage over any suburb in the world—it commands the most beautiful views. From every one of its windows you look out on beauty: the beauty of a widespread lake of blue waters; the beauty of flowers and magnificent trees; the beauty of a landscape offering every shade of green imaginable to the jaded human eye. The trees are always green in Uganda. This is an outstanding feature of the views. For in this land of the Equator there is no winter. Trees flower, bear fruit, and die to outward appearances according to their own sweet will. It is not at all uncommon to see a tree doing all three things at the same time. And if there is no winter with her bare, grey boughs and mournful winds singing through the skeleton trees, there is, alas! also no winter, no spring. To say that is to realise, as it were, all the home-sickness of exile. No spring! No soft green opening of leaves or buds! No scent of hyacinth or primrose! No new up-sprouting moss to lay a magic carpet in cool woods! No faint blue skies shrouded by scurrying clouds! No wet west wind, bearing with it all promise of fruit and flower and bud!
The seasons are relentless in Africa; the life of Nature is a fierce, surging affair. Everything is violent, from the sunshine to the torrential rains that sweep up into the sky on the wings of terrific thunder and wild flashes of lightning. It is little wonder that she takes us—her stepchildren—to her heart, and by the very force of her embrace crushes all life from us. But, first of all, we lose exuberance and energy and enthusiasm. After that we—if we are wise—creep back to Mother England, and let her springs and summers and autumns sink like balm into our souls. Or else we brave it out till—as the song says—
“We draw our pension pay,
And totter home to die in England.”
However, all this is, as it were, a bird’s-eye view of English life in Africa. Individually and collectively, we are an amazing race of adapters. Not that we allow ourselves to merge into the country—that occurs in rare cases and is alluded to contemptuously as becoming negroid; but rather we take the country, however gigantically opposed to us it may be, and bend or coerce it to our pattern. Entebbe is an ideal station for this purpose. It stands aloofly English on an isthmus jutting out from the mainland of Uganda. It is in appearance an Olympic Garden City. Here the gods of official circles lead, we will suppose, charmed lives: play their tennis, cricket, and golf—essential to any self-respecting English community; dine out with each other; dance and sup together; are, in fact, as sociable and friendly and cliquey as only the best English society knows how to be.
In Entebbe people wear gloves, and go to church, and don shining shirt-fronted things for dinner. What more need be said? It is impossible to imagine anything negroid existing within its portals for more than a few days, and difficult to imagine that such wild scavengers as plague, famine, or small-pox could ever dare to intrude.
Once a year, at least, Government House gives a ball. It is the high-water mark of the season in Entebbe. New and marvellous creations come out from home to grace the occasion; every one attempts to look his best and be his brightest; the large rooms shine with well-polished floors and glittering lights; the verandahs and lawns are artistically arranged for what is known as “sitting out” in; supper is served in a large marquee in the garden. And over everything hangs a sky of marvellous Eastern stars, and away on the lake the moonlight —vivid as no moonlight ever is in England—is tracing out for itself a road of silver. So that if you can get far enough away from the lights and the music and the latest Paris creations, you find yourself alone under some quaint huge-leafed tree and realise that you are in Africa after all, and not in some pleasant garden of London.
The Donovan party arrived a little late for the ball. Mrs. Donovan had had a big dinner, and no one had hurried himself very much.
Kenyon and Mrs. Simpson had gone in to dinner together. Mrs. Donovan had seen to that. She sat on the other side of Kenyon herself, and she kept very shrewd eyes on them for most of the meal. As yet she had been quite unable to detect any sign of advancement. Maureen looked beautiful; but more like a statue than ever, Mrs. Donovan decided. Maureen was wearing a jade green frock of some soft, clinging material. She had a long string of jade beads round her neck, and under the clouds of her soft, dark hair you caught a glimpse of jade again—jade green earrings hanging on thin threads of gold. There were rather tell-tale lines under the grey eyes, and fewer smiles than usual on the firm lips. In fact she was woefully silent—rather a wet blanket, Mrs. Donovan described her. Not so Kenyon. He was in boisterous spirits; his face seemed alive with the laughter that he could not keep at bay. He seemed a boy again, a boy drunk with some enchantment, other than wine. That Mrs. Donovan did notice, and it made her a little suspicious; but glancing at the woman’s face again she came to the conclusion that Kenyon had probably staked and lost—and that he was hiding his chagrin, as he would undoubtedly hide anything that hurt him, under a forced burst of gaiety. As a matter of fact nothing had passed between Kenyon and Mrs. Simpson over and above her brief note. He had driven into Wala on the heels of it, and he had found the woman well entrenched behind commonplace barriers of conversation and other people’s company. He had had no chance of seeing her alone; he realised that she did not wish that he should.
She was still frightened. At first the knowledge had irked and angered him. Was he to find in her all the accomplishments of an ordinary flirt? The leading on, the drawing back, the asking for, and yet unwilling to give or take. But then, watching her eyes and seeing the quick, hidden quiver of her lips, he woke to sudden pity, and would have given his soul to save her the ugliness of the thing she faced. For it seemed to him that he saw now, as he had never seen before, how ugly it all was. This love that must creep by back ways, must know itself ashamed, and feel the finger of scorn pointing at its most holy thoughts. He knew it to be all wrong, but with the traditions of the world as firmly planted as they were, there was no avoiding the fact. Their love, beautiful and radiant as it might be to themselves, to others must wear the sordid garb of intrigue. The shadow of Simpson and Simpson’s law-given rights stood between them and blurred all the glory.
So, realising, Kenyon had been content to stand aside and wait. His gaiety was not hiding a rebuff, as Mrs. Donovan had imagined. It came from the very depths of his heart. He had never been so near real joy before, he could no more have concealed it than he could have willingly laid it aside.
And Maureen? Who shall fathom what a woman feels about love? Be very sure, at any rate, that she is afraid. So much she gives, so much she stands to lose. And Maureen, more than most people, was to prove love a very devastating force. It had swept across her life already, it had threatened all her standards, it had struck, so it sometimes seemed to her, at her very soul’s foundation. “It is wrong, wrong, wrong,” her thoughts tortured themselves against that knowledge. “Wrong—sinful—unclean.” Here her Grannie’s teaching came in. And on the other side throbbed youth, pleaded the passionate woman’s heart in her that had always been denied. “Wrong! How can it be wrong to love? Sinful! Who made the giving of one’s body where one loved, a sin? Unclean—surely it was far, far more unclean to take kisses that meant nothing to one—to yield oneself out of custom and because it was expected of one?” “He is your husband,” so knowledge whispered. “He is nothing to me—nothing,” clamoured youth and heart and soul. If there had been a child—how easy to know then which path to take! But there was no child, and she stood storm-tossed, afraid, and perilously alive.
That at least was the mood in which the night of the ball found her, and she was very grateful to Kenyon for his tacit silence, for the knowledge that he was content to stand and wait. They drove up to the hall in his motor-car as they had come in it from Wala—Mrs. Raymond and Maureen in the back seat, Hamiz sitting, stiff and important, beside his master. Mrs. Raymond was looking very ethereal to-night in a gown of grey sprinkled with silver, and she was in one of her most excitable moods.
“I love dances,” she said to Maureen. “They sweep one away, give one an excuse for doing all sorts of things that one can’t carry through in cold blood. Your Mr. Kenyon, my dear. He is a thrilling person. Have you noticed his eyes tonight? But, of course, you have. There isn’t any need to warn you to be careful.”
She was all froth and bubble, a creature perfectly incapable of understanding the tumult passing in the mind of the woman beside her. Morals—the doing of right and wrong had never been any sort of burden to Mrs. Raymond. The only sin that counted in her eyes was the sin of being found out. With all her excitability she was careful not to risk that. And, with all her unfaithfulness, she was not at all indifferent to her husband. That was the side of her nature that Maureen found most difficult to understand.
Mrs. Donovan’s party moved through the hall and into the ballroom as the second waltz started, and they were the centre of an eager crowd of would-be partners. Quite mechanically Maureen stood and bowed and smiled and held out her programme, and let men write their names opposite the dances. Then, just as she was moving with her first partner, old Mr. Donovan, to join in the dance, Kenyon stood before her, and for the first time in these three days he looked straight at her and compelled her eyes to meet his.
“My dances, Mrs. Simpson,” he asked. “You have left some for me?”
Donovan stepped aside to talk to a man who was passing, and the feeling came over Maureen that she and Kenyon were alone in a great world of passing shadows. Her hands trembled a little as she looked down at her programme.
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I seem——”
He held out his hand. “Let me see,” he said; his voice fell so that only she could hear the words. “For God’s sake, don’t be frightened of me, Maureen,” he said.
A wave of warmth swept over her, she caught her breath. “Oh,” she said quickly, “take what you want! It doesn’t matter about the others.”
And, without looking at her again, he wrote his name across half the programme and gave it back to her.
Not till after the supper dance did he come to claim her. She had danced with good partners and with indifferent ones. She had sat out two or three dances with men who could not be reckoned as either. She had no idea what she had talked about, she had heard her own voice, and it had surprised her; it had sounded in some way very like the voice of a stranger. Once or twice during the early part of the evening she had caught sight of Kenyon dancing with Mrs. Donovan and Mrs. Raymond. Her eyes rested on him, followed him round the room, and each time she was conscious of the soft warm glow that seemed to sweep over her. Was it joy? Was it love? It had nothing to do with fear, that was all she knew.
Then, at last, he was beside her; she was in his arms, and they were floating away together. They were almost the same height, and they danced as though all their lives they had practised to suit their steps to each other. In and out of the other swaying couples, never a mistake, never a false step. She knew that her hair touched against his lips, that his hands sent some thrilling message through every waking nerve of her body. But they said no word to each other, and not till the last notes of the waltz had sounded did he stop, pausing by the wide doors that led out into the garden. Then, for a second, his hand on hers tightened.
“You’ll come?” he said. “The whirlpool does not frighten you any more? You are ready to brave it with me?”
She nodded, because she could find no words, and abruptly he turned, leading the way outside.
Chinese lanterns had been an unnecessary illumination to-night. Most of them by now had spluttered and gone out, and hung, disconsolate wrecks, on trees and shrubs, like relics of a bygone festivity. The moonlight was everywhere, creeping right up under the darker shadows of the trees, flooding the open lawns with silver; and across bare spaces the strolling couples moved, made ethereal, even the drabbest of them beautiful, under her magic.
“Come!” said Kenyon. “We’ll go right beyond them all, shall we? Out on to the hillside over there. I’ve booked you up for the rest of the evening, but I’ve got a lifetime of things to say.”
He turned sharply. Their path had led them out of sight of the lawns, into a shrubbery of small, thick trees. He did not touch her nor hold her, only his eyes looked straight into hers, and the moonlight made their faces very clear to each other.
“You come of your own free will?” he asked. “Dear heart, you’ve reckoned the cost—counted it? You find me worth while? I warn you I shan’t be satisfied with half-measures.”
“Oh,” she said, “I’ve reckoned the cost, and it’s of my own free will, I suppose. And yet, I don’t know, you are stronger than anything else that is in me. I have weighed you against what I think is doing right, and it doesn’t count at all.”
He laughed a little, a note of sheer joy. “I’m glad,” he said. “I would sin splendidly for you, Maureen. Isn’t it right you should be content to sin a little for me?—if you can call it sin.” He turned and walked beside her. “Come along,” he said. “We will argue that out on the hillside—that and one or two other things. Ah, don’t think that I haven’t seen—that I don’t understand what all this means to you,” he went on impetuously. “Dear heart, I’d give my soul—not that it is worth much—to save you from it all. If we had known each other earlier, if you could have loved me and taken my love without feeling ashamed. Do you remember the time when I showed you that rush of water over the falls and said to you that life had great forces like that in it? I meant our love, and you knew I meant it. The heart of me can’t honestly think that it sweeps us to destruction. I’m not a great believer in religion, so in this matter it shows me no path. I’ve led—that I am sane enough to know—a rotten life, but all that is good in me loves you—loves you—my dear.” He caught at her hands and swung her to face him again. “Enough to push you from me even now, and go down into the whirlpool alone, if by so doing I can save you from doing wrong. But I can’t see that it is wrong. Does it seem wrong to you to love me, Maureen?”
“I don’t know,” she answered again. “I have been taught to believe it’s wrong. Sometimes”— he could see the tears in her eyes—“I feel the most despicable thing on earth. It isn’t wrong to love you.” She threw her head back. “But it was wicked of me to let myself think of loving you.”
He watched her with his faint smile. “In that,” he said, “even the sternest critic would absolve you. I made you love me, my very dear woman. All my life I have practised the art. Does it hurt you to know that? I have got to be truthful to you, you see. But it is also true that until I loved you I have never loved a woman. I have only loved myself in them.”
She took her hands away, putting them to her eyes. “And are you so sure now?” she asked. “Listen! If I come to you,” a faint flame of colour stirred in her face, “I shall give you more than just my body, or my love for you, which I cannot understand or explain. I shall give you the very essence of myself—my soul, if I’ve got one, my conscience—everything.” She threw out her hands. “I’ve been ashamed of myself,” she said. “I’ve been afraid. I’m none of these things any more. If Tom loved me, I could not do it; but he does not—he never has. If I had had a child,”—her face softened and changed; she looked back at him, her lips trembling a little,—“I should not have wanted to, should I?” she asked. “You realise that, don’t you? But Tom has never wanted to have a baby; there is not even that to hold us together. And so—and so——” she held out her hands to him. “Oh, take me,” she whispered, “if I’m worth having.”
“My dear,” said Kenyon gently. He took her hands, drawing her to him. “My very dear. God deal with me as I shall deal with you.”
So, held close together, they kissed, and the shame and the discord and the doubts fell away from Maureen. Love’s hands had drawn her into the Kingdom of Love, and everything about her was made beautiful by its presence.
Afterwards, they sat down, still hand in hand, and discussed the future.
“You must take me straight away,” said Maureen, with grave eyes watching the moonlight on the lake, thinking to herself that just such a road of shimmering glory would her life be from this moment onwards. “I could not go back to Tom, Gerald. I can’t lie and cheat about things. I think he will understand. If he knows that I left him the moment I had made up my mind that love meant more to me than the other things,”—she turned her eyes to look at him,—“I mean than what I thought was doing right and doing wrong,” she explained. “It will be easier for him to forgive. And I don’t think he will really mind very much; only he will hate other people talking and knowing.”
Kenyon nodded. “ Yes,” he said; “to me it would be hateful if you went back. We start a new life here, don’t we, Maureen? I’ll do anything you like, live anywhere you please. I’ve got money, thanks be to Heaven. I’m not tied anywhere. I thought—for, of course, you know I’ve been thinking and planning about little else since your letter came—that the best thing to do would be for you to come straight back to my place with me after we have dropped Mrs. Raymond at Wala. And you can write Simpson from there. Or I’ll go in and see him, whichever you like. Then we can live there till the business side of the thing is settled. It’s absolutely out away from the world; there’ll be nothing to hurt you.” He frowned quickly. “My God—if I could only keep all the hurt from you,” he said, “all the ugliness!”
She slipped a hand into his. “You do,” she said. “I think your love is like a magic cloak. I wear it, and nothing seems to touch me or come near.” She mused for a little, her eyes back on the track of the moonlight. “It’s a wonderful thing,” she said, “but since you kissed me, I don’t even feel wicked any longer. I just feel glad—oh, wonderfully, radiantly glad.” She gave a little laugh and turned to him. “So much your love can do for me,” she said.
“If——” said Kenyon. He broke off abruptly and stood up. “I am going to make no promises,” he said, “because the rest of my life is just going to be one long showing you, one hymn of thanksgiving for what your love has done for me. Come,”—he held out his hands,—“for to-night we must let the rest of the world claim us; but after to-night it will be just you and I—dear heart—just you and I.” He held her against him for a little while, kissing her lips and eyes and chin. “You’re sure,” he whispered—“quite, quite sure? You aren’t afraid of the whirlpool?”
“No,” she answered, lips close against his. “I am afraid of nothing but death, and I believe you’d find me even beyond that.”
“‘I shall but love thee better after death,’” he quoted, and loosed her, taking her hand to lead her back to the rest of the world.
Mrs. Raymond studied Maureen with bright, critical eyes on the way home. There was very little that escaped Mrs. Raymond’s eyes, busy as she might be with her own affairs. She knew that Kenyon had not danced with Mrs. Simpson for the first part of the evening; she had watched them waltz together after the supper extras, and she had noticed their disappearance and return. She followed Maureen into the latter’s bedroom when they had said good-night to the rest of the party.
“My dear,” she said, tucking back the mosquito net, and balancing herself on the edge of the bed, “do you mind if I talk to you? I am ever so much wiser about some things than you are.”
Maureen looked up, a little startled. She had just taken off her string of jade beads; it slipped through her fingers on to the table with a little abrupt noise.
“What sort of things?” she asked. “And what a funny time of night or, rather, early morning to choose for a talk!”
“I know,” Mrs. Raymond nodded. “My brain’s always brightest at these hours. I should say”— she stole a quick glance at Maureen and looked away again—“it’s safer to dance with Mr. Kenyon than sit out with him. My dear,” she hurried on, not pausing to notice the effect of her words, “that man’s reputation is known from here to Bagdad, and unless you really are one of those people who think the world would be well lost for love—whatever that means—you’ll beware of him.” She slipped to her feet, and this time she looked straight at Maureen. “I’m not a cat,” she said. “I don’t mean to pass on what I’ve seen. Only, I like you, and I don’t believe you’d understand a man like Kenyon.” She frowned, trying to find words to make her meaning clear. “He’s a sort of Male Me,” she added, “absolutely without morals. Good-night, my dear. Please don’t be angry with me. You are bound to be to begin with, but you’ll realise when you think it over that it is only because I like you that I have said it.”
“Yes,” answered Maureen slowly. “I do realise that. And I am not angry. I have no right to be angry about what people say or think, if I give them cause.”
“The world well lost for love!” That was the phrase that stayed with her after she had taken off her clothes and slipped into bed to lie with wide-open eyes, studying the darkness. His kisses were still warm upon her face and lips; how could she regret what she had done? Yet some shadow of the future rested upon her, and for the moment darkened the joy of her heart. “The world well lost for love!” It entailed no hardship, losing the world, but there would be other things that might have to be laid aside as well. Her self-respect, her memories of the dreams of her girlhood, her prayers to the God whom her Calvinistic grandmother had taught her to worship. There might be the more human, more loving God whom Kenyon had put his trust in; but it is not always easy to supplant the faith learnt as a child. Maureen fell asleep presently, and under the lashes lying against white cheeks there were tears. Mrs. Raymond had fired the first careless shot that was to rend a hole in the cloak of magic which his love had thrown about her. Alas, that love’s garments should be of so fine and frail a fabric!
There was no memory of the tears the next morning. The sunshine creeping into her room brought with it a flood of gold, and the bit of garden that she could see from her pillows was amazingly good to look at. A background of green, a nearer dazzle of blue and white where the Morning Glory creeper spread its tendrils. Maureen got up and bathed and dressed to the lilt of a song, a remembered waltz tune from the night before, and so happy did she seem at breakfast that Mrs. Raymond watched her with envious eyes. Mrs. Raymond always felt a little jaded and cross after a night’s entertainment. The truth being that she ran her physical strength to death in these wild bursts of gaiety. She was inclined to be sleepy, and beyond a few spiteful remarks as to the other ladies’ dresses at the ball, made very few observations on the first part of the drive home to Wala—a matter of a hundred miles.
They broke the journey at Kampala, the half-way station, and had lunch in the big hotel that fronts the golf-course. And here Mrs. Raymond did rouse herself to flirt rather ostensibly with Kenyon, perhaps with some idea of carrying on her good advice of the night before. But eye could speak to eye above her interference, and nothing, it seemed this morning, could rob Maureen of the glamour of her thoughts.
Perhaps the lunch, which had been indifferent, or the small success of her efforts to draw Kenyon, brought Mrs. Raymond’s feeling of annoyance to a climax. She returned anyway to her attack against him, as the car sped out beyond the houses of Kampala and settled down to the long run between there and Wala.
“He’s got wonderful eyes,” she admitted; “but he’s not the sort of person that it’s wise for any woman to trust. Mrs. Donovan could tell you that. Oh, and a good many others. I don’t think he likes me. Anyway, he’s never favoured me with his compelling attentions.”
Watching the dear head in front of her—everything about him this morning seemed so dear and precious—-Maureen smiled. Not that the smile had anything to do with Mrs. Raymond’s confidences, for she was hardly listening to them. It had the effect of irritating Mrs. Raymond beyond all bounds.
“My dear,” she said bitterly, “I am afraid you are on the verge of making a fool of yourself. For Heaven’s sake, think before you leap. Any of the other men could tell you that Kenyon is not particular in his affairs. He has a perfect harem of black women out at Mamwirta.”
That shot told. There was something regal in the grey eyes that turned to look at her. “I hate listening to lies about any one,” Maureen said. “Please, Mrs. Raymond, do not let us talk about him any more.”
“Well, but——” began Mrs. Raymond; but the other put a quick hand on to hers.
“You said last night that you liked me,” Maureen said, “and I like you. I can’t bear that you should try and hurt me by throwing mud at some one who is my friend.”
“So long as it is only friend,” grumbled Mrs. Raymond, and relapsed into silence.
She kissed Maureen, however, at parting, probably to show her contrition, for it was a thing they had never done before, and she was a little surprised at the way in which—just for a second—Maureen clung to her. It made her even stand on the steps and stare after the motor with perplexed eyes.
“I wonder now,” said Mrs. Raymond, almost under her breath. And then, being essentially shallow-brained, she forgot the wonder almost before it was formed, and it was not until she met Maureen again that she remembered it.
It was half-past three as they dropped Mrs. Raymond at her house; by four they were well along the road to Mamwirta. As soon as they had got out into the open country beyond Wala, Kenyon stopped, and putting Hamiz into his place to drive came in himself beside Maureen, taking her two hands in his, watching her face with passionate eyes, to see if there was any sign of fear or relenting.
Maureen shook her head at him, laughing a little. “ No,” she said, “I haven’t changed my mind again. I have never met any one who can say things and ask questions with their eyes as plainly as you can.”
“If you can read the truth there of how much I love you, it’s all I ask,” Kenyon answered, and bent his head over her hands, raising them to his lips.
Then they sat silent for the rest of the way, hand held in hand. There was so much between them that silence was the best way of expressing it. It is only the froth of friendship or love that entails conversation.
As they were passing through Nuonga though, Kenyon roused himself to point out Chandra Lal’s house and, laughingly, he told her of his adventure there in the guise of an Afghan.
“I speak the languages better than most people,” he explained. “That is why I can be useful in that sort of way to the Government. And it interests me—takes me out of the dullness of plantation life.”
But he did not mention Noormahal, nor refer in any way to the episode of the hut, which was, in its way, a pity. He felt it would be difficult to describe it so that she should understand and condone.
“You’ve found it dull living out here?” said Maureen. “Do you know, when I first met you I used to think you had the saddest face I had ever seen.”
“Disappointed with myself, dear heart,” Kenyon answered. “I’ve told you about my people, haven’t I? That knocked the first hole in my pride, I suppose. And then—oh, well, it’s behind me, and it has nothing to do with you. I think you’ll find that I’ve made my place out here comfortable at least—beautiful, I hope you’ll think. I believe the subconscious me must always have known that some day you would come into my life.”
“If we had always been conscious of each other!” whispered Maureen. “Oh, if only it could have been so!”
And with that they swept up the last hill leading to the estate and turned in to the private road. Here a small crowd of obviously agitated natives waited their coming, and Hamiz pulled up immediately without waiting for orders from his master. Kenyon leant out, and the head man, who was present, broke into a stream of exclamations.
“Damn!” said Kenyon. He opened the car and stepped out. “Will you mind, darling?” be said; “there has been an accident down at the engines. Some silly idiot has messed himself up in it. I must do down and see if there is anything to be done for the poor devil. Hamiz will drive you up to the house. Tea will be ready. Will you mind?”
“Of course not,” said Maureen; “but can’t I wait here for you, or come with you?”
“We can’t take the car,” he answered; “and it’s quarter of an hour’s walk away. Besides, I’d hate that to be your welcome. Let Hamiz drive you up, dear one. I’ll be as quick as I can.”
“All right,” she agreed, and Kenyon gave the order to Hamiz, waiting to wave to her as the car moved off, before he turned away himself.
There had been a heavy shower of rain at Mamwirta; it had washed a new bloom of green on to tree and grass and shrub. The lilies lifted heads of fragrant colour and scent, the pink creeper flamed against the white house. Maureen went slowly up the steps and turned to cast her eyes on the beauty, to look beyond it to the flowering coffee trees, and beyond them again to the hills where they touched against blue skies. Here she could be happy, her heart sang within her; here she would find life’s crown, and the greyness of her days should fall away from her. She remembered vividly that first day upon which she had met Kenyon. The grey thoughts that had held her and how, at his coming, it had suddenly seemed as though she gained new partnership with the golden daffodils. “I must have loved him as he came in at the door,” she thought. “How wonderful love is!”
And with a little sigh of sheer contentment she turned from the garden and moved into the house. He had said tea would be ready; he would like to find her, she opined, with her hat off, waiting to pour out tea for him when he came. Hamiz had carried up her small suit-case—the only thing that she had brought away with her—and she smiled to him to put it down there on the top of the steps. She would wait till Kenyon came before she went farther into the house that was to be theirs.
There were heavy curtains in front of the largest door opening on to the verandah. The drawing-room, she decided, must be behind those, and as she pushed them aside a rather sickly scent of attar of roses came to her. Maureen frowned. She was conscious of a sense of disapproval, as indeed just once or twice in their brief passionate love-making she had been aware of meeting something in Kenyon of which her childhood’s training disapproved. It was silly to have heavy curtains against sunlight, and almost wicked to drown the scent of flowers by this other heavier perfume.
Then she pushed the disapproval from her. After all, that was probably the servants’ fault. Kenyon had not been at home for a week. Anyway, she threw the curtains aside, and stood at once at bay as the faint rustle of movement at the farther end of the room betrayed some presence there. It was truly at bay, all her instinct in arms, all her downtrodden, pushed-aside theories rampant again, and, like a swarm of quick, evil-biting thoughts, the memory of Mrs. Raymond’s words of the morning flashed across her brain:
“Every one knows he keeps a harem of black women out there.”
Noormahal—frail “Rose of All the World”—stood facing the unexpected light. She had indeed been sleeping, curled up like some sensuous kitten among the cushions on the large couch that stood against the farthest wall. She was very simply if rather inadequately clothed in long, full trousers of spangled gauze, caught in at the ankles with heavy bangles of gold, and a small transparent vest. Her heavy hair lay braided with gold in two plaits either side of her small face. Such a beautiful little face, such languorous heavy-lashed eyes, such ripe, red mouth; and youth, youth rampant everywhere, in every line, every curve of the lithe, young body.
That was what stabbed at Maureen. Opposite this vision she felt herself middle-aged, set, colourless.
“Who are you?” she whispered, swaying a little where she stood, hands thrown out to the curtains as though she longed to pull them together again and shut out this picture from her stricken eyes.
Noormahal yawned, stretching soft, rounded arms.
She had been asleep the minute before; but she was vividly, keenly awake now. And by the consternation on the woman’s face before her she guessed much. This might even be the white man’s wife. White men were apt to have wives whom they liked to keep strictly apart from their loves. Noormahal laughed to herself as she thought of it. Also, she was not a little angry. She was very imperious in the homage she extracted from those she chose to favour.
“Who am I?” she copied the English words faithfully, mincing them a little. She knew enough, too, to carry the hurt further. “The slave of my lord. Has he come?”
She came forward, every step a sensuous, graceful movement. “And you?” she asked, her cool, unabashed eyes studied the white woman’s face, her stiff dress; “you are, perhaps, his wife? He had not told me of you.”
His wife! The colour rushed to Maureen’s face. Courage and pride came to her suddenly. She needed them, for this girl’s eyes peered through love’s magic cloak, snatched it from her, and flung it on the floor between them, a soiled, frayed heap of rags. His wife!
“Oh no, no, no!” She had been mad, and this was the punishment for her madness. She had been wicked, and her eyes were opened to the sordidness of her sin. Maureen let go the curtain and turned away. Hamiz still stood at the foot of the steps, wiping with careful hands the dust off his beloved engine. There was no hesitation in Maureen’s mind; her voice was such as few natives would have thought of disobeying. She picked up her suit-case in passing, and went straight down the steps to Hamiz.
“You will drive me back to Wala,” she said, in his own language, “at once.”
She opened the door of the car and stepped in. Hamiz noticed vaguely that she sat strangely erect; he would have said she was very angry, but for the fact that she was so still and quiet. And Hamiz hesitated. He was torn between the desire to obey her and the knowledge that his master would be hurt. Yet, surely, there were enough women in his master’s life without bringing this white woman, who was the wife of another man, into it.
“Leave all women, save your wife, alone,” Hamiz’s motto ran. He would undoubtedly have added: “But above everything leave your neighbour’s wife alone”—had he been asked.
And now, it seemed, the woman was asking him. Between them they might save his master even from himself. With one quick look round, Hamiz bent to the car and started it, climbed into his seat without even a backward glance at the woman, and swiftly, almost noiselessly, the car hummed down the drive and out into the road beyond.
Thirty miles, with Hamiz at the wheel, took two hours, and all through that time Maureen sat stiff and white, almost as though she had been turned to stone, staring at the country as it swept past with eyes that saw nothing at all. Only once a little shuddering sigh broke from her, and she shrank back, covering her face with her hands, as they passed the place where Kenyon had stopped the car to get in beside her. The ghost of kisses on her hands woke sudden intolerable pain in her heart.
They drew up at the Simpsons’ house just as Tom Simpson, bathed and changed after tennis, was about to go down to the club for his game of bridge. He stopped, just to pass the time of day cheerfully with Maureen.
“Hallo!” he said; “had a good time?” It occurred to him that Maureen looked a little pale, washed out. Not that he paid much attention to her looks as a rule. “You look played out,” he added; “all this racketing is no use to any one. Better get off to bed.”
“Yes,” she nodded. She forced her lips to speak, they seemed frozen to stiff calm. “Will you come in and see me after dinner!” she asked. “I want to tell you something.”
“Right-o!” he agreed. “Maybe a little late to-night, though. Old Donovan’s in the station. I’ve asked him and Reilly and Lawes to dinner. We’ll probably have a game after. Better put off our chat till to-morrow.”
“No,” she said. “I’d rather it were to-night.”
He looked at her with suddenly suspicious eyes.
“All right, my dear; but what is the seriousness?”
“I’ll tell you then,” said Maureen. She moved towards her door. For a second he looked after her, wondering whether he should put off the club, and see what was the matter with her now. But the lure of bridge, with old Donovan in the station, was too strong. He would have to leave the solving of Maureen’s mystery till later.
It was very late, nearly two in the morning, before he made his way to her room, going on tiptoe, hoping that he would find her asleep, and determined not to rouse her. But his wife was not even in bed, she was sitting by the little table upon which she kept all her writing things, her favourite books. She was doing nothing, her hands were clasped in front of her, she was just waiting for him, it seemed.
He was moved to unusual compunction. He hated the thought of her patient stillness, while he played hand after hand of his favourite game next door.
“Why, Maureen,” he said gruffly, “what is this craze? I hoped you would have been sensible and gone to bed.”
She looked up at him. “I could not,” she said. “I had got to say this thing to you, Tom. Will you sit down.”
Simpson took the chair she indicated. But he sat on it uncomfortably, leaning forward, watching her. It occurred to him that Maureen was behaving very peculiarly, talking, even, in a curiously leaden way, as though she was under the influence of some drug. Was that what she was going to confess to him! Did she want his medical help, to get her out of a habit that had become a disease ! He became, as it were, on the thought, professional, keen.
“What is it, Maureen!” he said. “Not so bad as you imagine, I’m sure. I expect I can help you all right.”
“I don’t know,” said Maureen. “Perhaps you can—perhaps you will not even want to when you hear. You know, Tom”—the level voice went on—“you have not meant very much to me for a long time—nor I to you. Love—I don’t know if we ever did love each other. I suppose we did. But there has never been any baby, and you—you haven’t seemed to care. Oh!”—she rose suddenly, wringing her hands—“I sound as if I were trying to make excuses for myself, and I don’t want to do that. The fault is all mine—it has come out of my own sin—I——”
Simpson had risen, pushing back his chair. His face had changed a little, but there was bewilderment in his eyes. “In God’s name, Maureen,” he said,”what is it you are trying to tell me?”
“Only, that not loving you, I have loved some one else,” she answered. “Or thought I loved,” her voice broke. “Oh, is there anything in this world that is good or true? I seem to have missed it all, all—and even love we make hideous by our own shame.”
He stared at her. Strangely enough, the sentence that hurt him most was her calm—“not loving you.” Why, he had never doubted Maureen. Not love him! He remembered that first month of their honeymoon——the fragrance of her presence that had stolen so triumphantly into his life. Not love him!
“Maureen!” he whispered, his voice hoarse, almost piteous.
She looked at him quickly. She had expected to face dismay, cold anger. What she could bear least of all was the quick passion of possession that leapt into his face.
“I want you to let me go home,” she said, speaking quite evenly. “It is impossible for me to live with you, having wronged you in thought. I am not going to him—you need never be afraid of that. As long as I live I hope I may never see him again. Only——”
“Are you going to tell me his name?” Simpson asked; and then, before she could answer, “No, no, for God’s sake, don’t. We won’t make it more sordid than we can help. I gather what really counts is that you have no more love for me.”
“Yes, that is what counts,” she answered.
“I see,” he said. “And how long have you known that?”
“Oh, how can I tell!” she threw her head back. “Perhaps from the very first. A woman hasn’t much place in your life, Tom, has she? I have always seemed to be outside.”
“And yet I have loved you,” he said. It seemed all he could find to say. He stood in front of her, big, heavy, his face white now, his hands clenched. If he had said his world lay in pieces round him, he would not have been far wrong; for Simpson’s world was a very simple affair, resting, he had thought, on broad, straightforward facts—his love to his wife—hers for him—his absolute trust in her integrity and honour.
“You want to go home at once?” he asked presently.
And Maureen answered, “Yes, please,” moving a little away from him, catching on to the back of her chair for support.
“Very well,” he agreed. He turned to the door.
“We will talk it over in the morning,” he said, “ and see what can be arranged.”
He went, without saying anything further, and the woman he had left swayed suddenly into her chair, and laid her arms along the table, putting her head down on them. She had cleansed her soul from deceit at least. Might not the God of her childhood come close to her again, bringing with Him some little comfort for her tears! But the memory of lost kisses burnt her mouth, the memory of dead dreams stung her heart. She had given all for love, and love had left her only the ashes of repentance. There is small comfort to be got from cold ashes.
Kenyon came back to the house on what were almost winged feet. The man he had been fetched to see had proved to be more stunned and frightened than really damaged by the huge wheels, which seemed in itself a good omen. Kenyon would have hated death to have come to his place, however unimportant his victim, on the day that Maureen arrived. He was a man very much in love, very much held round by love’s sweetness, and the fact that he had very often in his life debased the image of love’s coin, made it none the less valuable now that it came to him pure gold. He had said that everything good in him loved Maureen, and that was undoubtedly true. For man, though he may be migratory in his passion, is only capable of loving, with heart and mind and soul, one woman in a lifetime. The other loves in his life are, as Browning puts it, false coinage.
“Re-coin thyself and give it them to spend.
It all comes to the same thing in the end.
Since mine thou wert—-mine art, and mine shalt be
Faithful or faithless, piling up the sum
Or lavish of my treasure, thou must come
Back to the heart’s place here I keep for thee.”
He was thinking of these lines as he passed up between the coffee trees to where he expected Maureen to be waiting for him. Poetry had always counted for a great deal in Kenyon’s life. It brought him closer in touch with the Divinity, which he felt compelled to believe existed behind all humanity, than ever religion or churches had been able to do. And Browning had always been his favourite poet. So that now his thoughts sang over the beauty of those lines, and, coming to the next, felt the swift pang of regret that they also should carry such truth.
“Only why must it be with any shame at all?” Was not that the question which Maureen’s eyes, looking into his, seemed always to be asking? Was it not, probably, the unuttered question of most women’s hearts? “Only why must it be with any shame at all?”
He flung the regret from him. After all, had her eyes not seen and understood and condoned—more or less? That was where the sting came in. For in talking of his past he had always talked very vaguely, and he had forced himself to believe that her hands, just with their touch, could smooth out the ugly lines and leave the pages of what had been sweet for her eyes to look at. But they were not— they were not. It was the constant little fret of regret in the midst of his contentment. In loving Maureen he had caught back all the ideals of his boyhood, and he hated to know in how far he had failed them. Anyway, she was here in his life now; was not that all that mattered?
He flung up the steps of the house, a little surprised at its slumbrous calm, at the fact that Hamiz had taken away the motor-car without waiting for orders, and that Maureen was not visible on the steps to greet him.
“Dear one!” he sang out as he reached the steps. “Where are you hiding your precious self? Is it a game?”
There was such gaiety in his voice, such underlying tenderness, that it would have been difficult even for an inept at love to mistake its meaning. Noormahal, at least, knew. Thrilled through every nerve of her small, wilful body, she slipped to her feet; for she had gone back to her couch, having disposed of the white woman. She did not for a moment hoodwink herself. The man was calling out to the other woman, and, though the words might be a little difficult to understand, the love behind them was unmistakable.
Love! Noormahal stiffened where she stood, too primitive in her passions to brook any thought of a rival, whether legal or otherwise. But if she was stiff it was only for a second. The situation, she realised, required all a woman’s skill and tact. She had not thought, while she stood facing the other woman, that there would be so much at stake. Kenyon had loved her, quickly and easily; she had not been brought up in a school of life which would lead her to believe that love thus lightly given would be as lightly taken away and bestowed elsewhere. She was quite accustomed to fighting for her prey, if, at the time being, he seemed worth retaining. And she was quite unaccustomed to defeat.
Here, then, she must give battle too—since the white woman had evidently stolen a march on her, probably held some unfair advantage over her. But a man like Kenyon, so Noormahal opined, would travel ill in the double yoke of marriage. And it is to be remembered that, as she had said herself, she was well versed in love, and therefore in men. It followed, then, to outwit virtue in the person of the wife by beauty in the person of the prostitute; to destroy the magic of love by the delicate skilled poison of passion. Such was Noormahal’s argument—all achieved in that brief space while Kenyon, still in some amazement, called for Maureen and got no response.
When he too entered the drawing-room there was, at any rate, no sign of Noormahal, and he was too perturbed to notice the scent that had so annoyed Maureen—perturbed and just for the moment soul-sick with fear. It is strange how our minds invariably leap to the truth of things before definite knowledge is obtainable. In that moment while he stood there, looking into the empty drawing-room, feeling the silence of the empty house all round him, Kenyon knew that he had lost Maureen—lost her more inevitably and irretrievably than if his eyes had seen her before him and he had known that she was dead. Then, very slowly, he turned and went back on to the verandah.
“Boy!” he shouted. “ Boy!” And Noormahal, listening again, concealed behind the curtains in the room she had selected for her use, smiled maliciously. There was anger in the woe now, and that is the first step towards destroying love.
Boys came running from all directions. The household staff had indeed been very interested in the doings of the morning. Kenyon spoke to the head-boy.
“Where is Hamiz?” he asked. “ And the oar!”
“Gone back to Wala, Bwana, with the Mukyala,” the boy began. “The Mukyala——”
Kenyon stopped him. “All right!” he said abruptly. “That will do. You can bring tea. Get out of here, all of you.”
That they should peer and watch and speculate as to what had happened was more than he could bear. He stood at the top of the steps facing the garden, and there was that in his eyes that it is not good to see looking out from any man’s soul.
So she had failed him. She had been afraid—too cowardly to dare for his sake the discomfort of the world’s scorn!—too poor a heart to face him with the truth! She had tricked him and lied to him—that was what it amounted to—for even with the “ No, I shall not change my mind” on her lips, her instincts, her desires had been swaying backwards and forwards. And, put to the test,—that half an hour’s silence from his love, freedom from his hands,—she had failed him. God! What a poor thing was woman’s love! And he had built it so wonderful a throne in his heart. He had crowned it with every dream of his life, he had thrown round it a mantle of worship. The pain of the whole thing caught at his heart, twisted it with hopeless despair, and the anger fell away. Poor little woman, she had been frightened. Why should he have dreamt that his love to her could mean a quarter what it meant to him, and it had not been altogether the world’s scorn she had feared—the thing went deeper than that, he knew. In coining to him she was braving the dismay and regret of her own soul. Woman holds more closely to the tenets of religion than ever man does. She had been—he had seen it in her wistful surrender—afraid of God—or the image of Right which she had erected in the name of God.
The servants brought tea and put it ready on the table behind. He could hear their discreet movements, knew that they were waiting and watching him. It was no use standing there, staring at the garden, hating the lilies for their complacent beauty, so sharply in contrast to his own intolerable regret. Kenyon moved and sat down, and poured out his tea, eating and drinking very mechanically. She had left him no message—written no letter. He did not expect she would; or, perhaps, in a day or two, he would get a characteristically stiff little note of explanation and farewell.
At that thought rage shook him again. She had played with him, cheated him as any other woman might have cheated, and he had thought her so different, so wonderfully different!
Yet, with all his anger and certainty of her betrayal, it was curious the great leap his heart gave when he saw the grey car swing into sight down the drive, with Hamiz driving. Perhaps—why should there not be a perhaps for him as well as for more fortunate people?—she had repented, had returned. She loved him; it was probable that across the space dividing them the agony of his mind had called to hers with no weak voice. But the car was empty, Hamiz impassive. The Mukyala had gone back to her own house. She had ordered and he had obeyed. Had he done wrong?
“Wrong! Good God, no!” stormed Kenyon, and swept out into the garden, and through the garden to the plantation beyond. He trampled the lilies underfoot as he went. They should not be there to mock him through another day. There would be enough of that sort of mocking in his dreams.
He walked for miles, and returned, long after dark, tired, almost passive with exhaustion. He did not want any dinner, but as they had set it for him, as they waited anxiously, with perturbed eyes on his face, he forced himself to sit down again and eat. He had his meal out on the verandah, but the big room in the house was lit up, he noticed, as if they expected him to spend his evening there as usual, reading or strumming vague tunes on his piano. He wanted to shout at them, to tell them to put the lights out; to leave him in darkness, and, if it were possible, in peace. But he realised that he must set some sort of command over himself, or he would probably be ill. Not that he minded that, only he had once in his life been ill with brain fever, and he dreaded lest delirium should settle down on him again, and he should shriek aloud all the foolish disappointment of his heart.
One by one the servants, tiptoeing, so it seemed to his overstrained nerves, finished their various tasks, and hesitated to say good-night, before they passed out of the house, leaving him alone. He never allowed any one to sleep on the premises with him. He preferred to think that he had the house to himself, and that the servants slept far enough away not to hear or be heard. And when the last one left, Kenyon got up. He would go into the drawing-room and put out that damned light, he decided, and then he would go out and walk again—walk till the devils had dropped away from him and left him ready to sleep.
As Maureen had stood just within the curtains, so he paused, blinking, his eyes scarcely believing what he saw. And as Noormahal had faced Maureen, so she faced him, only now she was more beautiful—infinitely more seductive. The lamplight fell softly about her; fastened to her head, draped to her arms, was a gauzy veil of pink; the wide skirt stood out from her soft limbs; the little bodice of sewn pearls outlined her breasts. She stood poised for dancing, and her small face was alive with expectation.
As he stood gazing at her, she began to sway, softly, slowly, every line of her perfect body moving to the rhythm of unheard music—a dance such as the dancing-women of the East use when they would conquer a man’s self-control and bend him entirely to their will. If you had any love of music in you, if you admired the beautiful, you could not have broken into the rapture of her dance. Kenyon stood transfixed, and slowly, scarce seeming to touch the floor with her feet, the girl came towards him till she was so close that he could see the quick breath coming and going between soft, parted lips. Then, with infinite grace, the music ending, one could imagine, on one long-held chord of ecstasy, she bowed before him to the ground, laid her lips against his feet, and stayed quiet, her hands spread out as though she gave herself in total subjection to his will.
In the hush that followed, Kenyon heard his own breathing harsh and faint. Coming on the heels of everything else, her passionate acting shook him as it would have been much less likely to do in his ordinary moods. He knew himself a little mad as he stood looking down at her; but he also knew that it would give him intense satisfaction to take the pliant body in his arms and break the girl’s life from her as he had broken the lilies in the garden. And his killing he knew would be one with the fervour of love she sought to rouse. Then he drew back abruptly and spoke:
“You!” he said. “How long have you been here? When did you come?”
She drew herself together and sat back on her heels staring up at him with soft eyes. “I have been in the house of my lord for three days,” she said.
A sudden, sharp suspicion came to him. “You were here to-day?” he said; “she saw you!”
The truth, under the circumstances, Noormahal realised might be unwise. She shook a protesting head. “Nay, lord of my life—am I a fool?” she asked. “I watched the white woman—she who is honoured in being your wife—but me she did not see. She came into this room, and her face was hard and cold. Lord, do such as she know aught of love? For a second she stood looking at these things that are yours, and therefore wonderful, and then she turned swiftly, as though she fled from some evil thought, and went back even to Hamiz. ‘Thou shalt drive me back,’ she said, ‘at once.’ The coldness of her voice made me afraid.”
He had not allowed himself to listen to the servants’ reports of what had happened; but he made no attempt to stop Noormahal. Her description was vivid. He could almost see Maureen turn and fly, and it was his love that she had feared as so evil a thought. His set face, his eyes, woke swift pity in Noormahal. According to her lights she undoubtedly loved Kenyon. Never, anyway, had she felt for a man before this swift, aching desire to hold him in her arms as she might hold a babe. With soft hands she caught and held his—pressing her lips against him.
“Dear lord,” she said, “the woman has hurt you. Has she such power to hurt, and am I as nothing in your eyes?”
He looked down at her, and quite suddenly, quite ridiculously, the accumulated storm of all his varied passions broke. With the hard, dry sobbings of a man’s tears, he wrenched his hand from hers and flung himself face downwards on the couch. Had it such power to hurt? His whole forgotten manhood rose to give evidence. He cried like a woman; like, Noormahal would have rather said, a child.
She sat beside him with tender croonings, with soft hands that came and went over his hair. She would have liked to have gathered him to her heart, and there was no desire behind the feeling to waken the lust she had striven earlier in the evening to rouse. He fell asleep under her soothing touch; to waken presently, very gruff and bad-tempered, yet grateful to the patience that had watched and that had found no cause to deride his weakness.
“I’m a silly idiot, eh, Noormahal?” he asked in English, sitting up, his head between his hands, looking at her where she crouched, graceful and pliant, beside him. “Have you ever had the opportunity to see so great an idiot before?”
“No, lord,” she answered. “Tears clear the heart for man as well as for woman. And agony comes not from weakness but from strength. It is forgotten now?”
So much a child she looked, with the pleading, eager eyes, that Kenyon found it in his heart to laugh at her. “I was mad, and now I am sane,” he said, dropping into the language that she would find easier to understand. “You’re a beauty, ‘Rose of All the World.’”
She stopped him, with quick lips pressed to his cheek. “Nay, lie not to me,” she whispered. “My beauty is as naught to those dear eyes sick for another face. And look, Keenyon,”—his name sounded unfamiliar pronounced by puckered lips,—“I am content it should be so for the time. Let there be no talk of love or beauty between us; but let me stay near you, lord, that I may serve.”
And for the moment she really meant it. That was the amazing part. Though with Noormahal it was difficult to imagine that this fantastic phase of motherhood could last for long.
There it remained. She could draw a piteous picture of her flight with the ruthless Ramlika in pursuit. And where should she hide so successfully as in the white man’s house! For Ramlika would never suspect that. He would, she realised, dream her to be too closely allied to their cause for any such thing.
Kenyon was loathe to keep her, but there seemed on the face of it nothing else to be done. He could hardly turn her adrift, remembering how much he was himself responsible for her position, and recollecting Ramlika’s mad eyes. He could only hope that before long Munroe might be successful in his campaign against Chandra Lal and Chandra Lal’s confederates. In which case there would be no excuse—from the point of view of fear—for Noormahal to remain with him. Meanwhile, ah, well, meanwhile, reverting to Browning once more—
“It cannot change the love still kept for her—
More than if such a picture I prefer
Passing a day with, to a room’s bare side:
The painted form takes nothing she possessed.
Yet, while the Titian’s Venus lies at rest,
A man looks. Once more, what is there to chide?”
Kenyon was very much that kind of man. Nor—in some mysterious way—did it change the love still kept for Maureen. The hurt stayed to sting him from every thought, every dream. “I shall but love thee better after death,” he had quoted to her. She was dead to him, and his love followed her with a faithfulness that nothing could turn aside. It was as though there were two Kenyons; and one stayed apart, nursing within his heart the image of a dream, and watching with hurt, shamed eyes the other Kenyon, who would pause, even in the bitterness of the most desolate day, to laugh at Noormahal—who could stoop to slake the hunger of hie lips against her lips and seek a hopeless forgetfulness within her arms. Two Kenyons, and—for the life of him—he did not know which he would have liked to destroy.
“I must say I can’t understand Kenyon,” thus Munroe to his wife one evening about a month later.
Mrs. Munroe looked up from a pile of darning, her placid brows wrinkled in a frown.
“I have never been able to,” she admitted; “but what made you think of him, Jim!”
“Nothing much, only you know that case I told you of at Nuonga?” Munroe was in the habit of bringing to this wise, small woman, who thought very little and said less, most of his official troubles and schemes. “Well, it appears that the girl—you remembered you liked her name—‘Rose of All the World,’ who escaped our raid, is living with Kenyon. Has been, apparently, ever since.”
“How disgusting!” said Mrs. Munroe, with a little shiver. “I never have liked him.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Munroe mused, more lenient about these matters than his wife was inclined to be; “I am always trying to make you see, Alice, that it’s a difficult life for a man out here—unless he is married. Especially if he is a planter. It is so lonely—and—well, there are some men who need women.”
“I know you are always trying to explain,” agreed Mrs. Munroe, face faintly flushed, head bent over her work, “but till the end of the chapter I shan’t be able to understand. I don’t believe, either, that any woman really condones it. Love means a lot to women, and men like Mr. Kenyon cheapen it so frightfully.”
She rose a little defiantly, putting her work away, and Munroe watched her with the complacent, affectionate smile he kept only for her. Dear little woman, thank God there was no particular reason why she should understand or condone the unruly passions of men! Munroe felt very strongly that woman’s role in life lay in bearing and rearing children. He was always rather shocked if he came across cases which went to prove that there were women whose instincts craved something other than, or outside, motherhood.
“Perhaps it is natural you should be shocked at the moral side of it,” he said now; “but it’s more Kenyon’s attitude towards me that perplexes me. You see——”
Mrs. Munroe cocked her head in an attitude of listening. A slight noise was emanating from the room which she designated as the nursery, though, as some of Munroe’s bachelor friends were wont to remark, the whole of the District Commissioner’s house had long ago been converted into an untidy background for babies.
“I believe Cecily is crying,” she said; “I’ll have to run in and see. I noticed she was breathing funnily when she first fell asleep, and you know, Jim, she is cutting those tiresome eye teeth.”
With which she was gone, and Mr. Munroe had picked up his paper again with a slight sigh. He was sorry Alice did not like Kenyon; but he was a chap that good women, probably, would find hard to understand.
He wondered vaguely, for instance, what Mrs. Simpson would say of her friend’s defection. Munroe had always been quite certain that there was something between Kenyon and Mrs. Simpson, and of late even Alice had noticed that Mrs. Simpson seemed to be unhappy.
“It is such a pity they’ve no children,” Alice said. She would, bless her; but Munroe still wondered along his own lines whether Kenyon might not have something to do with it. And then the paper slipped from his hands and he went very peacefully to sleep; for Munroe was thoroughly placid and domesticated, and a little sleep after dinner, while Alice settled one or other of the babies, was always the rule. The wild loves, the torment of passion, was not for him. He strolled leisurely along a far safer road in life; and if it was a little dull, it was only very occasionally that he allowed himself to find it so.
Chandra Lal was not long in discovering Noormahal’s hiding-place once he really gave his mind to it. He came over on his motor-bicycle to see her the day before Kenyon’s arrival. The motor-bicycle was a new purchase, and Chandra Lal was proportionately afraid of it. He presented a comic enough appearance, hunched up on it, stooping as low over the handle-bars as was compatible with balance, his fat form in its shapeless garments throbbing and shaking like a jelly with the vibration. But the riding of a motor-bicycle, of which he was afraid and which he found extraordinarily uncomfortable, was symbolical of Chandra Lal’s nature. He had to move with the times. A physical coward, his will and brains were strong enough to keep the body in subjection; and, sickened by any thought of pain, he could yet plan torture and murder on extensive scales.
He was inclined to be shrilly angry with Noormahal, and Kenyon’s servants listened in some amazement to the string of abuse and vituperation uttered in an unknown tongue within the precincts of their master’s house. They had not been able to understand Noormahal’s presence at all. Nor had they been successful in combating it. She arrived, she had said, on the orders of the Bwana; she had brought with her a variety of small wooden boxes and a roll of bedding, and she had taken up her residence in that half of the house usually reserved for visitors. Where a woman was concerned the servants were too wise to interfere, but they felt that the matter developed along lines of which their master would not approve when Chandra Lal, blustering and important, arrived on the scene of action.
Noormahal took the abuse calmly, leaning back on her cushions, watching him through half-shut eyes. Chandra Lal’s fear of the bicycle had made him hot, his cheeks bulged, hit oily black hair was disarranged under the small black cap which he affected. Noormahal’s thoughts were occupied, for the most part, in comparing him with the memory of her new lover, Keenyon, as she called him. However, presently, she deigned to reply.
“All this noise works for no good, Chandra Lal,” she said. “It is well for thee that the white man is away from home. Sit down, now; let me speak.”
“Nothing but lies can come out of a woman’s mouth,” snorted Chandra Lal—“lies and deceit. What think you, will Ramlika do when he hears? He will kill you and your white lover. That will be a good thing, but in doing it he will wreck our plans so near to completion.”
“And there is no need for him to know, unless you tell,” put in Noormahal. “Now, friend Chandra Lal, show but a little sense; look one small space farther than thine ugly nose. I am here for a purpose. Hast thou forgotten to credit me with that?”
He looked suspicious, but he sat down none the less, wiping the grease from his face with a silk handkerchief. “What purpose hast thou?” he asked. “Money? Revenge?”
“Better than either of those,” Noormahal nodded. She had thought of an explanation that would give her presence here in Chandra Lal’s eyes every excuse. “Know, then, that I spy,” she said, and thrust her face forward to his, the fingers of her hands crossed in the symbolic sign of their society. “Aye,” she nodded again, seeing his surprise. “That last time I danced, dost thou remember the young Afghan, Chandra Lal, who seemed to take my fancy? Even then I guessed,” she said carelessly. “I had but to push my way a little further, to take his kisses, to hold him in my arms, and then I was certain.”
“You mean,” said Chandra Lal,—a very baleful light sprang to his eyes,—“that this Kenyon sahib was there? That he heard, that he saw?”
“Heard what?—saw what?” asked Noormahal vindictively. “He came to see—granted—and then his eyes fell on me and he loved. The thing has happened before, Chandra Lal.”
“Fool—idiot!” squealed Chandra Lal—his voice nearly always squealed when he was in a rage. “His love did not keep him from setting the police about our ears.”
“Nay,” said Noormahal. “That matter had been planned beforehand by the District Commissioner. But it is true—Keenyon spies for the Government, and I,”—she sat proudly upright,—“I spy on Keenyon. Sucking out with my honeyed lips the secrets of his heart, which are the secrets of Government knowledge. Blinding with my beauty his eyes to aught that he might otherwise find out about your doings, Chandra Lal. And then thou must needs come here and shriek abuse at me. Oh, often have I sold myself for money, and thou hast found no need to grumble; but now that I would sell my body for the Cause,”—-again she made the symbol with her fingers,—“no name is too bad for me. Think you that I suffer a white man’s caresses contentedly? Have I ever failed in my vow of hatred?”
She was a magnificent actress, Noormahal; at this moment she looked truly regal, outraged. Chandra Lal was nonplussed. There was a good deal in what the girl said, for if the Government really possessed a spy in the person of Kenyon, there was no way of repressing his activities—short of murder—that would be likely to be as successful as the one Noormahal proposed. If—if the Englishman had really fallen under her spell—and if one could trust a woman. That was the biggest “if” of the two. He studied Noormahal with furtive eyes.
“And what of Ramlika?” he asked. “Sometimes—O fairest of women—thou dost overshoot thy mark. Here we have Ramlika, as mad as a bull at mating-time. How, thinkest thou, shall we dispose of him?”
“I wearied of Ramlika,” Noormahal admitted. “That is thy affair, Chandra Lal. Tell him what you like. Say even that I have run away with the Afghan. Or tell him I am ill.”
“Aye, and have him return hot-foot to Nuonga,” suggested Chandra Lal sarcastically, “careless of who sees him or what happens, so long as he can but hold thee in his arms.” He rose ponderously. “I will do what I can with Ramlika,” he allowed, “but if all else fails, thou must return to him, Noormahal. So near success—two months, our most confident say—and for a madman and a woman to spoil it all! That is unthinkable.” He glowered at her. “Thou must return, Noormahal.”
She shrugged delicate shoulders. “Rather than that aught should fail, I will return. Yet, remember, Chandra Lal, I do good work here.”
“If thou art to be trusted,” Chandra Lal grunted, and took his heavy way out to his motor-bicycle. It was lucky he could not see the derisive, mocking face that watched him. Failure or success—kingdoms and governments that rose or crumbled—what did these things matter to Noormahal, placed in the balance against love and the delirium of passionate kisses? And two months was far too far ahead for her to look, she who never weighed the day’s doings even by the effect that they might have on the morrow.
Chandra Lal, as he had promised, did what he could with Ramlika. He knew the other man to be installed in the embuga of Swadiki, a chief whose province lies along the shores of Lake Bags—a wild, uncultivated country, whose few inhabitants live largely on the fish procurable in the lake and the lily roots that grow along the shore. European influence had, so far, penetrated very feebly into Swadiki’s country. His people were not even Christian in name. They worshipped devils and ghosts, where they worshipped anything at all, but for the most part they led placid, uneventful lives where religion was unnecessary, and their only unpleasant fear was famine. Swadiki, himself, was a thin, morose-visaged man, who nursed a rarely expressed grievance against the Government for having deprived him of a lot of his land under the pretence that it was sleeping-sickness area. But even that grouse would have merged into the limbo of indigestible food, from which poor Swadiki suffered considerably, had it not been for Wamwila, chief priest of the devil-worship sect, and Chandra Lal, who had, years ago, enmeshed Swadiki in a heavy burden of debt, and whose seditious doctrines were preached with the same assiduity as his rupees were lent.
Perhaps Swadiki’s son did something also to encourage the discontent, for Thomasi had been educated at a school in Baganda and had come home full of the theories of the young Baganda faction. The country was a protectorate and the people were tired of their protectors. There was a great deal more in that line that Thomasi could pour forth for his father’s edification, and Wamwila would sit in a dark corner of the hut and rub bis hands and chuckle. Wamwila had a well-nursed, vindictive spite against the usurping religion of the white people. He knew what he would do with them if he had his way. Thomasi might talk with cultured politeness of requesting the white rulers to remove their sphere of government elsewhere, since the country was now capable of standing alone. These were, quite honestly, Thomasi’s views.
He was a pleasant-faced, intelligent-looking lad, and he harboured no rancour against the people who had brought bicycles and motor-cars and brains and steamboats to his land. He had a very real admiration for them. He modelled himself on their pattern as much as possible. But as their education preached freedom and the rights of small nations, Thomasi, like many others of his age and breed, applied it to his own country, and deemed that the time had come to put it into practice. Not so Wamwila; his thoughts, his plans, his prayers, lay along far different lines. He visioned red slaughter and a holocaust of sacrifices which should be dear to the spirits that he worshipped, and in Ramlika, he was not slow to discover, he found a kindred spirit. Ramlika would listen to Thomasi’s mild notions of evicting the white man, and his smile would be scornful, his eyes red with inflammable light.
“Kill—kill!” Wamwila had once broken in across Thomasi’s speech by shouting, and Ramlika’s eyes had caught his and the fellowship of blood had been, as it were, sworn between them. Then one evening Ramlika had stood, swaying to his feet, and for half an hour he had raved, using Swadiki’s language, that his hearers understood well, holding Swadiki and Thomasi spellbound with slow kindling blood-lust, and causing Wamwila almost to scream in acquiescence.
“Kill—kill!” that had been the groundwork of Ramlika’s impassioned oratory. There were many who would join them. Let them sweep down on an unsuspecting, slumbering European community and let them kill—man, woman, and child—without mercy, without exception!
“Thus only shall you know freedom,” thrilled Ramlika. “Have we not, in India, laboured under their yoke for a full century? They come first in gentleness, but, like some great vampire, once they have tasted of the richness of your land, of the value of your crops, and the worth of your slavery, their mouths will suck and suck till there is no life left in you. Have we not known it? Do I not speak from what I have seen?”
He sank back exhausted, and Swadiki and Thomasi stirred, staring at each other uneasily. And then it seemed that Wamwila became possessed, as he had used to be possessed in the old days when people had paid some attention to his religion, and it had been worth while to display his intimacy with the spirits. He sprang to his feet and squirmed and writhed and danced, foaming at the mouth, his hands clawing the air, his eyes half closed. His voice, shrill and discordant, for were not the spirits using his mouth, shrieked out a repetition of the message, “Kill—kill! Let the blood of the white people, male and female, pour over my stones, and the anger of the spirits shall be avenged! No more shall you be slaves, and give of your best that the white men may fatten themselves on your land! Kill—kill!”
Thomasi was shaken behind his outwardly Christian soul. “In Baganda they speak not of killing,” he faltered. “’Tis thought the white people will go when we have shown them that we have no further need of them.”
Even Swadiki’s laugh was a little satirical. No one could really think they would. Wamwila, still squirming on the floor, moaned faintly and sat up. “The spirits have spoken through my lips,” he quavered. “See that you do not disobey. You, Swadiki, blood of the house of Kabola, and you, Thomasi, his son.”
With which he groped and tottered his way out of the hut, but not before he had managed to convey by some sign to Ramlika that he had still more to say for the other’s private ear.
He waited outside, squatting in the shadow of the hut, till Ramlika should join him. His eyes paid no attention to the fantastically beautiful scene that the moon was lighting up with her radiance. Swadiki’s embuga was built on a spit of land thrust out into the lake. Papyrus reeds outlined the shore, great trees spread their masses of foliage darkly against the sky, and across a small bay of silvered water the giant rocks of the hill of graves raised their massive height. Towering they were, and forbidding and dark, though here and there the moonlight caught them and silvered whole slabs to a sheen of white. Here, under this immovable tomb of stones, lay the old kings and chiefs of Kabola—a mysterious tribe, who migrated centuries ago from the north, who brought to the wilder people, upon whom they descended, whose women they took as wives, and whose men they slaughtered, a strange old civilisation and features stamped with the regalness of kingship. They had been kings among men, those people who slept so quietly under this great mountain of rocks. The rough structure that ancient hands had erected for them was worthy of their kingship.
Wamwila waited for some time for Ramlika, and when he came it was obvious to the older man that the fire of his eloquence, the energy of purpose, had left the Bengalee. He showed in the moonlight long and lank, his shoulders bowed, his eyes brooding, and his nervous hands were at his mouth, pulling and twisting the lips, grinding against the teeth. He stood, looking away from Wamwila, staring across the lake to the hill of graves, but his eyes took in as little of the beauty of the scene as the old witch doctor’s had done. They were held by far other visions. Ramlika was thinking again of Noormahal, wondering if to-night should see her in his arms. The three days that Chandra Lal had prophesied had passed. What a fool he had been to trust Chandra Lal! Into whose arms had Noormahal given all the perfection of her beauty?
Wamwila, creeping from the shadows, touched him gently, and Ramlika turned with a start. The little old, wizened priest was peering up at him, his stature rendered all the shorter by the disease which long ago had seized him and twisted and contorted his bones.
“You spoke well just now, O Ba Indi,” he said. “But I spoke better—since I spoke from the spirits of the dead. Shall we work together?”
A flash of sense, in the midst of his madness, made Ramlika’s lips twist in a sarcastic smile. Strange companionship this, wherewith to work the downfall of the British Empire! He saw the whole of his scheming in that second’s scorn as what it really was—pitiful, mean, useless. This was not the road his feet had first started to tread when—as a boy—he had dreamed of rebellion and liberty. Then the habitual darkness closed about his thoughts again, and he saw only the red glitter of revenge beckoning him. Revenge which would be satiated in the spilling of blood even though the brain behind would realise that no great end can be served by murder.
“You!” he said harshly; “what can you do to help? Have you trained monkeys over there!” He nodded towards the hill. “Who will follow to do battle where you lead!”
The old man grinned. “Monkeys or men,” he said, “ it is all the same. Come with me, Ramlika; let me show you some of my power.”
“And where shall we go for this magic, old monkey-man?” asked Ramlika.
Wamwila straightened himself, lifting his head and looking out over the lake. “To-night is the night of the full moon, stranger,” he answered. “The spirit of the tree will take unto himself a bride. Will you follow where I lead?”
Ramlika assented indifferently. It mattered very little to him where he went, how he passed his days or nights, since Noormahal came not. To-morrow, should there be no sign, he would return to Nuonga—he had made up his mind to that.
Wamwila was making his way rapidly down to the shores of the lake; there was a canoe tied up there against the reeds. He scrambled into it, and signed to Ramlika to follow. With a long pole he pushed their craft free of the papyrus, and shot her out into the clear water, then seizing a paddle he commenced to work with an energy and skill wonderful in one so old. A quarter of an hour later saw them at the other side, tethering the canoe close up to a flat-stamped landing-place under the shadow of the rock mountain. Then, still without speaking, Wamwila turned and led the way up a barely discernible path that left the reeds behind and lost itself in a forest of elephant grass. On and upwards, the path twisting and turning in meaningless directions, so it seemed, till they came out to a belt of trees that grew close round and right up to the rocks.
Here they walked almost in darkness, for so thick was the canopy of leaves overhead that the moon had slight chance of peering through at them. In the centre of this grove, with the rocks of the graves lowering and glooming overhead, a cleared space suddenly opened out in front of them. The moonlight was everywhere, turning the crowd of people gathered there into fantastic hobgoblin shapes, shimmering right up to the heavy shadows of the trees, flaunting itself against the bare face of the rock.
And in a small hollow in this circle of cleared space lay a flat rock, fenced round as though it were some very sacred grave. It lay in darkness, for above it a great tree shook out its leaves and boughs and drooped its branches on every side so that no light of sun or moon might pry within the grave’s secret. To this spot Wamwila led Ramlika and, signing the Bengalee to stay within the shelter of the tree, stood out himself on the moonlit space in front of the fenced-in rock.
At his appearance a curious undertone of murmurs broke from the waiting crowd. They swayed forward till they stood in a semicircle round the priest. Ramlika thought there might be about two hundred people present, all men, save for one shrinking, terrified-looking figure—that of a girl, who was lying trussed up, rather like a fowl, at the feet of Wamwila. There were several faces there that Ramlika knew, including Swadiki and the placid, good-natured face of Thomasi, his son. Only, to-night some of the placidity had gone from Thomasi’s face. He seemed perturbed, excited; a European seeing him would have said that he was drunk, and fighting drunk into the bargain. The undertone mutter went on for a minute or two. The crowd seemed to be swaying and stamping their feet in some concerted dance movement, hands touching hands. Once or twice the girl’s trussed-up figure shivered and shook with suppressed sobs.
Then Wamwila commenced to sing, a shrill, out-flung sound; high notes that quavered and fell over each other; words that were mumbled indistinctly between old lips. And at the song the crowd ceased to dance, crouched low to their haunches, every eye fixed in a mesmerised stare on the singer. From time to time, however, sounds of acclamation and agreement would burst from individual mouths.
The noise, Ramlika thought, was not unlike the sounds made by lions or leopards as they month their prey, and, looking at the flung-down body of the girl, he felt suddenly a little sick, shaken out of his madness to a sense of horror and shame. Yet he made no movement. He may have realised that anything in the way of intervention would have been useless, and the song went on to its accompaniment of low-growled assent; till Ramlika felt his own mind swaying to the influence, heard something that shrilled “Kill—kill!” in his ears, and only restrained himself from murder by a fierce effort at self-control.
The song ended, Wamwila stooped to the girl at his feet, and lifting his voice again shrilled out a question:
“You go to your bridegroom willingly, O girl, honoured among women?”
“She goes willingly!” the crowd roared, and with that they swept down on her.
Ramlika shut his eyes and forced them open again. Eager hands carried the girl aloft. Thomasi, his face altered from all resemblance to its usual solid calm, was one of the bearers, and flung her face upwards upon the rock.
She was not a bad-looking girl, the daughter of some chief evidently, for the garment wound about her slim body was of better bark-cloth than any ever used by the peasant. And quite young—hardly a woman. Probably it was necessary that the girl-wife of the spirit of the tree should be a known virgin.
Ramlika had little idea of what followed. To tell the truth, despite his fierce wild thoughts, he had little stomach for scenes such as this that was being enacted in this wonderfully beautiful grove. He crouched down after that glimpse of the girl, laid out on what he now knew must be the sacrificial stone, and he covered his eyes and his ears, shutting out as much as he possibly could. He heard the thin scream that went out, though, as the girl-bride sought her bridegroom; he knew that the singing had commenced again. They were dancing round and round the sacred tree which sheltered Ramlika—a slow, measured dance; feet raised and stamped to the ground; uncouth bodies contorting themselves to ungraceful, bestial attitudes. How unlike Noormahal’s dancing! Her vivid grace, the beauty of her movements! And Wamwila’s song! Suddenly Ramlika took away his hands, sat upright, and listened.
Wamwila was singing now in Swahili, and his song was all of the matters that Ramlika had poured forth that same evening. “Let us kill the white men!” chanted Wamwila. “Let their blood run out in sacrifice to the spirits of our fathers, whom they have dishonoured and defiled. Are ye men children of the Kabola—and is manhood forgotten among you that you should eat from their hands or sell your bodies to their mastership? Let us kill, let us kill!”
“Wau! Wau!” droned and grunted the chorus. “Let us kill, let us kill!”
In a flash, Ramlika realised Wamwila’s half-explained suggestion. Here was the promised help. With these—Ramlika leapt to his feet and stared round him—with these to follow where he led! He saw himself sweeping down upon the unsuspecting, unprepared households; the lonely dwellings of the planters and missionaries. Even the townships. What resistance could they offer to him, followed by a force like this?
“Kill! Kill! Kill!” his voice shrieked into the others, unheard in the general tumult; he capered and flung his arms aloft, unseen in the blackness under the trees. “Kill—-kill! Let us kill!”
Chandra Lal found himself on the outskirts of this panorama, an absolutely dumbfounded spectator. He could not see Ramlika, but he imagined him to be present, because the people at Swadiki’s house had told him that the chief and his son and their guests had gone with Wamwila, the witch-doctor. One of the servants had offered to lead Chandra Lal to the meeting-place. They had not arrived in time for the sacrifice or Wamwila’s impassioned war-chant, but the dance and the uncouth shouts of “Kill—kill!” were quite sufficient for Chandra Lal. It was not rebellion along those lines that he had counted on. Surely Ramlika must be wise enough to know that it was almost suicidal madness to rouse passions such as these, and leave them for a month or two unsatisfied. Nor was it possible to hope that unless the rebellion was properly staged, and started simultaneously in the adjoining countries, it would succeed.
Chandra Lal was very angry, and said so in no unmeasured terms when he finally ran Ramlika to earth. Was Ramlika proposing to wreck all their patient scheming by an outburst of folly like this?
Kill! Yes, undoubtedly they might kill a few planters and their wives and families! They might even sweep across Wala and destroy the white residents there! But after that?
“Do you think we can conquer by such methods?” asked Chandra Lal. “I looked for more knowledge from you, Ramlika. You have proved these things in our own country.”
But he found Ramlika fast held in the toils of Wamwila’s cunning. “To kill!” he whispered. “Think of it, Chandra Lal, to have that much revenge! You talk of conquest,” he sat suddenly erect, his eyes blazed with scorn. “Know you not full well that that is but the dream of a few poor fools? But this—this! To kill the few that are within our power, to hear them whine and pray for mercy on their women-folk! That will bring satisfaction to my heart, at least, before I die.”
He was obviously quite mad, and had apparently forgotten all about Noormahal. Chandra Lal was nonplussed. True, he might stand aside, and warn his brethren to stand aside, letting this thing go through, and biding their time to strike their own more balanced blow. But, innocent themselves in this killing, they would most certainly come under very acute suspicion. Even if Ramlika died, his presence at the head of the fanatic hordes would need explaining. There was not one of the natives, Swadiki or Thomasi or the rest, who could be trusted not to reveal what had passed beforehand in Chandra Lal’s house.
He attempted to approach Swadiki and Thomasi, but the blood fever was upon them, and they laughed at his caution, deriding him for failing to lead along the road he had so industriously built up for them. As far as Chandra Lal could gather, for, guessing his disapproval, the leaders became very secretive, it was planned to attack Wala on the night of the 14th, a date a fortnight distant, when there would be a great gathering of chiefs and natives in the capital owing to the holding of an annual festival. On the same night bands of men would attack the various outlying plantations and account for them. Then, the Europeans slaughtered, Thomasi, at least, dreamt of a great rallying of the Busoga to his standard. Word should be sent to the Baganda, who, emboldened by the success of their neighbours, would attack Kampala and Entebbe.
Poor, mild-mannered Thomasi, his eyes reddened by the poisoned dirt of Wamwila’s teaching, saw further than that to a successful united Baganda kingdom, and himself as possible Prime Minister. But it is doubtful whether Ramlika shared these dreams. As he had said to Chandra Lal—to talk of conquest against the British Raj was folly; in the murdering of a few white people he intended to find some consolation for his hatred, and beyond that his mad mind made no attempt to grope.
There was one last resort which Chandra Lal reverted to in his attempts to prevent the catastrophe. He fetched Noormahal—not without some difficulty. Noormahal, installed in Kenyon’s house for the last month, the mother pose laid aside and triumphantly entered into her role of mistress, was very unwilling to leave. She was in love with the man, as she had never been before in all her life of love-making. She dreaded to lose him—to forfeit his good-natured tolerance, his gratitude—for Kenyon, remembering that first night’s despair and his wounded self-respect, was grateful to Noormahal for her worship. He had had no letter from Maureen. He had not been near Wala himself, not seen any one from there. He knew that though he could never forget, Noormahal’s presence did help to ease the agony of his days. When she told him of her proposed visit to Ramlika, Kenyon found himself amazingly annoyed.
“Do you want to go,” he asked, “or have they frightened you into it?”
“Lord, fright would not drag me from your side,” said Noormahal. She sat as usual on the floor, cross-legged, beside him, her ridiculously small feet burdened by the gold bracelets she wore. And she had been singing to him, strumming with soft fingers on a native guitar, a song that she had made up herself, for Noormahal was no mean poet. All about strange, light-coloured eyes that brought a heaven of happiness to one poor breast.
“Well, then, why do you go?” repeated Kenyon.
She looked up at him. It was not exactly respect for the Cause which made her conceal from him the real reason of her going. Noormahal’s brain was curiously feline, if that is not being rather insulting to a cat. She had quite made up her mind to save Kenyon, should it be impossible to sway Ramlika from his purpose, but it was not altogether to her taste to save the entire European community. There was that woman, now—not Kenyon’s wife, she had learnt that much since, but the woman whom he, none the lees, loved. Noormahal had no particular desire to see her saved. Indeed, if holding her hand was to ensure the whole of the white population being effaced—the whole of it, save, that is to say, Kenyon—she would be quite content to hold her hand. For would such a happening not make Kenyon all the more and peculiarly hers? Oh, Noormahal had her dreams of Kenyon’s complete subjection, one may be sure of that!
“Ramlika is mad,” she said now, “and Chandra Lal says he is, without doubt, dying. I go—nay, beloved—in teaching me love, thou hast taught me to pity even Ramlika, though I love him not.”
Her face turned up to him was very sweet and seductive. Kenyon kissed it, and cursed himself for the kiss—an event that happened very often in these days. However, he let her go without further argument.
He had no inkling of the real reason of her going, and he had come to the conclusion that Chandra Lal and Chandra Lal’s confederates had taken the hint conveyed to them by Munroe’s raid. According to Hamiz, anyway, activities had ceased at Nuonga.
Simpson had been mentally stunned by his wife’s confession. He took up the ordinary routine of his life the next day, but the inner man within him was bitterly conscious that the groundwork of his life had failed him. If Maureen had died he would have had very much the same sensation, for during their twelve years of married life she had grown to be integrally a part of his being. He could not imagine himself without her and her love, which he had always taken so very much for granted. She had lived beside him for twelve years, and she was a stranger to him. That was what it amounted to. And then, as though already tired of the whirligig of his mind, his thoughts would go back wearily to that first brief month of love-making that had been with him after their marriage.
He had his memories as well as Maureen. The faint dark of that evening when she had first stood before him as his wife was all about him when he let himself dwell on it. He could memorise a great many things that he had not thought of for certainly ten years. And each memory carried with it a sting, since she had said, “Not loving you, I have loved some one else.” Perhaps, irritably, he knew himself in the wrong—realised how love of self had stepped between him and the girl whom he had sworn to love and cherish. But he was very loth to admit it. She should have known that a man, such as he was, was incapable of changing. The fact that he had refused to give up his bachelor habits for her benefit was proof in its way of his fealty. He had been as incapable of loving any one else, having once loved her, as he was incapable of putting his thoughts into poetry. But he loved her, now that she seemed to stand away from him, with every particle of passion that was in his body, which was a different way of loving to what he had been contented to display in the last ten years. That was why—though he did not admit the fact to either himself or to Maureen—he was unwilling to accede to her request and send her home.
He was not a man to sit down under defeat, and he could not bear to let her go. To do so would be tantamount to saying, “Since I have been unable to keep your love—go; you are at liberty to bestow it elsewhere.” And he did not wish her to do that. Urgently, selfishly, he wanted her for himself. It puzzled and amazed him that it should be so, that he should be a supplicant at her feet after what she had admitted; but it was so.
To Maureen, worn-out and dazed by the stress of her own emotions, this sudden attitude of Tom’s was as a stone wall shutting her in, paralysing her intentions, robbing her of the initiative to act. What did anything matter, since love had failed her? She had pulled her soul out by the roots to lay it as a sacrifice on love’s altar, and the gift had been, as it were, thrown back in her face. She felt soulless, mindless. For a week Tom said nothing to her. They met in silence, they went their own ways. He was out a great deal during the day, but in the evening she knew that he stayed in the house instead of going to the club. His silence weighed on her. She felt inclined to scream out to him sometimes that she loved Gerald Kenyon. Did he realise that it was Kenyon that she loved?
And then, at the end of the week, she went down with fever, and suddenly Tom’s silence, his reserve, melted. He did everything for her, waiting on her with a woman’s patience, and quiet, skilful hands that soothed as they touched. She had often had fever before, and he had limited his attentions to prescribing quinine, and getting one of the other ladies of the station to look in and see what they could do for her. She thawed a little to his kindness. Once, as he was brushing her hair in the evening, she turned her face, and, burying it in the pillows, began to cry. He was on his knees then, he had gathered her into his arms, and she lay for a while, her face hidden against his coat, the sobs shaking her. But when he spoke to her, his voice hoarse and changed, calling her name, he felt her shiver and put out her strength to push him from her.
“Maureen!” he pleaded. “Maureen, isn’t there a chance for me? Let’s start afresh. I swear, dear heart——”
“Oh no—no!” she sobbed. “Would you make me seem so poor a thing that I can give and take love and throw it away as though it were a toy?”
“I don’t mind what you make it,” he said grimly. “It doesn’t alter you.” He rose and sat on the edge of the bed, taking her hands.
“Look here, dear,” he said, “it’s all been some sort of hideous mistake. My fault to start with. Oh, I know it’s taken me a week to admit that, but I knew it from the very first. My fault. That is what gives me the courage to ask for another chance. It won’t be my fault again—Maureen— so help me God!”
“But I—I——” whispered Maureen. “Oh, I can’t.” She tore her hands away, covering her eyes. “Love means so little to you, Tom! I love some one else—to me it makes living with you hideous. Oh, don’t you understand—can’t you see? Let me go home. Tom, put me outside your thoughts and life.”
He shook his head, his face suddenly sullen, his strong chin thrust out. “No,” he said. “I can’t do the first—I won’t do the second. At least, not yet, Maureen.” He stood up, he tried to make his voice cheerful, indifferent. “You’ll need a change after this go of fever,” he said. “Would you care to go out to the Durhams for a month or so? They’ve got a jolly house and a ripping shamba, and it’s the healthiest spot for miles round here.” He met her eyes and smiled. “I shan’t be able to go with you,” he said. “But you like the Durhams; you’d be all right on your own.”
“I’d be all right,” she agreed; her lips quivered again. “Only, Tom, it isn’t any use. Do believe me about that.”
“We won’t argue about it, anyway,” he said. “Mrs. Durham is in the station. I’ll see her tomorrow, and fix things up.”
He did so, with a swift energy that surprised himself. He felt that he was fighting against tremendous odds, and that every step not lost was in some sense gained. She should go out to the Durham plantation. It would be very quiet out there, very peaceful. He would leave her completely alone. He would not go out. No one would expect him to, he thought, with a sudden sarcastic knowledge of his old self. He would not write.
Mrs. Durham, a stout, cheerful lady, whose only hobby in life was housekeeping, was delighted at the suggestion of Mrs. Simpson staying with her for a couple of months. Life on a plantation is a lonely existence for a woman, especially if she is childless, which was Mrs. Durham’s fate, and to keep house immaculately for a husband who never knew what he was having to eat, or cared how much mud he brought in on his boots, was disappointing work, year in and year out.
So it was settled, and a week later Mrs. Raymond, calling in to see Maureen in the afternoon, learnt to her surprise that Mrs. Simpson intended to bury herself alive in the Durhams’ shamba for two months.
“My dear, how can you?” she remonstrated. Her critical eyes took in the weary indifference of Maureen’s pose, her brooding grey eyes. “That isn’t the way to get over things. You want amusement, distraction. I warned you, dear, didn’t I?”
“About what?” asked Maureen. She realised suddenly how badly she had played her part before a watching world.
Mrs. Raymond tinkled with pretty laughter. “Dear Mrs. Simpson,” she said, “I don’t suppose any one knows about it but me, but you did let yourself get a little too fond of that wretched man, didn’t you! Bob tells me”—she lowered her voice—“that he has now got the most marvellously beautiful Indian girl living with him. Picked her up in a low dancing-house somewhere.”
Oh, she knew that, she knew that too well! A memory of Noormahal’s mocking eyes, the perfect beauty of the girl’s face and form, haunted her days. To Mrs. Raymond, however, she was able to display a cold face of scorn.
“I do not think we need talk about him, need we?” she said. “I hate prying and peering into what is ugly in other people’s lives.”
“Oh, it’s no question of prying,” laughed Mrs. Raymond. “Kenyon is the most unabashed, straightforward sinner. I’ll say that for him. So you are really going to the Durhams?”
“Yes,” Maureen answered. “Tom thinks I need a change, and I suppose I do. Just lately”—Mrs. Raymond would not be quite sure, but she thought the grey eyes clouded with tears—“the hills round Wala seem to be closing me in, and the sky shuts down all round me, making a sort of cage.”
“What funny sort of thoughts you have!” said Mrs. Raymond. “ Do you remember that day when we drove back from Entebbe? I had a horrid feeling of tragedy when you said good-bye to me at our house.”
“Did you?” said Maureen. “That was a case of your having funny thoughts, wasn’t it? Life is much too commonplace for tragedy, really. I remember reading a book once—I can’t remember the name or who it is by, but there’s a sentence in it I have always remembered. Listen! ‘There are three phases in life: one when we dream that all is golden; one when we think that all is black; and the last, when we know that all is only grey.’ Most of us reach the grey stage very soon—don’t we?”
“When you are in love, I suppose that is the golden stage?” Mrs. Raymond suggested, her inquisitive eyes keen in their scrutiny. “Which only goes to prove that my way is the best. Love lightly and love often, and you hold on to the gold in life.”
“Yes, if you can!” agreed Maureen, her voice suddenly tired. “Shall we go round and see Mrs. Munroe? I want to say my good-byes there.”
Mrs. Munroe was soothing after Mrs. Raymond, but Maureen seemed to detect curiosity even in those blue eyes. And, indeed, Mrs. Munroe was curious. She had heard all Mrs. Raymond’s side of the story, and she had heard Jim’s outspoken comments upon Kenyon. Love outside the love of husband and children was an unreal factor which, in Mrs. Munroe’s estimation, went to the building up of novels. But it was rather exciting, though in a different way to the excitement of Cecily’s first teeth, to have a novel being lived out on your doorstep. And then she warmed suddenly and very gently to Maureen. It must be truly dreadful not to have any babies. She would certainly have put the greyness of Maureen’s life down to that fact.
At least Maureen was glad to get away from them all. There is a monotonous sameness about the daily round, the common task, when you have to take them up after your soul has been through a tempest of desire and despair. Maureen knew she had no courage left to face the daily existence in the big quiet house in Wala: the servants with their endless housekeeping troubles; the meals, sitting opposite Tom; the lonely walks; the afternoons; Mrs. Raymond’s curiosity; Mrs. Munroe’s pity. She had no courage for anything of all this. She was not strong enough to face Kenyon, and at any moment Kenyon might run into Wala. She might see him walking along the road, meet him at Mrs. Raymond’s. And Tom! She was beginning to be desperately afraid of Tom. His sullen silence for the first week had seemed like a thick smothering cloud, but his kindness, his tenderness, were infinitely worse. Whatever way she turned, seeking escape for her tortured heart, he stood with arms outspread blocking her path.
Mrs. Durham chattered affably all the way out to Biota, their plantation. The very flow of her eloquence was soothing to Maureen. The house, too, so great a change to anything that she had seen in Africa, served to distract her thoughts; for the Durhams had, romantically, striven to build their African home on the pattern of their old English cottage. The sitting-rooms were long and low-beamed with wood made to resemble oak; there were even deep fireplaces, for Mrs. Durham insisted that in the cold weather it was quite chilly enough for fires in the evening. The garden had been laid out like a cottage garden at home. There were no lilies here, only sweet-smelling roses and phlox and petunia and great yellow daisies and sunflowers—“That will grow as tall as the house and give the show away at once, by proclaiming themselves horribly African,” as Mrs. Durham said.
Mr. Durham was a quaint, silent man, with humorous eyes that twinkled in agreement with his wife’s laughter, though he rarely laughed himself, and talked as little as possible. Apart from the mud on his boots, he was an excellent husband, and Mrs. Durham’s steady flow of talk was never disturbed by any grumblings or repinings about her married life. One great sorrow had been hers; she kept it silent behind all the depths of chatter. There had been a baby, and it had died when it was two years old. Maureen came across a small grave one day when she was walking about the garden by herself. Just two plain stones, and on one of them Mrs. Durham, she supposed, had engraved the words:
Gerald—aged 2.
The light of our life.
Strange that his name should have been Gerald too! She had stood beside it, and the tears had shaken her. Tears for these two people, robbed of the light of their lives, and tears for herself and the piteous firefly that she had taken to be an all-enduring light. But from Mr. and Mrs. Durham one would never have guessed that the light of their lives lay buried out in the shamba, the grass growing green above the little feet that had hardly learnt to run before they had entered into the eternal stillness.
They were a very cheery couple, and Mrs. Durham, at least, fussed over Maureen and Maureen’s comfort as if this one extra interest in her life had been what she had always wanted. Maureen had the best bedroom—a pleasant place whose windows, diamond-paned, blue-curtained, opened on to a bed of flowering petunias, purple and blue and pale white. And there was a honeysuckle that had taken Mrs. Durham several months to persuade to creep in the right direction, that just peeped in at one of the open windows.
Mrs. Durham was a lesson to Maureen in many ways. Hers was a life spent in service—and somehow, looking back on her own life, Maureen realised that she had served very little. There had never seemed anything to do. Tom had not needed her, he hated even to have his socks mended; he held that darns were uncomfortable, he preferred to buy new socks. And the house that he had brought Maureen to had been a bachelor establishment, running on well-oiled, if expensive wheels. He had not wanted things altered on his first tour, and after that she had lacked the interest to try. She had read and sewn—but always for herself. There had never been any one else to do things for. Now, Mrs. Durham bustled through the days, always at work, always cheerful. She superintended the cleaning of the house; she cooked, or showed the cook how to cook; she mended all her husband’s clothes and made her own; she worked in the garden, and acted as dispenser and surgeon for all the minor accidents and illnesses among the Shamba people. She was never silent and, as far as Maureen could see, she was never depressed. If the light had really gone out of her life, she made a very cheery affair of the greyness that was left.
Perhaps Maureen made some vain resolutions to mould herself on Mrs. Durham’s pattern; for it is, alas! not easy to alter our natures even when we realise how far we are from perfection. She did at any rate try and copy the older woman’s philosophy summed up in the words of the old hymn:
“The daily round, the common task,
Shall famish all we need to ask:
Room to deny ourselves—a road
To lead us daily nearer God.”
And in so much this shows that her courage was slowly returning to her. For the path of self-denial is no easy one. Not one, at any rate, that a coward will succeed in travelling.
It was in this mood that she met Tom Simpson when, at the end of the fifth week, he took ten days’ leave and came out to spend it at Siota.
“The rooms are so small,” Mrs. Durham explained in a twitter of excitement over her new guest; “which would you like, dear? Maurice’s camp-bed in your room, or shall I get the pink room ready for Dr. Simpson?”
“For,” as she said to Maurice that night, “married people don’t always like sleeping together these days, Maurice—it is becoming old fashioned.” Mrs. Simpson evidently was not old fashioned. She was relieved at the idea of the pink room being at her husband’s disposal.
“We haven’t shared rooms since the first year of our marriage,” she said to Mrs. Durham. “Does that seem very awful to you!”
“Awful, good gracious, no!” laughed Mrs. Durham. “Strange—perhaps. I have always realised that separate rooms wouldn’t make any difference to love; but doesn’t it affect companionship?” She did not look at Maureen as she spoke. She was quite well aware of what the general run of people thought about Dr. Simpson and his wife.
“I’m afraid we have never been companions,” said Maureen slowly. “Tom is so much a man’s man, Mrs. Durham.”
She was making excuses for him, which showed that Mrs. Durham’s teaching was already bearing fruit. But she was none the less very glad that Mrs. Durham had thought of the pink room. She had made up her mind to tell Tom that if he really wanted her she would stay on with him, but she could not pretend that in so doing she killed the love that was in her heart for Kenyon. You cannot kill love. Not, however worthy the motive behind the killing may be.
On the second day after his arrival she took him for a walk, and chance—for she had had no intention to lead him there, feeling at the bottom of her heart that this place must be sacred to the Durhams—led them past the little grave. Tom stopped and looked, and stooped to read, and then he straightened himself, his face oddly flushed, his eyes meeting hers.
“By Jove,” he said, “if we had ever had anything like that between us, Maureen, things would be easier for you now.”
“Yes,” she said simply; “things would have been easier all along, Tom.”
“You’ve wanted one?” he asked shamefacedly. “You never told me, Maureen.”
“Did we ever tell each other anything?” she asked, head high. And then she put out sudden hands to him. “Tom,” she said, “you asked me the other day if I would be content to start again. I—I want you to know that I am. If you really meant it, Tom. If you haven’t repented, I’ll try and be some use in your life. We might even try to be companions, mightn’t we?”
He stood with her hands in his, looking down at her. “And love—Maureen?” he asked. He might have been a man putting his fate into the balance for the first time.
A little quiver of pain ran over her face. “Oh, don’t ask me!” she pleaded; “not yet, Tom. I’ve nothing to give, nothing! My hands are empty—as empty as my heart.”
“I’ll keep them none the less,” he answered gruffly, holding them so that the pressure almost hurt. “And we’ll make what we can of companionship for the time being—eh, Maureen?”
“If you are content,” she whispered. And he squeezed her hands again, and let them go.
That night Mrs. Durham—talking till the last moment—as was ever her way—confided to Maurice that she did not think there could be any truth in the gossip about Simpson not loving his wife.
“These big men are such poor actors,” she said. “You can see, can’t you, that he is mad about her, Maurice?”
“Well, I don’t know that I’ve looked much,” murmured Maurice, a quainter, drabber sight than ever in his vivid-hued pyjamas.
“Perhaps if they could have a child now,” went on Mrs. Durham. “You remember what Baby Gerald meant to us, Maurice?”
“Yes, I remember,” Maurice agreed. He turned and kissed his wife. “What he still means,” he added. “He is as much ours, Dolly, out there, as he could ever have been alive!”
“Oh, of course,” she whispered, and then lay still for a little while, hand still touching hand, each thinking, one might be sure, of Baby Gerald, and the joy he had brought and taken with him; each thankful for the steadfast love he had left behind. And then, presently, his voice a sigh almost, Maurice said:
“To-day is the 14th, isn’t it, Dolly? The little chap would have been ten to-morrow. Eight years—it’s a big slice out of one’s life.”
“But every year brings us closer to him, doesn’t it?” she said, and her voice had won back to its usual serene cheerfulness.
Noormahal returned to Mamwirta on the 14th; but it was not until later on in the afternoon that she succeeded in finding Kenyon. He had gone out after elephants the night before, word having come in that a small herd was doing damage to some of the surrounding native shambas. When he arrived, tired and dirty, he had to have a bath, and it seemed to her that he remained in his own side of the house for hours. She was beginning to feel desperately anxious for Kenyon. The excitement, the thrill of Ramlika’s madness, and Wamwila’s blood-lust had disturbed her not a little. She had not done much to divert Ramlika’s intentions—not half so much as she might have done, was Chandra Lal’s opinion.
Sick and disgusted himself, he had perforce to stand aside and watch the mad scheme of Ramlika’s rush forward to destruction. It could do no good to the cause which he had at heart; but, at the same time, to frustrate it by giving evidence against it was too dangerous a course for him to pursue. There was much behind Ramlika, and Ramlika’s presence in the country, which could ill bear investigation by the Government. Let the thing go forward then; a few English would be killed, and with any luck Ramlika, as ringleader, would perish in the subsequent retaliation. It suited Chandra Lal’s plans best to return to Nuonga and warn his confederates to adopt an attitude of impressive ignorance towards the abortive rising. He hoped he would be able to pervert the influential members of their community, anyway, to this course.
And in that he succeeded. The Indians shut their eyes to what they could not but help knowing was in progress, and for the rest, outwardly at least, they appeared as unprepared and ignorant as the Europeans.
Noormahal had thought out many ways by which she might save Kenyon. It was no use, she knew, to appeal to either Ramlika or Chandra Lal. She must rely on her own resources and upon Hamiz. She had been quick to discover Hamiz’s devotion to his master. Between them they should disguise and conceal Kenyon until the storm was passed. The only person whom she left out of her reckonings was Kenyon himself. She had not reckoned upon what his attitude would be.
Perhaps truth was impossible to Noormahal; perhaps she hoped by exaggerating the danger to make Kenyon realise more swiftly the need for concealment. In telling him of Ramlika’s plot she undoubtedly succeeded in conveying the impression that the entire native population was to be concerned in the imminent rising. Kenyon sat aghast, scarce listening to her quick-uttered schemes for his own safety. He was visioning Wala, helpless, unprepared, handed over to the mercies of a repellent horde of natives, led and engineered, so much he realised from Noormahal, by the Indians. He knew of the festival, the sports, in honour of the King’s birthday, at which all the principal chiefs and their retinues were to be present. There would be, he calculated, about two thousand natives in Wala on this the night of the 14th, and there were, all told, about thirty Europeans—men, women, and children. He sickened at that, thinking of the Munroes, little Dulcie Raymond, and, finally, letting his thoughts rest on Maureen. All the time they had, in reality, been hovering over her. As he leapt to his feet it was borne in on him that he must at all cost be there to stand between her and death—to see, at least, that death was her portion rather than anything else.
“You are sure of this?” He lifted Noormahal to her feet, shaking her in his strong arms. “It is not a game of lies that you play for my benefit, Noormahal?”
“Lord, why should I lie?” she answered. “You must be saved. I have thought of naught else since Ramlika first breathed this poison of his madness into my ears. Oh, thou knowest there was such a game afoot! Did you not spy on Chandra Lal? Did you not hear and see! Now it has come to sudden evil fruit. Nothing can stay it. To-night, they will pass through every white man’s house in the land, and in the morning there will be no one of your people left. Even here will they come, Keenyon. I risk much in telling you. If they knew, would they not surely kill me? Even I, though I am in their eyes the ‘Rose of All the World.’” He could see that she was speaking truth. He could see the anxiety, the fear, that shook her.
“To-night?” he asked her.
“To-night, as the moon rises,” Noormahal answered.
He swung away from her, studying his watch. “I’ve five hours,” he muttered; “five hours, my God!”
He was on the verandah before she quite realised what he was going to do; but she followed, soft hands clinging to his coat.
“My lord,” she cried, “what would you do? Where would you go? With me there is safety. I—I only can save you.”
He turned to look at her. “You!” he said. His face stiffened, his eyes were hard. “You! Do you think I’d stay with you now; let you drag me further into your nets? I am going to drive to Wala. I may be, I must be, in time to save some of them.”
She drew away as if he had struck her. As, indeed, his words had struck her heart. “You go to save the white woman!” she screamed. “’Tis of her that you think! And what of me, I who have risked my life to save you?”
He was half-way down the steps calling to Hamiz; but he stopped to look back at her. “Get you back to your own people,” he said fiercely. “I go to mine.”
On that he was gone. Tearing down the drive, shouting for Hamiz—Hamiz; and Noormahal, watching him, crumpled up where she stood and sank to the floor, her little body huddled up, her face hidden in her arms. They were very bitter the tears she shed, for there had been real love behind her service to Kenyon, and whether you be black or white, whether you be virtuous or evil, love has the same power to hurt. When love turns to hate, there is something that dies within us, and the agony of its dying breaks our hearts.
Kenyon drove through the street of Nuonga, and on along the thirty miles between him and Wala, as though all the devils of his imagination were behind him. Nuonga, he noticed, was quiet and deserted. Chandra Lal’s house was shut up. Fierce anger rose in Kenyon’s throat, almost choking him; but it was anger against himself. He had suspected this thing, the threads of suspicion had been in his hands, and he had been content to let them drop, to lose them in the enchantments of Noormahal’s beguiling. How prettily she had fooled him, coming to him at a time when his nature was weakened, adrift on a sea of despair! Making him dance to her piping, blinding his eyes, shutting his ears! Had he overheard Noormahal’s hastily invented and totally untrue version of her reason for staying in his house that she had given to Chandra Lal, he could not have felt more bitterly towards her.
He had no thought of pity for her; no belief whatsoever in the love she had given him. It had been part of the plot that he, the known spy—for how could he have flattered himself that he was not known?—should be kept quiet and out of the way. How he cursed himself as the wind stung against his cheek, as the car jumped and quivered along to its greatest speed! It was dusk before he reached the outskirts of Wala. The head chief’s embuga showed up dimly about forty yards away from the main road, on the side of the hill. It was thronged with people, their hoarse guttural singing, the throb, throb of the drums they played came to him. Evidently there was an engoma in process. A dance of war and death he could imagine it to be. To his overstrained nerves the streets of the bazaar seemed horribly astir. Groups of Indians standing at the various doors, native forms slinking and slouching up every high street. He felt they were watching him, wondering why he had come. As he turned in at the District Commissioner’s compound, he could see a little group sitting out in chairs on the grass: Mrs. Munroe and the children, one or two men who had been playing tennis, and Munroe.
Kenyon, getting out of his car, staggered a little. He was a very imaginative man; his brain all the way here had been imagining such horrors—there might still be such horrors to come. For, good God, what could they do, thirty to two thousand? And no boat at the pier—he had taken that in at a glance. No boat coming slowly round the bend of the lake. It was not boat day. He had had no right to hope for that, and yet he had hoped.
Munroe came across to greet him. “Hullo, Kenyon!” he said. There was nothing in his greeting to show that he had been rather hurt with Kenyon for the past few months. “It’s nice seeing you again. What good news brings you in?”
“Good news?” said Kenyon. They were out of earshot of the others; he put out his hand and gripped Munroe’s. “Good God, Munroe! The natives are rising. It’s come. To-night they propose to sack Wala. There must be two thousand of them in the town, and you—what do you number!”
Munroe’s face had flushed; he was staring at Kenyon. “We are about thirty, Kenyon, counting the women and children. You are sure—you have good authority?”
Kenyon nodded. “As sure as I am of my own damnation. It’s my fault, largely. I’ve been asleep. That time at Nuonga——” he broke off. “It’s the woman,” he said briefly, “‘Rose of All the World,’ who told me. Of course she is in it, but she had some idea of saving my miserable carcase for her own consumption, I suppose.”
“Hush, man!” Munroe looked stern. “She has risked something, we will suppose, in telling you.” He looked behind him to the pleasant little group assembled in front of his drawing-room windows. His wife was laughing at something; little Betty, the eldest girl, was helping John, the second born, to pull a cart across the path. “What are we to do?” he said. “It’s a question of keeping our heads, isn’t it?”
Kenyon’s hand fell away. “Yes,” he agreed, “our heads and their honour,” he nodded towards Mrs. Munroe. “You’ll have to arrange a front we can defend. I should think the P.C.’s house; it stands high and open, and all its approaches are clear. Get the women and children there, devise a search-party, eh?”—his eyes narrowed—“to which every one must be invited, nay, commanded. It’s no use letting the servants see we’ve been warned. They are bound to be in league. It would bring about an earlier attack—give us less time to arrange defences.”
“You think they are all in it?” said Munroe slowly. “I’d have staked my life on Yuzufu and his people.”
Yuzufu was the resident chief in Wala. Kenyon shook his head. “You’ve always liked them too well, Munroe, trusted them too thoroughly. Yuzufu holds an engoma this evening—his drums are calling.”
Munroe swung round stiffly. Above and beyond the danger to his wife and children the thing hurt him, flicked his official pride. He had trusted them, he had been proud to trust.
“We had better get back to the others,” he said. “I don’t want the Memsahib to be alarmed more than is necessary. You go round the station, Kenyon, get hold of the men-kind, tell them as quickly as possible. Give it out that the P.O. has suddenly got it into his head to have dumb charades or something in honour of the King’s birthday. Make the men understand, though, that they’ve got to bring their babies with them. Oh, damn it all, Kenyon, what right have we to ask a woman to risk this sort of thing for us?”
“We may pull through,” said Kenyon slowly. “We are all armed, more or less. I reckon twenty of us can hold that house for a day or two. There may be a boat in at any time.”
“There’s a boat due on Tuesday, to-day is Thursday,” said Munroe briefly, “and our telegraph is in the hands of an Indian.”
“I’ll go anyway,” said Kenyon. “I don’t know every one, but I suppose I’ll find them. There are the Raymonds and the Simpsons.”
Munroe turned to look at him. “By Jove!” he interrupted sharply. “The Simpsons aren’t in the station; they’re at the Durhams’ place. What is going to happen to the planters, Kenyon!”
He saw the man’s face go sickeningly white, as though he was about to fall, and put out a quick hand and caught his arm.
“Kenyon,” he said authoritatively, “it’s no use facing it like that, man. She’s got her husband with her.”
He laid some stress on the word “husband,” for even at this moment Munroe could not help remembering to respect the conventions.
Kenyon simply stared.
“I must go,” he said briefly. “You’ll have to get some one else to go round here. The Durhams’ are sixty miles, isn’t it? I may be in time.”
“And even if you are?” asked Munroe. “Besides, don’t you realise that by now the roads will be closed against any of us getting away?”
But Kenyon made no answer. He had turned and stepped back into the car, swirling away in a cloud of dust, before Hamiz had had time to climb back into his seat.
Munroe strolled back to the group. He hoped he looked as unconcerned as he tried to appear. He smiled, anyway, at his wife. “What about bedtime, Alice?” he said; “ these young folk will get chewed by mosquitoes in another few minutes.”
It was a sure way of driving Alice indoors, he knew. She was laughing and calling the babies to her nest, with little John in her arms, Betty clinging to her dress. How wonderfully dear she and they were, Munroe thought, as he watched her. Then he turned to the three other men and told them Kenyon’s news in a few stern sentences. It was a difficult thing to believe that such things could be so close to them, within a few paces of this quiet, pretty garden and the women and children who had first gone indoors. Yet, in a way, it is a fear always at the back of the white man’s brain as he works, day in and day out, among these tropical people, whose faces he cannot read, whose hearts are as closed books to him. The three men, Pearce of the Police, Branson of the Bank, and Geddes, the A.D.C., took the news very characteristically.
“Why not the bank,” suggested Branson, “instead of the P.C.’s house? We can look after the bawbees at the same time.”
“Too near the bazaar,” said Pearce. “Too crowded in. Besides, it’s not big enough. We’ve got to make the ladies as comfortable as we can.”
“Rather a lark, eh?” asked Geddes. He raised what Simpson had once described rather angrily as “lady-like” eyebrows. “Shall we put up barricades and pot at the beggars through loopholes?”
Munroe did not answer. He was one of the few people in the station who as a rule was not annoyed by his subordinate’s lack of seriousness on all subjects, but to-day, somehow, the thing came too near home for him to be lenient.
“Perhaps it’s a lark to you, Geddes,” he answered briefly, “but to the rest of us, with wives and children——” He left the sentence unfinished and turned to Pearce. “What about your people?” he said. “Would it be wise to disarm them? God knows whom we can trust!”
“I fancy they are loyal,” said Pearce stiffly. His mind flew to the tales he had read of the Indian Mutiny, of the officers who had staked and lost their lives on the loyalty of their men. “We’ll have to risk it; if we try to disarm them now, we bring it about our ears, if they are disloyal.”
“Yes,” agreed Munroe. “It can’t add much to the risk. If they are against us, Pearce, the end comes quicker, that is all.”
“I’ll stay in the lines to-night,” said Pearce. “If they are prepared to follow me and stand by us, I shall be able to help you in the house materially. If not—well, as you say, the end will be all the quicker.”
Geddes broke in, irrepressible, “By Jove, Pearce, you knock spots in most of us doing that!”
“Will you get some one to help you?” Munroe turned to Branson. “Beat up the station, see that every one migrates as quickly and silently as possible to the P.O.’s house for dinner. We have a dinner-party on—the Raymonds, Clements, and Rogers. I’ll bring them on. And I’ll go across and see Samuels now. The thing is to arouse as little suspicion as possible. Our servants may, in a sense, be our jailers; let them suspect nothing. We’ll have to smuggle the kids out of the house somehow. Thank goodness we don’t boast many in Wala—only ours and Cecily Raymond’s. And every one brings what guns and what ammunition he has.”
He crossed over and put the matter to Samuels, the P.C., before he went into his own house. Samuels was a bachelor, a big, cheery, bearded man. He was not altogether prepared to believe the rumour that Munroe had reported, but he quite agreed that even on the vaguest suppositions it would be wise to take every precaution. He became eager and interested as he and Munroe went round the house and hurriedly drew up a plan of defence. His servants were all from Toro, a district very much to the north of Busoga; he was confident that they could be relied on to stand by him. He jumped at Munroe’s suggestion to give a scratch dinner-party—his cook was quite used to preparing meals for any number of unexpected guests. He would have all the rest of the station, and he would see to it that it was a cheery, noisy meal. If there were any spies in the neighbourhood they would find nothing suspicious in this gathering together of the Europeans. And Munroe should bring his party across after dinner, and with them they would bring the children, and the house would be by then in a state of siege, ready to shelter and protect them; it did not much matter even if their arrival did rouse suspicions. Pearce was right to stay with his police. They would be less likely to be swayed by the rebels if a white officer was with them, and, if the police stood firm, the proportion of attackers and attacked would be much less unequal.
Kenyon had said at the rise of the moon. Tonight she would rise at ten. It was seven now. There were three hours in front of them. Munroe went slowly back to his own house. He must tell Alice. He had never tested her courage, her self-control in this way before, yet he did not think she would fail him. But there were the children to think of. It tortured Alice, he knew, to think of the children as ill or out of sorts in any way. How would she face the thought of this danger that shadowed them beyond any of their preventing? He need not have been afraid. Mrs. Munroe listened to him in silence, face a little white, bent over the youngest baby, whom she was feeding.
“And we’ll go across after dinner,” she said calmly, when he had finished. “Wouldn’t it have been better for us to have taken the children across and put them to bed there? It seems such a pity to wake them after they are once asleep.”
He explained to her how unwise it would be to let the servants suspect that they had been warned in any way, and she nodded her head, lips proudly compressed.
“I’ll write a note to Mrs. Raymond,” she said presently, “begging her to bring Dulcie and put her to sleep here. I never like her leaving that baby alone in the house when she goes out to dinner. She’ll think it is one of my fads. Do you know, Jim, I don’t think we had better tell Mrs. Raymond more than that until after dinner.”
“No,” he agreed; “she isn’t very reliable, is she? I’ll go across and see Raymond now, if you’ll give me the note.”
Mrs. Munroe rose and laid the baby in his cot. If she held him closer to her for a second, with desperate terror in her heart, there was no sign of it for any one else to read. She wrote her note and handed it to Munroe, smiling a little at his set face, standing on tiptoe to kiss his cheek.
“Don’t fret, Jimmie,” she said. “I feel we’ll be all right, and I am really not very frightened.”
“You!” he said, and for a second he held her to him, not trusting himself to speak.
So that evening the Europeans in Wala held high revels. The P.C.’s dinner-party was a success in every way; he was hilariously gay himself, and Geddes followed his lead most ably. Most of the guests had arrived rather muffled up in overcoats, some of the ladies even carrying rugs, and they were conducted straight to Mr. Samuels’ own dressing-room, and what they brought with them under their coats they left there. Geddes mounted guard until after the last guest had passed through, and then locked the door. The Munroes’ dinner-party was, perhaps, a little quieter than Mr. Samuels’, but none the less quite sociably cheerful. Mrs. Raymond, anyway, was as talkative and as amusing as ever. She considered it very sporty of old Samuels to blossom out into this unexpected festivity. After dinner, when, very gently, Mrs. Munroe told her the real reasons—of Dulcie’s presence, and how all the children were to be carried across to the P.C.’s house—she grew very quiet, very white-lipped. But she did not make any sort of fuss or faint, which was what Mrs. Monroe had been afraid she might do.
By half-past nine they were all assembled under Mr. Samuels’ roof. The servants had been dismissed from the house, and the state of siege had begun.
Mrs. Raymond and Mrs. Munroe, with the five other ladies of the station, and the children, were in the centre large room of the house, Mrs. Munroe being very busy by then, for all the children had been wakened by their excursion and were inclined to be fretful. The men were at their various stations round the house, the lights were turned low, the noise of revelry had ceased. Over the shoulders of the far hills in the opposite country of Baganda a faint, mist-wrapped moon was just creeping into sight. From the bazaars came the sound of throbbing drums, and every now and then raucous voices raised in song or quarrel. But for the rest, the whole world seemed asleep, and in the big house on the hill the handful of white people waited, ears strained, eyes peering into the shadows.
Maureen woke quickly. A sudden, startled awakening, sitting up in bed, her feet touching the floor, before she realised what she was doing. She was always a very light sleeper, and to-night some unusual sound had woven itself into her dreams, producing a fantastic nightmare of horror. She was frightened as she sat there in the half-gloom of her room. The curtains in no way shut out the moonlight; the floor was flooded with pale silvery light. But whether it was her nightmare that had frightened her, or something that had really sounded in the waking world round her, she could not decide.
She slipped out of bed anyway, and tiptoed to the door. She was really absurdly frightened, so that even her breathing seemed too loud, and she tried to hold it in. She had her hand on the handle of the door when she heard the noise again. A curious bestial singing of men’s voices, a chant that rose every now and then to a shout. Maureen paused. Why was the rest of the house so quiet? Had no one heard, or was it merely some festival among the plantation workers?—a form of music that the Durhams, at least, were quite familiar with. She was a little cut away from the rest of the house, a long passage leading from her room to the drawing-room. The Durhams and Tom were on the other side of the house, rooms opening off the dining-room. It was Mrs. Durham’s boast about her best spare room that it was so completely shut away from the rest of the house that you would never have guessed it was there.
Maureen would have to go down the length of the passage and across the drawing-room to get to the others, and the thought oppressed her. She was frightened of that singing, whatever it might mean. She remembered how once, during her first year in the country, she had been terrified one night sitting alone in her drawing-room to glance up and see a native’s face pressed up against the wire-netting of the window. An uncouth, hideous, face; black, thick lips, retreating forehead, and small eyes. She always remembered that face if she was by herself among a crowd of natives; for though she liked her servants very well, and got on with them most peacefully, she was always afraid of them in some ridiculous way. Now, as she stood hesitating, the door just ajar, from the shadows of the house in front of her she felt sure she could hear the sounds of soft, hurried movements.
Maureen stepped back quickly, latching the door. What did it all mean, what could it mean? She must screw up her courage and go and find Tom. Tom was very large and sensible; he would laugh at her for having been afraid. She turned back to put on her dressing-gown, and slip her feet into her satin bedroom slippers, then, still quite noiselessly, for in the face of fear it seems necessary to make as little noise as possible, she opened her door and ran down the passage. Her idea of having heard movements in the shadows was right, for half-way down the passage a figure suddenly loomed in front of her, blocking her path.
Maureen stepped back with a half-uttered scream, and the man put out his hands and seized her wrists. It was too dark for her to see him, but the feel of his hands, cold and soft, told her it was a native that held her. Then, before she could scream again, he spoke in a quick whisper. It was Valentine. She recognised the voice; it was the Durhams’ English-speaking boy, who had been in their service for the twelve years they had been in the country.
“Make no noise, Mukyala. Already they have killed the Bwanas and my Mukyala. Because they knew not the way to this room as yet they have not killed you. But they will come quickly, if they hear or see.”
“They? The Bwanas killed, Valentine? Oh, what does it mean, what are you telling me?”
He pulled her beside him into the darkness. That they were mistress and servant, black and white, seemed to be forgotten in the moment’s horror.
“Listen,” he said. “Mukyala, look!” He led her, his hand still cold on hers, to a small window in the passage that looked out on to the sweep of lawn that circled the house. It was very light out there in the garden, compared to where they stood.
Maureen crouched down and stared out, and Valentine stood beside her. The dancing, capering forms, that she had imagined in connection with that horrible song, were there on the lawn in front of her. A circle of men that swayed and stamped their feet and shook their hideous bodies in time to the words they chanted; drawing closer together after the fashion of children playing at ring a ring of roses; spreading out till you could see what it was they danced round; that lay in the circle between them. Numb and still, Maureen stayed there. The moonlight showed her quite plainly what lay between the dancers’ feet. She could recognise Tom’s great, strong figure, Mr. Durham’s thinner form, and Mrs. Durham, with a sweep of dark hair lying across her bare shoulders. They were, as Valentine had said, dead. She could not doubt that. She could even give a quick, shuddering sob of thankfulness that they should be dead. That, for them anyway, it had been swift and unexpected. She had heard no cries, no sound of struggles. Till that ghastly singing had wakened her up she had heard nothing at all. Or had it been a scream that had first woven itself into the nightmare that had held her? Had Mrs. Durham screamed? She wondered stupidly, vacantly, as one’s brain works when it is stunned by terror, what was the fate in store for herself.
Even as she wondered, the drawing-room door at the end of the passage was flung open, a light flamed along to where they were. She felt Valentine’s quick movement, knew that his kansu brushed against her arms and face.
The man behind the light saw only Valentine’s white-robed figure. He peered round his lamp; swung it to a level with his eyes.
“Are there more here, O brother of mine?” he shouted in Lusoga. “Have you looked well?”
“I have looked well,” Valentine answered. “There are no more. They lie out there.” He threw out his arms, pointing to the garden.
The man with the lamp laughed. “Good,” he said, “we go now to burn them. Are you not coming, brother? It will make a beautiful sweet-scented fire.”
“Yea,” Valentine answered. “I come, but I move slowly for my foot is hurt. Wait not for me.”
The man was content to take him at his word. The door slammed to, they were in darkness again. Maureen looked up at Valentine. She realised that he had saved her, that he had hidden her behind himself.
“You do not want me to be killed?” she whispered. “Oh, Valentine, why have they done this to the masters? To your Mukyala, who was so good—so good?”
“Yes, she was good,” Valentine admitted in his stiff English. “I know nothing, Mukyala, the other servants know nothing. We were asleep, and we were wakened, and this had come to us out of the night.” He bent over her: “I must go,” he said, “else will they come back to look for me. Go to your room, Mukyala. You must stay there till I come for you. I will come when I can.”
“No,” said Maureen, “I will stay here. I must see, I must know.”
“Very well,” he gave way; “but stay quiet, do not scream, do not cry out.” He turned and went quickly, shutting the far door behind him. There was silence in the passage, heavy, hot silence, weighted with the terror of her own thoughts.
And outside the fantastic dance had finished, the song had ceased. They were shouting at each other now, laughing and jeering as they pulled those three inanimate bodies hither and thither, as they brought wood and stacked it up in a pile. The moon shone on black-skinned bodies, glinted on the steel of spear-heads, and knives slung from shoulders or hips. She could see Valentine standing among a group of the house servants. She could see her own boy, a gnome-like creature, whom she had always rather liked because of his cheerful smile, his evident sense of humour. To-night he looked terribly repulsive. She thought she could detect his laugh, she could see his broad, white teeth, his excited, amused gestures. Even the house-servants seemed amused; they pointed and laughed and nudged each other. Only Valentine stood very erect, very scornful.
How long she crouched there she could not have said. The flames burnt well and swiftly, the heat of the bonfire reached her window, she could feel it against her face, and the stench of it was sickening. Fear was quite numb within her. In a little while, even if they forgot her now, the other servants would remember about her, they would point her out, that man with the lamp would come back and find her. She did not feel she would mind very much. She was so heart-sick with horror that even the instinct of self-preservation, the strongest instinct in humanity, people will tell us, seemed absent. She must have fainted as she crouched there, face hidden in her hands, for when she lifted her head presently it was to darkness and emptiness and stillness on the lawn and in the house. Valentine was standing beside her.
“It is finished, Mukyala,” he was saying; “they have gone.”
She staggered to her feet. “What are you going to do with me, Valentine?” she whispered. “Why have you saved me?”
He watched her with grave face. “As I would have saved the others if I could,” he answered. He looked out over her head. “For twelve years have I served Bwana Durham,” he said. “There was love between us. Why should I have wished him killed?”
“Yes, but how can you save me?” she argued. “In a little while they will come back; wherever you took me they would hunt me out. Oh,” she burst into sudden tears, “I do not wish to live! I would rather lie out there with them. I would rather it were all finished.”
Valentine did not pay much attention to what she was saying. It was only natural that a woman should weep, and he was very busy thinking of other things. He did not believe, for instance, that the murderers would come back. He had not credited their tales of a rising, or put much belief in their boasting that not an Englishman should be left alive in the land. He put the whole thing down to the drink-sodden lust of a certain chief in the district with whom Durham had always been on bad terms. But he was ready to admit that he was not in a very good position to either save or protect the white woman. He did not know if he could trust the other servants. They were excited, maddened by the events of the night. At present they were looting the house, looking for the money which they knew must be somewhere. They would be drunk with whisky and other drinks, not good for native brains, before morning. He quite honestly wanted to save her. It was instinctive, his loyalty to the white people, whom he had served ever since he was a boy. He had as nearly loved Durham as it is possible for a black man to love a white.
“You must go back to your room, Mukyala,” he said, when her sobs had grown quiet. “I do not think they will come back, but to-night it is not safe for you to be seen. To-morrow”—he hesitated—“to-morrow the other Bwanas will be here. They will have word of these doings in Wala. The Bwana police will come out with his men.”
Maureen stopped her crying to look up at him. “But,” she said, “I thought——”
“No,” Valentine shook his head. He always spoke English very slowly, very carefully; his words seemed weighted with deliberation. “It is not what you have thought, Mukyala. I know not what it is, but we, the people, we have not risen to kill our white masters. That I know.”
“But,” she began again, “I saw Ezra—my own boy”—she shuddered quickly, clenching her hands—“he was laughing, shouting out there.”
“I know,” Valentine admitted; “he is but a boy, and the sight of blood made him mad. Not one of us helped to kill them, Mukyala. We would have saved them if we could.”
Maureen turned towards her room. “I will do as yon tell me,” she said. “You have saved my life once. I have to trust you.”
It was perhaps not very gracious, but she could not forget those other dark capering forms outside—Ezra’s broad laughter. After all, Valentine was a native like the others—it seemed a very frail reed on which to put her trust.
It was only 2.30 by the small clock that ticked away so peacefully on the table by her bed, four hours since she had said good-night to the others. Four hours since Tom had pressed her hand and whispered “companions” to her with a smile on his lips. Maureen sat down in the easy-chair Mrs. Durham had insisted on carrying into this room for her, shutting her eyes, gripping her hands. She must banish thought. If she thought of the things that had happened she would surely go mad. She had not loved Tom. Only last night the thought had come to her that it would be impossible for her to have to live out the rest of her life with him. How vile and disloyal the thought seemed now that Tom was dead! She strove to remember their first days together, days when she had thought she loved him, and it led her back to Kenyon and her love for him, from which memories she could only shudder and shrink. And then she tried to pray, and disconnectedly, almost furtively, her prayers resolved themselves into a passionate shield of protection for the man her heart longed to hate and despise.
“God keep him safe—let him escape, whatever happens to me—let me see him once again before I die!”
Valentine on guard outside her door, squatting on his haunches in front of it, dozed uneasily, his head nodding forward on to his knees. The other servants were in some far portion of the house. He hoped that what they found, or hoped to find, would keep them busy till daylight. He was sure something would happen, some rescue force from Wala or a near-by plantation would arrive by daylight. He fell asleep in reality, and presently woke with a start to the consciousness that some one had kicked him. He was on his feet in a second, ready to defend what he guarded, but the dim light in the passage showed him it was no fellow-native in front of him. It was a white man, and with an infinite sense of relief Valentine dropped to his knees and seized the white hand.
“Oh, Bwana Kenyon,” he said, forgetting English in his excitement, “you have come—welcome! welcome! Here there have been much bad doings. My master and mistress, they have killed, and the Bwana doctor! What could we do, Bwana! They came to us out of the night. Only my mistress cried out. The Bwana was killed without seeing. Ah—weh—ah—weh!” He lifted his voice, forgetful now of caution or anything else in a long-drawn-out note of wailing.
Kenyon took him by the shoulders where he knelt, shaking him and dragging him to his feet. He knew him to be Valentine, the Durhams’ head boy. “Shut up,” he commanded, fierce and low; “if you don’t stop that noise, I’ll kill you. There was another white mem-sahib here, Valentine. What of her?”
Valentine drew himself up rather proudly erect. He remembered now to speak in English; his wailing was finished.
“The Mukyala of the Bwana doctor, I have saved,” he said. “She is within.”
Kenyon took his hands away, he put them over his eyes. Valentine thought that he heard him say, “Thank God—thank God!” Then he pulled himself together abruptly, pushing Valentine aside. “If we get through this, I shall not forget, Valentine, he said. “Meanwhile there is much to do.”
His hand was on the handle of the door; Valentine stopped him for a moment. “Bwana,” he said, “have you brought others with you? Have you come alone?”
“Alone,” said Kenyon with stern lips; “but we’ll save her, Valentine. You and I.”
With which he had gone into the room, closing the door behind him again.
It seemed a dream that he should be standing before her. Maureen rose to her feet with a low cry. She, who had been ashamed of her prayers, was conscious now of bitter, fierce resentment that they should have been in so much answered.
“You!” she said quickly. “You—how dare you come here? Don’t you know what has happened? Haven’t you any respect for the dead even?”
It hurt him intolerably that she should look at him like that. He had half dreamt that she would have run to him, stupid conventions laid aside, remembering only his love; that he would hold her in his arms and soothe her terror and pain. He was stung to quick anger that she should be so small-minded, so narrow, with death and terror all round her.
“I am afraid I did not stop to think, Mrs. Simpson,” he answered stiffly. “I heard you were here. I knew you were in danger. I came as best I could. If I could have brought the motor all the way I should have been here earlier; but one man against a horde, I do not suppose I should have been much help to your husband or the Durhams.”
“Wasn’t it rather silly to come like that?” she flamed at him. She was all distraught; she did not know what she was saying. “What did you hope to do!”
“I hoped to save you,” he said; “I still mean to try.”
“You did not mind if they were dead or not!” she said. “Perhaps you even wanted Tom to be killed. Oh, go away, please; please go away!”
She stood facing him, white and anguished, her lips trembling, her eyes misty with tears. He was suddenly not angry any longer, only desperately sorry for her.
“Hush!” he said gently, he came across to her, taking her hands that strove to fight against his. “Hush, you don’t know what you are saying. It has maddened you, what you’ve gone through. I can’t go away, dear one; even if I did not know you or hated you, I could not go away. You are an Englishwoman—I’m an Englishman. I must stay beside you. Put the other things out of your mind. I’m a stranger to you—try and think that. God knows I am not going to remind you of anything else. But I’ve got to save you, if I can. It’s, shall we say, up to me?”
His grey eyes smiled at her; she looked from them to his hands—firm, strong hands, that yet held her so gently. She had always loved his hands. “And I do not choose to be saved by you,” she whispered stubbornly. “I believe I would rather die.”
“I am sorry,” he said, and now his eyes were grim, his face stern. “Then I am afraid I shall have to do it whether you like it or not.”
He flung her hands from him and turned away, and, with a little shuddering sigh, Maureen sank back into the chair and buried her face in her arms.
During his mad rush from Wala to Siota, Kenyon had thought out many plans, but they had all fallen away from him when, on reaching the outskirts of the plantation, he had seen the red light of the fire in the sky and heard the tumult of wild, shouting voices. He had come too late—that was the sickening thought that, for a second or two, stunned him. But even if he could do nothing to save her, he must go to her, he must find her even though he had to find her dead.
He left his car there where the sound first came to him, pushing it aside into the long, elephant grass, and he went for the rest of the way swiftly and noiselessly on foot. He had come to the edge of the neat, orderly garden, and he had stood and watched unnoticed, while the wreckers carried forth their dead, built the pile of their bonfire and danced round it. The singing had mocked his ears as it had mocked Maureen’s. It had made him almost mad enough to rush out into the midst of the revellers, accounting for a few of them at least, with his revolver before the end came to him. But one thing restrained him. Wild as the hope was, he could not help but cling to it. Her body they had not brought out; she did not lie with the others on the smouldering, flaming pile. Perhaps they held her a prisoner, in which case he knew what to do if they brought her out, and he could in no other way save her. Perhaps—and here was the wonderful singing hope in his heart—perhaps she had escaped. It might happen that some of the servants had worked to save her. He had to retreat before the revels finished, for it seemed probable that they would find him standing there; but from a safer point he watched them assemble together to depart; saw that they were in some sense led and commanded by Swadiki, chief of the tribe of Kabola, and that they did not take Maureen away in their midst. Then he waited for half an hour—it seemed in his impatience to be more like an eternity—before he disclosed himself in any way, or went near the house. There was no use running into unnecessary danger. If she lived, there was still so much to do to save her.
Not for a second did Kenyon doubt what Noormahal had told him. The natives had risen. It must come, he knew, as a bolt from the blue to the European community. Before help could be procured, before they could rally sufficiently to make a stand, there would be a great many more scenes like the one he had just witnessed. The only thing that he could do, as far as he could see, would be to drive north in his car as far and as fast as it would take him. The nearest European station in that direction was, he calculated, six hundred miles away. He must make for that, once he had found Maureen—he and she together! He could not help it if love beat so strongly in his heart that, for the time, it shadowed everything else. He ached to hold her and shield her. She would turn to him, surely, forgetting the narrow creed which, so he imagined, had held her from him, when she realised that he and she were alone together in a world of danger and tumult and death. To him that fact alone made all else bearable. He would meet death quite contentedly, so long as she faced it with him, so long as his arms were holding her, hiding her from fear.
The memory of these thoughts surged up in Kenyon and burnt as he stood there watching her cry. He had found her. It had seemed to him when Valentine said those words to him outside the door that the most precious moment of his life had come. All his soul had been in the whispered “Oh, thank God—thank God!” Now every dream lay shattered and broken at his feet. She hated him. It was the same God, that he had thanked so passionately, who had taught her so to hate, who had made her believe that his man’s love was a shameful thing. He felt very bitter. He was minded at one moment to fling out of the room and leave her; but that he knew to be impossible, and after a seconds fierce fight with his disappointment, he turned to her again.
“I am sorry, Mrs. Simpson,” he said; “I put things brutally, stupidly. It is natural that you should hate the sight of me, I suppose. But I am afraid you must try and put up with me; we have got to get away together. I would ask you, if I could find any words that would not make you hate me worse than ever, not to make it harder for me than it is. Believe me, I came, not at all realising that you would feel all this about me.”
“Oh!” she looked up at him and away again suddenly, her tears checked. “I should not have said what I did about you. I know—oh, indeed I know—it is not true.”
“That is all right, then,” he agreed. “Now, Mrs. Simpson, will you do what I ask, forgetting that it is me? Will you get dressed as quickly as you can! Bring something warm with you—a cloak, a blanket, anything you have. I’ll wait outside. Valentine must forage some food for us. We’ll make for Imbali—I think that is the best plan. I am afraid you will be awfully tired, but we must get as far as we can before daybreak. That gives us two hours. Will you do this?”
“Yes,” she agreed, but she did not look at him again. “If you will go, I’ll be ready in ten minutes.”
Kenyon went. Valentine he found still on guard outside the door. Yes, he could find them some food; bread and cold meat and two bottles of water.
In a quarter of an hour’s time the party were creeping from the house, Valentine leading; he knew, from his previous foraging expedition, how to circumvent the other servants. At the foot of the plantation hill, where he had left his car, there was another disappointment in store for Kenyon. His car had gone. The long grass where it had stood concealed was all broken down and trampled. It could only be surmised that the attackers had taken it off with them. Swadiki, he knew, could drive; he had seen him once or twice in a motor borrowed from some Indian in Nuonga bazaar. Any flight northwards was out of the question on the heads of that; Maureen could not walk through the heat of the day and hardly any distance even at night. He felt his plans at a standstill, till suddenly he remembered his own shamba and Hamiz and Noormahal; surely, even Noormahal would help. “The woman whom thou lovest, lord”—she had always been content to call Maureen that. He forgot the bitterness that he had flung at her that last time he had seen her. He did not wait to reckon how fierce hate can be when it has once supplanted love. He thought for the moment only of Noormahal as another woman who would do what she could to help the woman that he loved.
“Will you hate it?” he asked, trying to read Maureen’s face in the dim light. “I can’t see anything else for it. My place lies, roughly, ten miles from here across country—we must make for that.”
“Shall we be any safer there than here?” Maureen asked. He thought her voice trembled.
“I think so,” he said. “I’d trust my own fellows through thick and thin. They’d shelter us whatever happened.”
“We must do what you think best,” she agreed stiffly. “Why should I mind?” She was determined, it seemed, to shut the door on what had been between them.
“Come, then,” he ordered gruffly, and turned to lead the way.
Valentine would have come with them, but Kenyon thought it would be wiser for him to stay behind. They could carry what food they wanted, and Kenyon knew the way; he needed no guide.
“It will be a long walk for you,” he said, as they started. “I don’t know if you are a great walker.”
She made no answer, and for the next hour they walked almost in silence, tramping single file along the narrow native track that led through towering elephant grass. One hour, one hour and a half! Her breathing even hurt Maureen; her feet, in thin, useless slippers, were blistered and cut; her whole body ached with exhaustion.
They were out now on a cleared, barren space of ground; great flat rocks showed among short grass, and away on the horizon the sun was rising—a ball of vivid red in a sky of misty blue. There was just a foretaste of his heat in the damp mists rising from the ground all round them.
“I can’t,” gasped Maureen presently, breaking the silence that had held them for so long. “I can’t walk any farther. It’s no use.” Her breath panted, she stumbled over a stone in the path, and before he could turn to catch her, she had swayed forward in a dead faint.
Kenyon was consternated, for all this time he had purposely not thought of her, turning his brain to solve quick problem after problem rather than let it touch on her or her dislike of him. And he was light-footed and wiry. A ten-mile walk meant nothing to him. She looked so piteous, like a tired child asleep, and he could see her poor, silly shoes all cut and torn, the blood trickling from the foot she had stubbed against the stone. It was only a faint, he knew that, but he could realise also that her strength must be very far spent. And they had only come half-way. He knelt beside her, loosening her dress, pouring a little of their precious water between her lips, and, soaking his handkerchief in it, moistened her forehead and behind her ears. When she stirred and sighed, he stood up and took a keen look all round him. A little to the left of where they were he could discern a wood. Just a tangle of bushes, with one or two large trees grouped, in all probability, round a morass of water. He would carry her there, and put up some sort of shelter for her through the long, hot day. They must not try and go on till night came again.
He stooped and lifted her; she was heavy for him, but his heart glowed with joy under the burden. Only half-conscious, she turned to the shelter of his arms, and nestled into them. Half-way across the space between them and their shelter a false step made him stumble, and the jerk of recovery brought her altogether to her senses. She looked up at him with wide, startled eyes.
“What are you doing?” she said. “Why are you carrying me? Please put me down.”
She struggled, and he held her closer with possessive passion. “You can’t walk,” he said briefly. “You’ve hurt your foot. Please lie still; you make yourself ten times heavier when you struggle.”
Maureen flushed, she was also a little piqued. “I am sorry,” she said; “have you far to go?”
He shook his head, he could not trust himself to answer. And she shut her eyes, lying limp and passive against him.
It was, as he had surmised, a little, almost dried-up pond of water, kept there by the shadow of the trees. A startled herd of buck looked up at their coming, and fled, with a scattering of hoofs, towards the open. Kenyon set Maureen down under one of the trees, and straightened himself.
“There!” he said, with an odd grimace, which hid the feeling he had no wish for her to read; “that is that, Mrs. Simpson. I could not carry you the remaining five miles, and you can’t walk them, so here we are and here we stay. I don’t think this part of the country is inhabited. I don’t suppose we’ll be disturbed unless it is by visitors of that sort,” he pointed to the buck, who had stopped some distance off, and stood outlined against the sky, scenting the air.
“I am sure I could walk,” said Maureen, “after I have had a rest. It won’t be very hot for another three hours, will it?”
“It will be too hot in half an hour,” answered Kenyon. He studied the sky. “I know these cloudless, airless days. And all those mists meant heat, you know. If you feel up to it,” he said, “will you take off your shoes and put your feet in there?” he nodded to the water. “It will ease them, and it is quite clean.”
“I am quite all right,” said Maureen. “I do not think there was any necessity to carry me. I—I hated it.”
“The indignity is over,” Kenyon laughed bitterly. “So we need not argue about it. I am going to erect a shade for you in the shrub there. We will stay as much out of sight as possible, in case any one does chance along.”
He moved away, and left her to bathe her feet. She could see him pulling down branches and erecting hastily devised poles to support a roof of grass and leaves. He was wonderfully deft and quick in all his movements. Her eyes stung with tears as she watched him. When he came back she was drying her feet on the hem of her petticoat, and looked up at him, a flush rising to her eyes.
“I am afraid I seem awfully ungracious,” she said, “ungrateful. You——”
“Nonsense!” Kenyon interrupted; “it is quite understandable. You are in a rotten position, thanks to my eager desire to rush in. You need not try to explain how you feel. Will you let me help you over there now? I’ve rigged up a shelter of sorts, and we had better eat some of that food Valentine provided us with.”
“I am sure I can walk by myself,” she said, and this time it was shyness of his touch that held her, though again he put it down to dislike.
After they had shared a little of the bread and meat Valentine had provided them with, and drunk some of the water, Kenyon suggested that she should lie down and try to sleep. “You are, you know, however obstinate you like to be about it, dead tired,” he said. “I would like you to get some rest. It would promise better for our evening’s walk if you did.”
“I am afraid I am proving myself a terrible nuisance,” she said wistfully. Woman-like, she wanted his praise, his reassurance that no service done on her behalf could be troublesome. But Kenyon had learnt his lesson too bitterly in her first greeting for him to forget it.
“I don’t know about a nuisance,” he said crisply, “a responsibility, certainly. Women are always that. I hope to goodness we find everything all right at my place.”
He went outside while she lay down on the grass he had heaped up into a couch for her. He was not very much afraid of any one stumbling on their retreat, but a water-hole is always of immense value in Uganda, and very often the people will come from miles away in the surrounding country to fill their calabashes, or water-pots. He wanted to be on his guard. Once he looked in on her, and saw her asleep, white cheek pillowed on her hand, the dark lashes shading her eyes. She had taken off her hat,—he had deemed it to be quite safe under the shade of the tree and his improvised shelter,—her hair untidy, breaking loose from its pins, lay about her neck like a soft cloud. How beautiful she was! For if a man loves a woman, to his eyes she is always beautiful. And how she hated and scorned him! He wondered dully how it was that hate had grown, ousting the love that had, for a second, clung to him, that had looked at him out of her eyes when she had said to him, “Your love is as a magic cloak about me.” Very poor magic, since it had so quickly failed. And then he went back to his steadfast watch outside. What was the use of wondering? The thing stood between them like a drawn sword; he had no hope of winning past it.
At noon he heard her stir behind him. She had slept six hours, the deep, quiet sleep of exhaustion. It had brought a faint colour to her cheeks, a little life to her eyes. She moved out and stood beside him. She had smoothed back her hair and put her hat on again.
“What is the time?” she asked; and when he told her, “Have you sat patiently out here all that while?”
Her eyes softened, but that Kenyon did not see, for he was very careful not to look at her.
“Won’t you rest now?” Maureen said presently. “I feel very wide awake. I could call if I saw anything.”
He shook his head. “I’m not tired,” he answered. And still without looking at her, “ You had better stay under that shelter, such as it is. I think it too hot for you out here.”
Maureen went, obediently enough. She knew that her words of this morning had hurt him; she was beginning to wonder if he would never let her win past the barrier they had raised. For, after all, she loved the man—had always loved him. Last night she had been unable to hide that knowledge from God, however well she had succeeded in hiding it from herself. “If there was anything great in me I would go to him now,” she said to herself, “and I would say, ‘Gerald, I was jealous of that other woman. Hold me fast, shut my eyes with your lips; what do other women matter so long as you love me?’” But, alas! they did matter, and how could she think of loving another man, when Tom—who had been her husband, who had loved her—was dead? Dead—dead! The scene swung up in front of her mind’s eyes, to torture her memory. She was watching the dancing figures, Ezra’s grinning face, and those still, quite forms that burnt in the midst of a great fire.
Kenyon heard her little shuddering cry of horror, and stood up, looking in at her.
“What is it, Mrs. Simpson?” he asked. “Is your foot hurting you?”
She looked up at him, the terror still on her face. “No, oh no!” she said, “but my thoughts torture me. I keep seeing them, hearing them!” She shivered, covering her ears.
Kenyon came in quickly. “What a fool I am,” he said; “I ought to have thought of that. Of course, any company is better than your own, isn’t it? Come now, push the things away from you, talk to me, or listen, if you prefer it. I’m great on talking.”
He stayed near her for the rest of the day, talking, he realised, the most outrageous nonsense, repeating to her some of his favourite poems. She dozed off to sleep again when he was in the middle of Swinburne’s “Triumph of Love,” and he let his voice die away into a whisper, saying the verse he liked best under his breath, studying her, now that she could not know he watched her, with passionate eyes:
“There lived a singer in France of old.
By the tideless, dolorous, midland sea;
In a land of summer and sand and gold
There lived one woman and none but she. And finding life for her love’s sake, fail.
< Being fain to see her he bade set sail,
Touched land and saw her as breath grew cold,
And praised God seeing, and so died he.Died, praising God for his gift and grace,
For she bowed down to him, weeping, and said,
Live—and her tears were shed on his face
Ere ever the life in his face had fled.
The hot, live tears fell through her hair and stung
Once, and her close lips touched his, and clung
Once, and grew one with his lips for a space,
And so drew back, and the man was dead.”
“Brother, the gods were good to you.” Kenyon’s heart echoed the words. He stood up and stretched wearily. He very much hoped that when all this was finished, when he had succeeded in saving her, he might find the end of things for himself. “And so drew back, and the man was dead.” He could not hope that his soul would go out on her kiss, but he very much hoped it would go out some way or other, swiftly and soon.
At six, he waked her to finish their food and drink the last of the water.
“Are you going to be able to walk?” he asked, looking at her shoes.
“Well, I can’t let you carry me.” Her second sleep had brought the courage of laughter back to her. “It nearly killed you last time. Of course, I am going to walk.”
“You are not exactly a feather-weight,” he agreed, and sat down to take off his stockings. “We’ll make these into pads,” he said. “They’ll save your feet a little.”
Maureen let him kneel and wind the stockings round her shoes—the colour coming and going in her face as she watched his bent head. She pronounced it a great improvement. “They feel like snow-shoes,” she said, laughing at the sight of her enlarged feet. “I was always too conceited to wear them at home.”
They started their walk more at ease with each other than they had been the night before. A certain new companionship was between them, the result of food shared and discomforts endured. He talked to her as they moved along the path, suiting his pace to hers, pausing to reassure her if he thought she were frightened by dim passing shapes or the far-away howl of a hyena. And tonight they made better progress; dusk had barely yielded its place to the darkness of night, and there was, as yet, no sign of the moon when they came in sight of the long lines of coffee trees that marked the boundary of Kenyon’s plantation. He stopped there and turned to Maureen.
“Will you wait here,” he said, “while I go forward and see if everything is quiet up at the house? If I can find Hamiz he will be able to tell me just how things stand.”
But she put out her hands quickly. “I am frightened,” she said—“you don’t know how frightened. Please don’t go away from me; take me with you.”
“Very well,” Kenyon agreed, but he turned, it seemed, rather brusquely from her hands.
They went very quietly; her shoes were muffled by the stockings wound round them, Kenyon was invariably a lithe, quiet walker. The dim garden grew about them as they stepped out from the coffee trees; the house was quite quiet, almost in darkness. Only one light burnt in the centre room. That would be Noormahal, Kenyon decided. For a second he thought of trying, in some way, to explain the situation to the woman beside him. But, after all, what did it matter? She had pushed him outside her life on that day when she had fled from Nuonga. She had shown him very plainly, since, that she did not regret her decision. How could it interest her to know the story of Noormahal and Noormahal’s presence in his household? Yet it might be as well to prepare the Indian girl for her visitor. Again Kenyon turned to Maureen at the foot of the steps.
“Wait here, at least,” he whispered. “I won’t be out of earshot, and there is a light in the drawing-room. I must see who is there before I take you in.”
All the anger of her hurt pride flamed up in Maureen! She hated him in that second as intensely as she, in reality, loved him.
“You mean, I suppose,” she said, and she did not lower her voice in the least, “that you want to get rid of her before I come in. But as I happen to know all about her, it is rather a waste of time, isn’t it?”
She swept past him up the steps, and as if she had flicked his face with a whip in passing, Kenyon drew back. It was just that moment’s stunned indecision that lost him the game. For, as Maureen reached the top step, he saw the forms that leapt out of the shadows of the verandah to seize her, he saw the sudden movement of the light, and knew that Noormahal stood in the doorway, the lamp lifted in her hands; and behind Noormahal again, he glimpsed the lean, gaunt figure of Ramlika. It was too late to fight, not safe to fire. Maureen’s raised voice, her angry sweep forward, had given the game into the enemy’s hands. He had led her into a trap, that was the sudden sickening thought that shook him. Then, thrusting his revolver out of sight, praying desperately that they might not think to search him, he ran lightly up the steps, and felt the same hands that had caught her clutch at him and drag him roughly forward.
With the lamp held high above her head, Noormahal watched, laughing a little.
Yuzufu’s embuga on the crest of the last hill before you reach the borders of the Indian bazaar, was a large place of many small huts and one central important building. The whole thing is enclosed in a high fence of reeds, and from the road the wide path bordered with trees seems to lead to a veritable village. For Yuzufu is a great chief, and has many dependants, and wives not a few. On the night of the fourteenth, Yuzufu sat in the centre court of his embuga, and held his engoma as Kenyon had truthfully remarked. It had begun at dusk and had gone on intermittently ever since; so that now the moonlight shone down on a crowded scene of noise and clamour.
For, undoubtedly, Yuzufu was excited. A big, broad-shouldered lad,—at the outside he could hardly have shown more than twenty-four years as his age, he possessed one of those essentially good-natured faces sometimes, nay often, to be found among the Central African natives. But with the good-nature went a certain amount of strength.
Yuzufu had small eyes that twinkled and closed up with laughter, he had a wide mouth and magnificent teeth, but there was no receding about his chin, and his nose was distinctly pugnacious. Regal, Yuzufu could very often look, especially when he donned his bronze-coloured coat—a long garment trimmed with the great gold tassels which his soul loved—but ferocious, never. He was as far removed from ferociousness as a very large, massive St. Bernard dog appears to be. The cause of Yuzufu’s excitement in this instance was nothing more thrilling than a tug-of-war. He had trained his own team from amongst the smaller chiefs of his district, and to-day at the sports they had challenged several other teams and defeated them all, including the notoriously victorious police team. Yuzufu knew that a great deal of the victory had had to do with his own immense weight attached to the end of the rope; and now as he sat on the camp-stool, that had been a present from some past District Commissioner, and greatly treasured in consequence, he kept shouting out to his companions all the various points in their weeks of training which had made for victory. He had to shout, because the conversation was conducted to the very loud accompaniment of all Yuzufu’s drums, paraded in honour of the occasion, and in front of Yuzufu six selected singers and dancers kept time to the drums while they danced and shrieked about the great prowess of their chief in the tug-of-war world.
“Many go out against him,” sang the chief singer, an old, lean, rather wheezy man, naked save for a bushy girdle of fur, a tail stolen from some monkey, and the head of a crane fitted as a helmet on to his nodding head. “But one after the other did our great chief pull to the ground in front of him:
“Ah—ah—ah—ah!
Great is the great Chief Yuzufu.”
There were a great many verses to this song, and now and again it was punctuated by a dance in which the old man’s antics strove to resemble a monkey or a dancing crane. But he was evidently very popular, for the crowd shouted and roared its encouragements to his efforts, and Yuzufu laughed heartily whenever he noticed him.
Two great bonfires and sundry torches illuminated Yuzufu and his companion chiefs, who lounged at ease on various camp-chairs, stools, or mats, attired in the long graceful kansu, the national dress of the better-class native. The crowd round them also showed a preponderance of white robes, though here and there was to be seen the scantier bark-cloth garment of the peasant or worker. For all classes were admitted to Yuzufu’s embuga when he held an engoma. He was very open-handed and free with his people. Munroe often remarked that that was one of his great virtues. He would stop and chat with the humblest bakopi that knelt in the dust at his great booted feet, and it was not at all difficult for any one to obtain audience of him.
“Of course, his ideas don’t run along quite the same lines as ours,” Munroe had once confessed, after a morning spent in trying to convince Yuzufu that it was unlawful to cut off a man’s ears when he had been caught stealing; “but all the same he has far more idea of justice than the average native, and he will always listen to the humble side of a quarrel. Might is right—to most native minds—but it isn’t so with Yuzufu.”
So that, on the whole, Yuzufu administered his country and ruled his people—for even under British supervision he still held immense powers in his limited world—wisely and well. And he was very proud of his friendship with the English and his education derived from them. Yuzufu could read and write English; he could talk it, after a fashion; he could play football, and understand how might, exercised against poverty-stricken right, was unfair; and he could captain a tug-of-war team quite as well as the most experienced English schoolboy. Not at all a bad education to face life with.
To Yuzufu therefore, sitting on his rickety camp-stool, his very large feet thrust out in front of him, his hands gesticulating and waving as he shouted his remarks to his friends, came a supplicant. At least so the man had appeared to be at first. An old, still magnificently proportioned peasant, the bark-cloth garment worn slung by a knot from one shoulder, a great staff and water-calabash in his left hand.
“Greeting—lord—Yuzufu Maliki!” he cried, pushing his way through the crowd that watched the dancing, raising his voice so that it was heard above the drums. “I have some news for your ears.” He knelt on the ground, making the low obeisance of peasant to chief, and then he sat back on his haunches and gazed at Yuzufu, quite satisfied that he would get the audience he desired.
“Ah—ah—ah—ah——” sang the wizened dancer, improvising with the wonderful skill it is their pride to cultivate.
“From the ends of the world,
From great chiefs and from the white men
Come messages to our lord, Yuzufu.
Ah—ah—ah—ah!
Great is our lord, Yuzufu.”
Yuzufu signed to him to be quiet and to the drums to cease. He banished the absorbing interest of a stupendous tug-of-war team that would defeat even the white men in the station, and leant forward.
“What is your news,” he asked, “O man from the country of the Kabola?” For Yuzufu was quick to recognise the straight features of the lake tribe.
The man glanced round him as if to assure himself that all present were listening to his announcement. Then he drew himself together and leapt to his feet.
“The men of Kabola,” he cried in a loud voice, “the Chief Swadiki, and his son, Thomasi, go out against the white man. To-night they have passed through your country, Yuzufu; to-morrow, when the white men have been killed, they will hold out to you the hand of peace.”
Yuzufu drew in his large feet sharply. Sitting there on his very rickety throne, he became on the instant kingly; the boy vanished in the man. All round him came the uneasy murmur of people amazed, uncertain.
“Do you talk madness, or is this some strange jest?” asked Yuzufu.
An elderly man pushed forward in the ranks of chiefs—a man with a mild old face, but, undeniably, shifty mouth and eyes. He was Tumbola, late chief of the neighbouring district to Yuzufu, deposed at the beginning of Munroe’s administration because of his fondness for screwing money out of his peasants.
“No jest, this, Yuzufu,” he muttered, “though it may well be madness. For many moons I have heard talk of some such thing. At Nuonga there were those who talked freely, who were ready to lead!”
Yuzufu turned to look at him. “Against the white men?” he said. “Through my country? What talk is this!” He sprang to his feet, facing round on his chiefs. “To-day have we shaken their hands,” he said. “We have played with them the games of children”—he was referring to the sports that both Europeans and natives had taken part in that afternoon. “To-night—is it said—we shall go out to kill! I will not have it.” He swept round on the messenger. “Go you to your Chief Swadiki, O man of Kabola—go you to his son Thomasi—and those of your chiefs who lead their people to this folly—say that I, Yuzufu, will take no hand of theirs in peace if it be stained with the blood of the white man who has been unto me both father and brother. If they do these things to-night, to-morrow will I go out against them, I and my friends, the white men, of whom there will be many left in the land.”
He paused, shaken and hot with his loyalty, and Tumbola put out a firm old hand and touched him.
“O son of my sister,” he whispered, “look well before you leap. There are many in this country, and in the country over the lake, who think it is time that the white men left. Would you stand against your own people in this matter?”
“It is not the will of my own people,” stormed Yuzufu. “There are many who creep amongst us, as you say, Tumbola, with the tongues of snakes and evil in their hearts. I, too, have heard their whispers. But the will of my people is steadfast to my will, and my will you shall have proof of to-night.”
He turned. The man of the men of Kabola had risen, he stood erect, his great staff in his hand, his eyes on Yuzufu’s face.
“At the rise of the moon, Chief Yuzufu,” he said, “the son of the Chief Swadiki, Thomasi, and the black man from over the seas who is with him and those that they lead, passed through Nuonga at the rise of the moon.” He threw up his head and pointed with his staff to where the moon floated clear and a perfect circle half-way across the sky. “Their work will be finished ere now. Is it the hand of peace or the hand of war that I shall say you hold out to them?”
“The hand of war!” shouted Yuzufu; “and now—it shall be now—now.”
With his own hands he snatched the sticks from the drummer of the chief’s own drum, a huge drum that at all engomas stood at Yuzufu’s right hand, but was only beaten on great occasions, such as war or the death of a chief. Once, twice the sticks twirled above his head, then down they came with all the force of Yuzufu’s arms, and the drum thundered forth its summons.
Drums are taught to speak in Africa as buglers speak to the soldiers of the West. War was the call of the drum under Yuzufu’s fierce hands. War! War!
The waiting crowd broke into shouts; they surged forward; their feet moved to the dram’s music. Kansus were thrown aside, spears and knives and unexpected guns swept into evidence.
Wamwila’s two hundred men, meanwhile, were meeting with a very different reception to the one they had planned. Out of the shadows round the P.C.’s house they had leapt, shrieking and yelling, headed by Ramlika and Thomasi, shepherded at the rear by an amazingly active Wamwila. But, where they had looked for no resistance, and a blithe, swift killing of those who slept, they were met by a company of armed eskaries and a fusillade of rifle fire. Where they had expected assistance from the native servants in the various compounds, they encountered fierce and active defence.
Wamwila might dance and foam and shriek; he could not pull the heart back into their dead adventure; and when Yuzufu and his men swept down on the attackers from behind it was to find an already distraught and broken force. Shouts rent the air; shouts of triumph from Yuzufu’s people; shrieks and wild yells for mercy from the foe. Here Wamwila fell, a huddled-up figure of hideousness, his life going from him in a scream of hate. Here Thomasi died; realising at the last the forlornness of his ambition, the uselessness of his schemes. Only Ramlika among the leaders escaped. There were Indians enough in the bazaar eager to see to that. He was mounted on a motor-bicycle and hurried off along the road to Nuonga.
Munroe and Pearce stood on the steps of the P.C.’s house and watched the final rout. Among the heaving, yelling mass of men, breaking and flying in all directions, hotly pursued by the new force which had joined the battle, Munroe fancied he could detect Yuzufu’s stalwart figure.
“Yuzufu!” he said. “ Oh, thank God!”
“We really had ’em beat before his arrival,” Pearce pointed out to him, jealous for his own eskaries. “It’s been a very abortive rising—eh, Munroe?”
“Yes,” the other agreed. But the thankfulness in his heart had not been so much for their assured safety as for the proved loyalty of Yuzufu, a lad whom he had trained and loved.
Later, with the house quiet now, with the ladies and children settled off to sleep, Samuels and Munroe received Yuzufu and a deputation of prominent Indians from the bazaar. There was honesty in Yuzufu’s face, in the quick, eager explanation of how he had sat in his embuga listening to his drums and his singers, and of how the man of the men of Kabola had stood before him and delivered his message.
“With my own hands I beat the drum of war,” said Yuzufu. “Not one of my men held back. We fought for you, Bwana; we are still ready to fight.”
“And of these doings we knew nothing, honoured sir and P.C.” said the spokesman of the Indians. “Much fear have we known this night, quaking in our shoes lest evil should befall you who are our protectors and our friends.”
That, too, might be true. Munroe concealed his doubts, and the P.C. accepted their assurances gravely.
“What the Hades is the meaning of it all, Munroe!” he said, as the last deputiser went away. “Who hired this band of assassins? financed them! led them! And is this all of it? Does it end here?”
Munroe’s mind leapt to Chandra Lal, and Chandra Lal’s house in Nuonga. Was it not probable that all the trouble had started there?
“You heard Yuzufu’s story, sir. Swadiki is head of the Kabola—that young man whom Yuzufu handed over to us as a dead prisoner is his son. As for the financing, well, Swadiki has, for years, been very heavily in debt to one Chandra Lal. I think Chandra Lal will have to be deported, and, if we catch him, Ramlika will have to be hanged.”
He told, very briefly, his glimpse of Ramlika, his uneasy suspicion, and Kenyon’s visit to Chandra Lal’s house. The night finished as he was talking, the sun swept into being over the lake. Servants, soft-footed and deft, passed in and out of the house, getting breakfast ready, spreading a large table on the verandah for all the P.C.’s guests.
“As for whether it ends here,” added Munroe, “I am a little afraid it mayn’t.” He stood up. “To my mind, that man,” he pointed down the drive, “looks as if he brought bad tidings.”
Mud-flecked, panting, his face seamed with dust and sweat, terror still staring from his eyes, Valentine’s messenger staggered up the path and dropped exhausted at the foot of the steps.
“They have murdered the Bwanas and the Mukyalas,” he wailed. “They have burnt the house. All through the night have I run to give warning. Ah—weh! Ah—weh! Ah—weh! Ah—weh!”
Thrust into a small room together, the door locked behind them, their guards gathered outside, Maureen and Kenyon touched hands for a moment in the dark—she swaying towards him in an agony of fear and repentance.
“It was all my fault,” she whispered. “Oh, what will they do with us? What does it mean?”
He held her very close, for marvellously she seemed content to stay in his arms. Quite regardless of their danger, or perhaps because they stood so near to death, and she was willing to forget and forgive, his heart sang suddenly with joy.
“My dear, I haven’t the slightest idea,” he answered. “And I am not sure even that I mind very much. You are near to me; nearer than you’ve been for months. The hate has gone out of your heart, hasn’t it! Indeed, I would be content to die on this.”
Poor Maureen, striving to understand a nature as different from hers as the sun is to the moon, the very gladness of his voice shocked her. All the repression of her training rose in arms against the pressure of his hands.
“Please, let me go,” she said stiffly. He was quick to notice the stiffness. “I was frightened; but I think we should try and talk things out quietly.”
He loosed her at once, and she groped her way back from him with her hands. “I believe we must be in a cupboard, or store,” she said. “I can feel shelves all round.”
“Probably,” he agreed. “What shall we talk about? Oh, Maureen, Maureen—in the little space that is left us—I don’t believe they will let us live long, dear heart—let us find each other again. For God’s sake don’t hide yourself behind that barrier of convention, or whatever it is. You loved me, Maureen. Couldn’t you love me again just for a little?” His voice broke; she had a horrible feeling that he was shaken beyond all reserve.
“That other woman,” she managed to say. She stood—if he could have seen her—very erect, her hands behind her, her eyes accusing.
“Oh, my dear, my dear,” he pleaded; his voice was soft now, it held all the tenderness that in the old days she had learnt to look for in his eyes. “This woman—that woman—the pitiful sordidness of all my life—-and you the one great golden truth. There might be five hundred women like her in my life and it would make no difference to my love for you.”
“But I am not like that,” said Maureen slowly. “I cannot understand it—or”—her voice fell very low—“or forgive.”
“You don’t believe I love you?” he asked.
She threw back her head a little. “I know you love me,” she answered. “But you are content to drag love through the mud. I—I cannot touch it after that. Oh!” she went on passionately. “What is the use of all this stupid talk? You are different from me. You would never understand. Perhaps all men are like you. I don’t know. Tom loved me—there was never any other woman in Tom’s life. And you laugh at things I call sacred. To you love is a game. You don’t mind who you play it with or where. And I—I meant to give up God, because I loved you and He seemed to stand between!”
“And if love is a game to me,” he said presently, very bitterly, “what is there to prevent me taking what I want now!” He broke off short. She could hear his breathing, and then his voice again, quick and uneven. “I am sorry, that was a damnable thing to say. There is no meaning behind it. I hope to God that nothing in this life or the next will hurt you as you have hurt me.”
He moved. She could hear him strike a match, the faint glimmer showed her shelves and tins of jam and marmalade and fruit stacked in orderly array before it went out again.
“They have left me my matches,” he said, and now his voice was quite ordinary, “though they’ve taken my revolver, damn them. It’s the store right enough. I know where there are some candles. Sit down, Mrs. Simpson. I’ll get a light in a minute, and then we will have to think. Thinking is a pretty bitter amusement,” he added to himself.
She stayed where she was while he found a candle and lit it, sticking it upon one of the shelves, shielding it with an array of tins and packets, to keep as much of the light from their guards as possible.
“We ought not to starve here.” There was an apology for laughter in his eyes. “I wonder how long they’ll give us.” He turned to look at her. “I hope you will believe I did not mean to lead you into this trap,” he said.
“Of course, I believe that,” Maureen answered stiffly. She could not suit her moods to his lightness. She had been shaken by the agony in his voice, and here he was almost laughing—facing her, anyway, with laughter in his eyes.
Kenyon was busy piling some empty boxes together to make himself a foothold. “There should be a window somewhere about here,” he said. “It can’t be bunged up. Not that we can either of us get through it, but I might be able to attract Hamiz.”
He stood on tiptoe, pushing his head through the small square window. The store faced, he knew, towards the servants’ quarters, but they stood—-he had taken great pains to see to that—well out of sight and earshot. Still, a whistle might reach Hamiz—a low, clear-toned whistle. He had taught the man to recognise it as a call; thinking, in his game of spying, that there might come moments when such a signal between them would be useful. He waited for a few minutes after his first whistle, his ears strained to hear, and it seemed to him that, very faintly, the sound came back.
“Now,” he said, “that is better. With Hamiz at hand, much is possible.” He swung to his feet beside Maureen. “You are going to agree to do everything I tell you?” he said. “You do believe, don’t you, that I am doing the best I can for you?”
He was very close to her. The troubled colour flamed to her face and died away again. “Of course,” she said again. “I know that you will do the best you can.”
“Good!” he said; “so much to the good.” The faint echo of a whistle sounded nearer—questing, it seemed to be, for its direction—and very softly Kenyon sent the answer back. “Now, listen!” he went on to Maureen. “ By hook or by crook I am going to push you through that window to Hamiz. It’s not so small as I thought it was, and you are slight, thank God. It won’t be an easy job; you’ve got to help all you know. I can trust Hamiz to carry on the good work if you’ll promise to do exactly as he tells you.”
“But you?” Maureen asked. He had turned from her again to the window, moving things aside, making the climb easier for her.
At her question a grim smile twitched his mouth. “Oh, dearest and most contrary of women,” he thought to himself, “who has no use for my love and yet cannot let me go!”
“I?” he answered. “Oh, well, I haven’t thought out my own way of escape yet. I couldn’t get through that window at the moment. I may have time to widen it. But I cannot see that what I do can affect you very much, Mrs. Simpson.”
“How can you say that!” she began passionately; but he was already on tiptoe on the boxes again, peering out into the night.
Hamiz was there, a rather bewildered Hamiz, standing in the middle of the empty space staring about him. He had certainly heard his master’s whistle, he had answered, and it had answered him again. But how could his master be anywhere near here? What could it mean? Perhaps the whistle had been a ghost whistle. Hamiz shivered, glancing behind him. There had been many ill deeds done in the last twenty-four hours; might it not be the soul of his master that whistled to him, wanting service even beyond the grave? And then, in the blurred outline of the house, high up, the shadow of a head moved, a hand waved.
“Hamiz!” whispered Kenyon. “Hamiz, here, under the pantry window.”
Hamiz moved quickly, silently. He stood pressed flat against the wall, his dark body merging into its shadow. He stared up at Kenyon. “Oh, Bwana, what ill thing is this?” he asked.
“Ill enough,” answered Kenyon. By hanging his head out as far as he could get it, his mouth was almost on a level with Hamiz’s ears. He whispered as much of their story as it was necessary for the native to know.
“The woman must be saved, Hamiz,” he ended. “I give her to you. It is a greater trust than ever I have yet given. See that you do not fail.”
“What will you do, Bwana,” asked Hamiz, “if I take the Mukyala?”
“The first thing in obedience is to ask no questions,” Kenyon answered briefly. “Show that you have learned my teaching well, Hamiz.”
He stepped back and held out his hand to Maureen.
“Come!” he said. “It’s not a comfortable journey, I am afraid, but you must manage it. See, your foot here, then kneel on this shelf and wriggle yourself through. I’ll help, and Hamiz is ready to catch. Ah, don’t be afraid! Fear is not going to help you, and, really, believe me, I think there is little time to waste.”
“I am not afraid,” said Maureen, “but, don’t you see, I can’t go and leave you here! I would rather stay with you,” she met his eyes bravely, the colour in her cheeks, “and meet what comes.”
“Even if I believed you,” he answered, “I would not let you do it. Please do as I suggest, Mrs. Simpson. You drive me to rather desperate truth. It is your presence here that spells danger for me. Without you, the lady, whom you so scorn to be associated with, will see that no harm comes to me. Such as she understands the word, she—loves me.”
It was brutally said, he meant it to hurt her, to sting her to intolerable pride, and he met the scorn in her eyes without wincing, even smiling a little.
There was no time to waste; even now his quick ears thought he could detect sounds outside the door, as though there was some movement on foot among their guards.
“You will go?” he said, and held out his hand.
“There is not much else to do, is there?” said Maureen, “since you have put it like that. I thought——” Something choked in her voice; she moved forward abruptly so that he should not see the quick, unwilling tears.
He knew she was crying, then, and the thought hurt horribly. Yet for the sake of quickness, so necessary if she were to be saved, he could keep his voice cheerful, unaltered.
“Not head first,” he called up softly to her, where she crouched on the shelf. “You’d land on your head, Mrs. Simpson, which would be a shook to both you and Hamiz. It is no use being proud; you have got to let me help you.” He stood up on the boxes again, and, folding her skirt round her ankles, guided her feet through the window. “Now, turn round towards me,” he ordered, “hold on to my shoulders, twist and turn till you have got your hips through, after that you’ll drop, and Hamiz will catch you.”
And then, just at the end, as her hands clung desperately to him, as her wet, upturned face brushed against his, he let his lips for a second brush against hers.
“You won’t grudge me that, afterwards, when you have come to know what love is,” he said, and let her go, pushing her away with gentle hands.
He could look out for a second, and see that she was safe, standing upright in the shadow by Hamiz; he had time to whisper his final orders. “Quick, Hamiz, as far away as you can get her!” Then he heard the key turning in the lock of the door, and he had to spring down, upsetting the boxes by which he had climbed, snuffing the candles as he jumped. He would be in the darkness, they in the light. He wanted to see in what form death was coming to him before he faced it. He was not afraid, but her cold, wet lips against his had shaken him for a moment out of his self-control.
As he had half expected, it was Noormahal who stood without in the circle of light, the natives who had seized him and thrust him in here grouped behind her. He could catch no sight of Ramlika, and for that he was grateful. Noormahal, he felt, would be easier to deal with alone. For the moment, time was everything gained. He stayed well in the shadows, pressed against the shelves, and Noormahal had to raise her lamp and peer within before she saw him.
“You are there, Keenyon?” she asked in her most dulcet tones. “And the lady—your friend?”
“The lady has fainted,” said Kenyon. He moved out to stand in the lamplight. “I have laid her on the ground and pillowed her head upon a sack of onions, I think. What would you with us, Noormahal!”
“Ah!” she answered softly. “What would I with you, Keenyon? You, whom I have loved, who have lain in my arms and tasted of my lips!”
“As I have lain,” he agreed, and dropped quickly to his knees in front of her. “As I would lie again, O ‘Rose of All the World’—just once before I die.”
He was talking to gain time. Making love to save—oh, not his own life—thank God that shame could not lie at his doors!—but to save Maureen’s—Maureen’s.
Noormahal studied him through half-closed eyes. His voice thrilled her, it had always had the power to do that; the touch of his lips against her hand weakened her pride, shook her hate. She was quite regardless of the watching natives. Ramlika, she knew, lay quiet for the night, heavily drugged.
“And what of the other woman, O Keenyon—she, whom your soul loves?”
He shrugged his shoulders with seeming indifference, moving and standing very close to her. “Soul love,” he said softly; “how shall that count, O ‘Rose of All the World,’ against the love which clamours in my blood and on my lips?”
She looked up at him, mocking a little. “You would save your body from death, Keenyon. Think you that I am such a fool?”
“Nay,” he said quickly. “My death is certain. How could you save me, even if you would, Noormahal? Only I would not have you push this woman between the life that is left to me and you.”
Still she watched him with half-mocking eyes. “You would spend your last night in my arms?” she said. “And leave her here?” She nodded towards the darkness to where she supposed Maureen’s body to be stretched.
“Yes,” he answered softly, and felt his throat dry as he saw acquiescence leap into her eyes. So much time gained for Maureen—so much more shame earned for himself.
“So be it,” said Noormahal. She swept round on the amazed natives. “Now—get you gone,” she ordered. “Come in the morning; there will be work for you to do.”
She held the lamp up, and signed for Kenyon to follow her, shutting the door and locking it behind her.
“Think you she will sleep well and dream of you, Lord Keenyon?” she asked.
And Kenyon, lifting his head for a second, looked out beyond her to the darkness of the garden.
“I pray to God she may,” he answered—only he said it in English, which rather annoyed Noormahal. “But not to dream of me. I lie beyond the sweetness of her dreams.”
The remaining members of Swadiki’s rebel horde, and Swadiki himself, were captured at the edge of the lake under the great towering rocks of the tombs of the old Kabola kings. Swadiki had turned thither, back to his birthright of greatness in the end; and he died fighting, his back against the rocks—a certain dignity and fineness about his death that all his life he had sadly lacked. Pearce and Munroe, with a company of eskaries and Yuzufu, had started in pursuit the day after the affair at Wala. Other tides of disaster had come to hand; there was much to be avenged. For, if the attack on Wala had failed with pitiful meanness, Ramlika’s sowing had not proved so barren elsewhere. Five European houses in the outlying district had been sacked and burnt; ten Englishmen and women had been murdered; and everywhere there reigned the same horror and consternation at the deed among the countryside people.
Munroe and his detachment, with Yuzufu in attendance, passed through the Durhams’ plantation, stood in the ransacked garden and listened to Valentine’s account of the night’s doings. The other servants, sober and terrified by now, had fled back to their various shambas; there was only Valentine left, Valentine and that pile of smouldering ashes to show of the night’s work. And it was then that Munroe heard of Mrs. Simpson’s escape, of Kenyon’s arrival and their subsequent flight. They had gone to Kenyon’s shamba. Valentine could tell him that, and in all probability they would be safe enough there, for Swadiki’s force had not swept over that part of the district, and no tale of murder or destruction had reached Munroe from Nuonga.
“It is almost as though Fate meant them for each other,” thought Munroe, and for a moment his mind touched on a sense of envy for the swift excitement of romance that had always seemed to surround Kenyon’s life. Only for a moment—because, after all, Munroe was all the time morbidly conscious of Tom Simpson and Tom Simpson’s death.
He had to go on anyway. The wreckers had left a clear path behind them. He could only hope that Kenyon, as soon as he found there was, in reality, no such thing as a general rising, would take Mrs. Simpson back to Wala as quickly as possible. Alice would take her in and be good to her, and if they were going to openly declare their love it must not be yet awhile, not until a decent interval had been allowed to elapse.
So thought Munroe, and he hastened on, passing through one other plundered shamba and joining forces with Pearce just on the outskirts of Swadiki’s mutala. They had hardly expected to meet with resistance. It was evident that word of the disaster suffered by Wamwila had spread with the surprising rapidity with which news does travel among a savage people. But they had not thought to reckon with the force of influence which lay round that massive mound of rocks where old kings lie buried. In Wala the men of Kabola had broken and run distraught with fear before the steady rifle fire; here, in their own country, guarding the land that was sacred to them, they made a most stubborn resistance. Round the rocks the fight, intermittent, for at most times of the day the defenders succeeded in remaining concealed, waged for a day and a night. And then, at last, the end came. Swadiki’s figure, outlined for a moment against some gaunt slab of rock, an eskarie dropped on one knee, the steady rifle pointed, aimed, the stinging bullet that fled through the air, the wild up-flung arms, the hoarse shriek. Swadiki, last of the Chiefs of Kabola, lay, a still, silent figure, his blood staining the earth and trickling through to the dust of those who had been his fathers.
“I am glad he died fighting,” said Munroe, “and that boy, Thomasi. If they hadn’t, we should have had to hang them, or deport them. Their lives would have been finished, maimed. I hate them to end like that.”
After that there was very little more trouble. Only one thing disturbed Munroe—the continued absence of Ramlika. For Ramlika he looked upon as the most dangerous ringleader.
“He has got to be found,” he told Pearce, as they made their way homewards with their shouting, singing eskaries, and their few silent prisoners. “We will go round by Nuonga, if you don’t mind, Pearce, and rope in Chandra Lal. I think I can put the fear of the Lord into him.”
“All right,” agreed Pearce, and the safari turned aside, on to the cross-country road that Chandra Lal had travelled on his new motor-bicycle but little more than a month earlier.
Hamiz had fulfilled his trust to the best of his ability, with reservations. From the shadow of the wall he had led Maureen with swiftness across the intervening open space, and he had smuggled her into his hut without any observations from his fellow-servants. In the dim light, with her dark dress and a cloth pulled about her head, she might have passed for a native woman, had there been any one to see; but, as a matter of fact, there had been no one.
After that, however, Hamiz hesitated. He swung between obedience and an obstinate desire to stay near his master. And in the end he compromised, leading Maureen during the night to the house of his aunt on the hill half-way between Mamwirta and Nuonga. Hamiz’s aunt was a withered old dame, the only one of his relatives who had survived the march in search of food that Hamiz’s family had set out on seven years ago. When the huts, in which Kenyon effected his various disguises, had first been built, Hamiz had installed his old aunt in charge there. She was of necessity silent, because she could not bring her old tongue to master the difficulties of the English language, and because she was by nature very reserved and suspicious. Hamiz decided to leave Maureen in her charge and get back himself as quickly as possible to see what had happened to his Bwana.
Ushered into the gloom and smoke-laden atmosphere of the old woman’s hut, Maureen crouched down on the stool pushed forward for her, and sat in a seeming stupor of apathy while Hamiz explained matters to his aunt. Indeed, she saw and heard nothing of what was happening round her. Every bone in her body ached with hopeless fatigue, and the tears she had cried during the night had left her brain stupid, incapable of thought or fear. From time to time as she sat there long shivers shook her, and a little moaning sound came from her lips. Fever was mounting up in her veins, brought on by fatigue and exposure. And with the fever came strange muddled memories of horrors that her eyes had seen and horrors that her brain had imagined. Kenyon’s figure was always before her; his face, white and set; the tenderness in his eyes, the laughter that so mocked her on his lips. And then the vision would shift, and she would see him standing to face that opening door alone where she had left him. His last kiss burnt on her dry lips. “When you have come to know what love is,” he had said. Ah, surely, she had come to know it now, was learning it in every throb of agony that her regret brought her! Why had she doubted and distrusted and scorned? “And you the one great golden truth.” How pitifully she had worn the honour he gave her! And now it was too late. For by now he must be surely dead, and truth and falsehood and sordidness and glory were blotted out in the last grey shroud of death.
Hamiz, his recital finished, stood up. “The Mukyala is ill,” he said, keen eyes on Maureen’s face. “See how she shakes and mutters and sees us not at all. Oh, Merisiama, make her a bed, throw blankets over her, heat milk for her to drink. In the morning I shall be back and we will see what is to be done. But guard her well.”
Not that the old woman did much guarding or tending. She was annoyed that her peace had been thus invaded, and she had always had scant patience with Hamiz and Hamiz’s devoted service to his master. Certainly she shook together a bed for Maureen, and heated some milk, placing it beside the white woman in a none too clean earthenware dish; but there her services ended. She curled herself up in her own corner of the hut, and fell into the sound, untroubled sleep of an old life-weary animal. Maureen neither drank the milk nor lay down in the bed. She crouched lower where she sat, and her hands trailed along the floor, while her eyes stared out in front of her, bright, restless, fever-laden. All night she talked and whispered and called out on Tom and Mrs. Durham and Gerald—Gerald, who stood far off from her, and mocked her with laughing eyes; till just before morning her grandmother seemed to stand beside her, stiff held in the black silk dress with white at wrists and neck that Maureen remembered so well.
“You are not behaving at all as I taught you to,” the grave, stern voice said, yet there was tenderness in the eyes; “and you are very tired—you should go to sleep, my child.”
Maureen no more thought of arguing with the vision than the child Maureen would have argued with the reality. She slid to the floor and, head pillowed on her arms, fell asleep.
When she woke up the cold sweat of retreating fever was sending the shivers coursing over her body again, and Hamiz was once more in the hut.
“Mukyala,” he said, speaking slowly, “the Bwana is well and safe. They have not killed him, they will not kill. He has said to me, ‘Take the Mukyala in the car to Wala, to the house of Bwana Munroe.’”
But it was quite evident that she neither understood nor heard, and it occurred to Hamiz that she was probably very ill.
“There is nought for it,” he said, turning to the old woman, “but that you must come too. I cannot both drive the car and see to her as well.”
Merisiama had never been in a car before, nor did the idea appeal to her. Maureen, however, did the drive in to Wala, her head resting on the old woman’s shoulder, her hands fast held in the other’s skinny paws. And it would have been difficult to say which was the most uncomfortable, only that Maureen knew neither comfort nor discomfort, nor time nor place. She was unconscious when they lifted her out of the car, still unconscious when the doctor, a new arrival from Kampala, was brought in to see her. When she was coaxed back to life, by every means at their disposal, it was only to wake to the rising torrent of her own thoughts, and a temperature which, the doctor surmised, must end in death unless they could bring it down in the next twenty-four hours.
Munroe found a letter from Alice waiting for him when he and Pearce reached Nuonga.
“Mrs. Simpson is here,” Alice wrote. “Poor dear, she is very ill. Malaria again—made worse by sort of brain fever, the doctor from Kampala says. Of course she has been through the most terrible experience. She has hardly been able to talk about it, but she said she saw her husband murdered. Jim—she lived through the night of terror. And then Mr. Kenyon seems to have behaved very extraordinarily, though she keeps on saying, when she is delirious, that he saved her life, and gave his own to do it.
“But the man who brought Mrs. Simpson in, who is a servant of Mr. Kenyon’s, says that his master is alive and quite safe, but that he did not wish to come in with the Mukyala. I must say I don’t understand it. But, perhaps, if you are at Nuonga you will be able to find out something. I think it would be a great relief to her mind—and, poor woman, she is too ill to quite know how she gives herself away—if she were to know that he was safe. It is all very terrible, Jim; but I suppose Fate is sometimes too strong for people, and I always knew that Mrs. Simpson’s life was very empty. She had no children, and Dr. Simpson seemed a selfish sort of husband. But, of course, she will forgive that now. And even if there had been no children for us, Jim, I am sure I should never have wanted to love any one but you!”
Alice’s letters were like herself, always rather inconsequential, but fundamentally sweet. Munroe kissed the letter—rather a sentimental proceeding for a man who had been married six years—and stuffed it into his pocket.
“I am running into Kenyon’s shamba this afternoon,” he said. “Will you come, Pearce?”
Chandra Lal had been all obsequious eagerness to do what he could for them. He had not yet been told of the probable fate in store for himself, and he was anxious to make things as smooth for himself as possible. So it was on Chandra Lal’s motorbike that Munroe and Pearce covered the distance between Nuonga and Mamwirta. They rode up to the door of an apparently tenantless house. The garden, in these few weeks of neglect, had gone back to a wilderness. Grass and weeds grew everywhere,—smothering the flowers, hiding the beds where the broken lilies had grown,—and the steps of the house were dirty, unbrushed.
“I don’t believe he is here,” said Munroe. “I——”
But Pearce interrupted. “Some one has been here,” he said. “Look, Munroe! there has been murder and death or something. A heavy body dragged down here. See, that is dried blood!” He pointed to great smears on the steps. “And the grass has been trampled down not recently—it must have been some time ago. Now——+”
He straightened himself, and Munroe sprang past him with an inarticulate shout.
Kenyon stood on the steps above them. A barely recognisable Kenyon, haggard, unshaved, and in his arms he carried a limp, inanimate bundle—something that looked almost like a doll dressed in tinselled finery, veiled in pink, gold bangles on wrists and ankles, gold thread plaited into soft, black hair.
“Kenyon!” Munroe shouted again. He was up the steps three at a bound—he was standing beside his friend—and with strange eyes Kenyon turned to look at him.
“Ramlika is dead,” Kenyon said, his lips moved stiffly—“four days ago. I buried him in the garden myself. She”—he looked down for a second at the thing he carried—”she died this morning. Poor ‘Rose of All the World!’” he added softly.
For a shocked moment Munroe almost fancied that there was love in his voice.
Drugs! Of what avail were drugs to a mind like Ramlika’s? To a tortured soul that fought and groped and screamed for life beneath memories that stifled, beneath horrors that appalled? His madness was working to its predestined end. The madness that had first come to him from Noormahal, that would slake itself only upon her heart’s blood. But this, as yet, Ramlika did not know.
He had come back to Noormahal. Through all these weeks her face and form had denied and beckoned and retreated and mocked just beyond his reach. On that last despairing ride from Wala it had been her face that had glimmered and lured him in the moonlight. He had gone straight to Chandra Lal’s house, and Chandra Lal, terrified, anxious at all costs that Ramlika should not be found on his premises, had given the necessary information as to her whereabouts eagerly enough.
She was hiding at the shamba of Bwana Kenyon. She had been there for the last month. Ramlika asked no questions—he had no need to. He knew that he was going to kill her, not immediately, but afterwards, when she had given him all that his soul hungered for of her youth and beauty and grace.
And when he reached Noormahal the red flame of hate against Kenyon was burning in her heart. He could see that. Even behind his madness she could make him realise the truth of her hate. It altered his plans. Now he must wait a little longer till, together, they should take their revenge off the white man, and then, when that was accomplished, he would kill Noormahal and die himself.
How could she hope to soothe such thoughts and keep them silent by drugging the brain that produced them? Gaunt and still, Ramlika sat on where she had left him, but his eyes brooded and planned in the stillness, and he was not by any means asleep or as opium-bound as she had imagined. He was thinking how veritably the gods had played into his hands in the arrival of Kenyon. There need be no searching for him; he had walked straight into their arms. Perhaps there was something in the gods after all. For years Ramlika had mocked at belief. How should he do otherwise? The men of the Western world had taught him to see the falsity in his own old religion. They had not been able to show him anything in its place. The Brahmins lived nearer to their belief than the Christians, and both built all their hopes on the shadow or shadows of a dream. So thought Ramlika. But to-night his mind was stirred by the old primeval passion of worship for Shiva. Shiva the Destroyer and Creator.
“In the rise and fall of my lightest breath
Is the might incarnate of Lust and Death!”
Shiva the Destroyer! His mind visioned the pulsing joy of Death! Of red blood that flowed, of nerves that leapt and quivered with agony!
And then he lifted his head and realised that Noormahal was no longer in the room beside him. She had been sitting at his feet, her head against his knees. It was her fingers that had filled and passed the pipe to him. Ramlika staggered to his feet—his fingers were already clutched about the knife. Not that he, for the moment, doubted her good faith; but the weapon had never been very far from his hands during the last few days.
Fingering it, his feet unsteady, his eyes mist-held, Ramlika lurched out on to the verandah. It was moon-swept, wonderfully clear. The faint scent of coffee blossoms was in the air, and a little moisture: soft rain heralding the approach of the storm that lay banked all along the line of the horizon. For a second Ramlika stood swaying, and in that second his eyes cleared and his brain took in the meaning of the sight in front of him. At the top of the steps, on a carpet dragged from the centre room, with cushions flung about them to lend luxurious ease, sat Kenyon and Noormahal. She rather lying, her head against his shoulder, her arms flung upwards round his neck. And all her pliant body was at ease against his limbs, while she whispered to him how her hate was but the dreaming of a fevered brain; how love must rule triumphant whatever he did or left undone; how to save him, her one lord and master, from the least thought of pain, she herself would gladly face death and torture.
“Only desert me not—dear my lord Keenyon,” she was whispering. “Next time that you most go, leave me behind you, dead. I cannot live knowing that you have gone; that some other woman holds you as I have held you; that your eyes speak to her as they have spoken to me.”
Kenyon listened with dry lips and throat that ached. It was all so much time gained for Maureen—but oh, the shame that ate into his heart, that dulled his pulses! It was true he had always played at love; the scorn in Maureen’s eyes had been right. He had played with it, covering it with the dust of his desires, till love’s poor wings, all smirched and torn, could no longer fly. He had “dragged love through the mud,” as she had said. He would have to be content henceforth with the poor thing which he made of love. There could be no more great golden truth for him in life.
It was Kenyon who saw Ramlika first, as on that other occasion in Chandra Lal’s house. He scrambled to his feet, only now he attempted to thrust Noormahal behind him, to shield her from what he could see shining in Ramlika’s hands.
“Do you know where my revolver is?” he whispered. “The man is mad; I shan’t be able to fight him with my hands.”
“On the table in the room in there!” she panted.
“Go quick, my lord, quick!”
It was, he thought, their only chance. He had no idea of what it was she meant to do. Perhaps Noormahal scarce knew herself. Her love for Kenyon was the strongest force in her life. She had not as yet fathomed its depths or strength.
Ramlika saw them separate. He saw Kenyon move to the room, and Noormahal stand where she had been left. For an instant he wavered, his hands moving in indecision upon his knife, and then he swung round and moved like some silent stalking animal after Kenyon. He would reach the white man, it seemed, before Kenyon could get to the room. It was then that her great purpose flashed on Noormahal; then that she came to know the heights and depths of her love, and what it meant to her. With a little laugh she slipped forward, her anklets tingling as she moved, and at the sound Ramlika swept round. She knew it was death coming to meet her. With arms flung out, with lips just faintly laughing, she met it; but as the knife stabbed into her throat she saw Kenyon in the doorway of the lighted room, knew that he held the revolver, that he would be safe.
“Lord!” she cried. Kenyon heard her; it sometimes seemed to him that he would hear nothing else till the end of his days. “’Tis for you! Now, fire, for see——” The voice choked on a rush of blood, she crumpled up and sank down, and Kenyon fired, the echoes of his revolver shutting out all other sounds from his ears.
The place was seemingly deserted. His shot brought no one, and those two huddled figures lay horribly still and motionless before him. Kenyon moved presently. He felt sick and shaken, but he must do something to free Noormahal’s body from the black weight that lay over her.
Ramlika was quite dead. Kenyon’s bullet had gone through his brain. His teeth were still bared in a savage grin, his eyes were glazed and horribly staring. But Noormahal was alive. She stirred faintly under Kenyon’s hands, the long lashes wavered above her eyes.
“Lord Keenyon,” she whispered, and, with a choking sob, Kenyon gathered her up in his arms and carried her into the house. The wound in her throat, reaching right down to one of her perfect breasts, was long and jagged and deep. It must in the end spell death. He bathed her and tended her with gentle hands, found brandy in the store, and forced some between her teeth. And as the hot spirit stung life into her veins, she opened her eyes again, and smiled at him.
“You are safe, Noormahal,” he said. He knelt beside the bed so that his face should be the nearer hers. “ And Ramlika is dead. There is no more to fear.”
“Nay, I fear not,” she whispered, “even though this be death, my lord.
“I shall hold you more firmly in death than in life, Keenyon,” she said later. “I am content to die.”
He could not argue with her, he had not the heart. He could only do for her the little things that seemed to give her pleasure or ease her pain. She liked to lie in his arms, she liked to feel his hands smoothing her hair, to know that he bent above her, that his lips brushed hers. Part of the time she was unconscious—most of it drugged, for he found the opium and gave her that to ease her pain. But she lived for four days, and all that time he hardly left her. He knew, for she told him herself in little whispering gasps, of the failure of Ramlika’s plot, of how things had gone at Wala. It did not occur to him to try and move her out of the house or send for a doctor’s help. He knew that no one could do anything to save her, and it must mean separating her from him. It seemed to him that he had no right to do that. She had given her life for him; what he could give her of his was hers by right. He buried Ramlika during the next day, dragging the body down the steps and a little way across the garden and digging the grave himself. No one came near him; the servants had long since fled. He had to get food for himself, and catch one or two of the scattered goats so as to have milk for Noormahal. Ramlika’s attendants had slunk away evidently in the night.
Hamiz found his master, when he came on the second day, sitting with the Indian girl in his arms, and across Noormahal Kenyon gave his orders as to Maureen’s journey to Wala. It was one of Noormahal’s spells of consciousness. She looked at him with a little twisted smile after Hamiz had gone.
“So even in that you lied to me, Keenyon,” she whispered. “It was to save the woman that you sought my love!”
He could not answer her, the dull flush mounting to his face, and she put up a soft hand and stroked his lips. “Ah, what matters it, lord?” she asked. “I die, and for this short while you are mine. She cannot steal these hours from me—O best beloved.”
“She has gone out of my life altogether, Noormahal,” he answered. “I do not even think of her these days.”
Which was surprisingly true. He did not think of Maureen. She seemed for ever outside any life that could be left to him. Noormahal, perhaps, thought differently, but the lashes veiled her eyes for the time being, and she said nothing. It was surprising how near she came to the truth of things in those last few days as she lay there dying. But there was little regret in her heart. She, who had been “Rose of All the World “ to her lovers, did not grudge them the sweetness of her petals that their hands had soiled. To Kenyon she gave the perfume of her life. She knew that, however much he might turn to other loves in the days that were to come, he would never lose that memory from his heart. Strangely and wisely, she was content with that, and unafraid to die, as is the way with Orientals, who look forward to no future life of reward or punishment, only to a just balancing of the scales and a further effort along the upward path.
Just before she drifted into the last unconsciousness before death, lying in Kenyon’s arms, she looked up at him, smiling a little wistfully.
“I have been beautiful, Keenyon,” she whispered. “Does death spoil my beauty?”
“How should it?” he answered. “Death is only ugly to those who die in fear.”
“And to the old,” her voice crooned on. “Keenyon, I am not certain, but I think I have known seventeen summers. They have been sweet and long.” She straightened herself a little. “You will make me beautiful when I am dead, Lord Keenyon,” she said, “so that all men seeing me may still know love?”
“You shall be beautiful,” he promised, “ as beautiful as you were on that first day I saw you—’Rose of All the World.’”
And at that she smiled up suddenly, radiantly, her hands for the second warm about his face.
So that when she died, slipping quietly from sleep to death, her face unruffled, her eyes closed, Kenyon set himself to perform the thing he had promised. And, like some woman might have done, he washed and dressed the small, still body, put on the dress she had best loved—the wide, tinselled dancing-skirt, the little pearl-sewn bodice, the anklets and bracelets of gold and pearls. And on her forehead he slung the blood-coloured ruby that she had worn the night when she had come to him and he had cheated her with his pretence of love. And he plaited her hair with gold, and flung the pink scarf about her, and gathered her up in his arms for the last time, to carry her out into the garden and bury the beauty she had been so proud of under the warm, dark earth. For her seventeen long, sweet summers were finished, and now eternity had closed her round.
He did it all as though he were in a dream. The four days’ watching and serving had worn him out, and he was habitually a man who lived hardly on his emotions. He was stunned and dazed; her death had shocked him as no other thing had had power to do in his life; her love haunted him. “Lord, ’tis for you!” Those words stood between him and the rest of his ordinary world. He belonged to the dead. She had bought his soul by her death.
There was something of all this in his eyes as he faced Munroe and Pearce at the top of the steps, his piteous burden held within his arms. The two white men, exponents of civilisation and common sense, could only come to the conclusion that Kenyon was, for the time being, mad. He certainly looked it. Madness can sweep very unexpectedly upon the white man in a land of sun and fever and wild life. They looked at each other quickly, and decided that this was a case for care and tact. And then Munroe put his hand on Kenyon’s arm.
“Let us help you,” he said. “You have been through a lot, Kenyon. You look ill and played out. Give her to me, there’s a good chap, and you go inside, lie down and rest.”
Kenyon looked at him with an odd smile. Perhaps he had seen the quick glance Munroe and Pearce had exchanged.
“I am not mad,” he said, “only—a little extraordinary. I’ve always been that, gossip will tell you. No, I would rather you two went inside, and left me alone for a quarter of an hour. I’ll be through with it then. This part of my life—not quite respectable or understandable to decent people—will be laid aside, covered by earth that makes no distinctions. Do you mind, Munroe? As a policeman, Pearce, will you permit me?”
The two men glanced at each other again, and Pearce shrugged his shoulders.
“My dear Kenyon——” he began. Munroe put a hand on his arm and drew him aside.
“Yes, go, Kenyon,” Munroe said. “We will wait for you here. You can tell Pearce your story then.”
“So you see,” said Kenyon, his story finished, his elbows on the arms of his chair, his chin propped in his hands, “that was how it struck me. Mad, I suppose I seem, but she—well, she had died to save me. What is that thing about ‘Greater love hath no man than this’! My love—the love that I had pretended to give her—had always been a poor, pitiful, cheating thing. It seemed to me that what I could do to gloss over the cheating, I must do. I could not just send for a doctor, hand her over to the native hospital. I couldn’t, that is all.” He looked at the two men. “Will the thing have to go further,” he asked—his voice was very tired—“be investigated and all that?”
“Not from our point of view,” said Pearce hurriedly. “Ramlika was killed in self-defence, and he was one of the worst offenders in the late rising at Wala. No need to investigate his death; that he is dead is the main point. As for the girl——”
“No, there is no need,” put in Munroe quickly. “We three know about it, that is all that is necessary.” He stood up. “Pearce,” he said, “will you take Chandra Lal’s motor-bike back and go right through to Wala on it? I want an order for Chandra Lal’s arrest from headquarters. I want a car sent out here for myself and Kenyon.”
“Not for me,” said Kenyon quickly “I shan’t leave here, Munroe. The people will be back in a day or two. There’s a lot to do.”
“We can argue about that later,” said Munroe. “Meanwhile, I am staying here for the night. You have no objection to that, have you?”
“Objection, no!” Kenyon answered slowly; “but I am not unhinged, though I suppose the two of you think I sound like it. I shall carry on quite normally and peacefully, even though you don’t put yourself out to stay.”
It was not a very cordial invitation to remain. Nevertheless Munroe accepted it, sending Pearce away without any further preamble.
“You can send my cook and the boys along,” was his parting instruction; “and that boy of Kenyon’s, Hamiz, had better come back in the car. I believe he stayed on with Mrs. Simpson at my place. Don’t say too much about all this in Wala,” he added. “Kenyon is quite misunderstood enough as it is.”
With which cryptic remark, he hoped to be able to prevent the story reaching Mrs. Simpson’s ears. Then he went back to the verandah and Kenyon.
Kenyon was still sitting in the same chair, his chin in his hands, his eyes on the wilderness that had been a garden.
“Kenyon, old chap,” said Munroe, going to the point as, in his blunt way, he thought getting to the point would be best for Kenyon, “there is only one thing in that story of yours that, to my mind, wants clearing up. Did you love this girl? I am not doubting that you could love her, she was very beautiful.”
A great bitterness came into Kenyon’s eyes, his face set into dogged lines. “ No,” be said. “What business is it of yours, Munroe? But that is my answer. No, no, no. I cheated and lied—as I have always cheated and lied to women.”
He stood up abruptly, shaking his shoulders as though he attempted to throw something aside. “Leave me alone, Munroe,” he said. “For God’s sake don’t probe! You’ve no idea how it hurts.”
“But I want to hurt,” argued Munroe; he felt himself to be suddenly concerned in directing Fate for these two people: Kenyon, whom he had always loved; and Mrs. Simpson, whom he very much admired. “I have got to probe a sort of maggot out of your brain, old chap, because it seems to me if it’s allowed to stay there it will ruin your life for you.”
“Don’t you imagine I have done that for myself?” asked Kenyon. He swung round to Munroe, and, short and plump and serious, Munroe rose to his feet, facing him.
“No,” said Munroe, “not ruined it. Played the fool with it, perhaps. What about Mrs. Simpson, Kenyon?” he asked. “I have no earthly right—except the affection I have always borne for you.”
The whole of Kenyon’s face stiffened—went dead, Munroe described it to himself.
“You can’t leave it at this,” he went on quickly. “You may have cheated and lied to others; I don’t believe you ever have to her. Why shouldn’t the two of you——”
“Oh, you and your curiosity and questioning,” burst in Kenyon. “Let us leave it at that. I do not choose that her name should be spoken here between us. Will you let things alone, Munroe, or will you put me to the incivility of asking you to leave my house, here and now?”
The other man was silent for a minute, his brows frowning. Then he held out his hand with a sudden, frank movement. “All right, Kenyon,” he agreed. “Don’t turn me out. I’ll respect your silences.” He moved back to his chair. “Sit down again,” he said, “till I tell you about our little show at Wala. Yuzufu stood by us. I don’t think any of them were shaken for a moment. I feel it’s a feather in my cap. By Jove, Kenyon, when you’ve given the best of your life, most of your heart, to a people, it hurts when they turn against you. Now, Africa as a whole is sullen, restless—we are aliens to her bosom, always shall be. But individuals—we pick them out, we put our faith in them, grow fond of them. If Yuzufu had failed me, I should have hated it.”
He was talking to give the other man time to regain his self-control. When he looked directly at Kenyon again, he was relieved to see the storm at least had passed. Kenyon had dropped back into his chair, his body relaxed, his arms limp.
“Yes,” he agreed, his mind apparently on the subject Munroe had started. “To give and take trust—it is the only way to govern in these countries. And I suppose where there is no love there can be no trust. Will you excuse me, Munroe? I’ll go in and make myself respectable. I have only just realised it’s four days since I’ve shaved—no wonder you and Pearce thought I looked mad.” He stood up, looking down at Munroe. “You’ve forgiven that gust of temper?” he asked. “If it’s any satisfaction to you to know it, I do love Mrs. Simpson. It’s the sort of love that you, Munroe, have probably had for the only woman in your life—your wife. But she, Mrs. Simpson, I mean”—he straightened himself, looking over Munroe to the garden—“she has found out my lying and cheating. It has disgusted her. I fancy I am further outside her life than the proverbial outcast dog. She has told me so, very plainly. I did not want to sit down and howl about it, but the fact remains.”
“Humph!” said Munroe. He was comparing this rather bitter statement with his wife’s letter, and the comparison appeared to leave room for a “humph.” “Women have been known to say what they don’t mean in a temper,” he added slowly.
“Is one in a ‘temper’ when Death is waiting round the corner!” asked Kenyon. “I am afraid it is nearer the truth than that, Munroe.”
He moved and went into the house, and came back a changed, shut-away Kenyon. There was no reopening the subject with him. They talked of many things that night after dinner, for Munroe’s cook and servants arrived in time to serve up a respectable meal. Afterwards, when they sat out on the verandah, with their pipes lit and their drinks beside them, they talked of Ramlika and Ramlika’s madness; of Chandra Lal and his coming deportation; of poor Thomasi with all his promise and his hopes in the dust; and of Swadiki and the old greatness that Swadiki and his people had come from.
“The outposts of Empire,” said Munroe; “God knows whether we do good or ill, Kenyon. There are times when I grow horribly disheartened.”
“You’ve no need to,” answered Kenyon. “You’ve got a big light in front of you—duty—I have never known you to waver from that.”
“Oh, we do our duty,” agreed Munroe; “but does the doing of it do any good? What does England really play for—the good of the little people or the good of her own fat purse! England—you know what that name came to mean to us during the war—eh, Kenyon! It seemed to mean more because we were of those who could not get home to fight, we had just to carry on at the outposts; but the name of her used to ache in my heart. If only I could think we weren’t out for the fat purse in these our outposts!”
“You were always a sentimentalist,” laughed Kenyon. “I fought through a bit of the war; I danced and made love and chucked away money during the black 1916. There were crowds of English people doing that quite cheerfully in London at the same time.”
Munroe snorted impatiently. “But you are not English?” he said. “How can you speak or feel or dream about her as we do.”
It was of these things they talked, dragging out enthusiasms, raking up arguments, till, at last, Munroe rose, yawning.
“I am turning in,” he said; “and you, Kenyon?”
“Yes,” Kenyon nodded quizzically; “oh, nurse and guardian, I, too, am going to bed! Have I convinced you that I am fairly sane, Munroe? Can you trust me to go to bed and sleep?”
“Oh, sane enough!” grumbled Munroe; “but the maggot is still in your brain. I’d like to shake it out. I feel like the God in the Machine. I want to arrange things for you.”
“Oh, best of fairy godfathers, you can’t!” laughed Kenyon. “But I am grateful for the wish, though I mayn’t show my gratitude very plainly.”
Kenyon was quite firm about not going back to Wala with Munroe. The latter had to return by himself. Hamiz was in charge of his master’s comfort; the other servants were creeping back one by one. Work, it was evident, would be in full swing again on the plantation in a few days. There were really no arguments that Munroe could put forth, yet he went away dissatisfied. There was something about Kenyon, some expression in his eyes, in his face, or the droop of his shoulders, that, in some way, depressed the older man. He hated to think of leaving Kenyon by himself in this big, white house that had seen so much tragedy and death. He had a horrible feeling that Kenyon might do something silly and desperate.
But willing, or unwilling, he had to go, and Kenyon stood faintly smiling and watched his departure from the top of the steps. Munroe made a funny, little, plump God in the Machine; but he had wanted to help, and Kenyon was grateful for that.
Then, when the car had gone, Kenyon went back into the house and stared round him. It was against those curtains that Maureen had stood, for Noormahal had told him the story before she died. There, in the centre of the room, Noormahal had danced for him, and through this room he had carried her, her dancing finished, her limbs stiff and quiet in death. How far away it all seemed! Maureen! Noormahal! and all the other women with whom he had played at love in life!
“As things that are not, shall these things be,” whispered Kenyon to himself, and had a sudden clutching memory of that day that he had spent with Maureen out in the open, of how she had fallen asleep while he whispered to her the “Triumph of Love.”
He turned away a little stiffly, and went and sat down at the table where his work, account books, and things dealing with the plantation lay stacked waiting for him to go through them. The Romance of Life ended in this: a more sombre, chill ending than that which the click of a revolver would bring him. And, as he thought half regretfully of death, a faint yet very all-pervading scent of attar of roses stole about his senses. It was as though Noormahal’s frail, sweet figure stood beside him, as if she leant forward to whisper in his ears the words of a poem she could never have known:
“Where the old leaves of the year lie rotten.
Dead red leaves and the years thrown by.
The misconceived and the misbegotten,
I would find me a sin to do ere I die.”
Kenyon stirred restlessly, clenching his hand on the revolver that lay there among the orderly books and papers. If he died? It could only make the scorn a little more bitter in those clear, grey eyes. And if he lived? God alone knew if he had the courage for life as it was left him to live. Sitting there, he bowed his head, his cheek against the cold touch of steel, and all round him floated the scent of attar of roses, and ghostly, childlike hands touched at his sleeve, moved against his cheek. The ghost of a dead, unsatisfied desire which never dies.
Mrs. Munroe felt very strongly that her guest and late patient required cheering up. She was a little hazy as to how to set about it, for it had to be remembered that Mrs. Simpson had very recently lost her husband, and lived through a night of horror such as it fortunately falls to the lot of few women to live through. You could not exactly plunge her into a whirl of gaiety, and even Jimmie’s reassuring news as to Kenyon had failed to have the effect which Mrs. Munroe had hoped it might achieve. Mrs. Simpson was to go home to her own people as soon as she was strong enough to travel and they could book a passage for her; but, meanwhile, she stayed on at the Munroes’ house, and Mrs. Munroe’s motherly heart was continually being wrung because of a sadness which she felt rather than saw.
For, outwardly, Mrs. Simpson was cheerful enough. She sat and sewed through the long mornings; helping Mrs. Munroe with the manifold mending and making which a family of three entailed. She played with the children. She said she slept splendidly, and she took the tonics which Mrs. Munroe and the doctor devised and thought of between them with apparently a very good heart, to get well and strong as quickly as she could. But behind the effort Mrs. Munroe was conscious of the failure in the woman’s heart to find peace. She would detect long pauses in the work when she knew that Mrs. Simpson sat, hands idle, eyes fighting against tears. She doubted the repeated statement about sleep. Those dark shadows under the grey eyes did not witness to sleep, and no amount of tonics, Mrs. Munroe knew, can ease a heart that breaks. It was not her husband that Mrs. Simpson fretted over, that Mrs. Munroe guessed. If it had been, it would have been a grief easier to soothe and ease.
As wife and mother, Mrs. Munroe would have drawn close to that, could have put her arms round stiff reserve and wooed merciful tears to eyes that would not weep. As it was, Mrs. Munroe felt that she stood aside, and that a certain judgment went with her pity. They never mentioned Kenyon in their talks; but his personality stood vividly between them, and kept aloof. Mrs. Munroe felt the good which otherwise her gentle companionship and the children’s laughter might have brought to the other woman’s heart.
There were times when Mrs. Munroe hated Kenyon. She had never approved of him, but Jimmie’s tale of the Indian dancing-girl had been the last atom of evidence against Kenyon in her judgment. When she heard his name, therefore, one afternoon, carelessly spoken across her tea-table, she knew that she flushed suddenly with resentment and, quite against her intention, for she would have hated it to be thought that she spied on another woman’s pain, she lifted her head and glanced at Mrs. Simpson.
“Yes, Kenyon is a weird fellow,” restated Mr. Pearce, the offender; “but he seems to strike romance out of life.”
“That sounds so delicious!” chirped Mrs. Raymond, also of the party, if you could call Mrs. Munroe’s cheerful little afternoon teas parties. “Do tell us what you mean, Mr. Pearce.”
“Need he!” said Mrs. Munroe. She said it, she supposed, rather primly, but she was horribly conscious of Mrs. Simpson’s still figure, white hands folded against the black of her skirt, and grey eyes that seemed to watch and wait. “It’s sure to be gossip, and I hate gossip.”
Pearce laughed apologetically. He was well known as a scandal-bearer, and he guessed that Mrs. Munroe was having a dig at his reputation. “This isn’t gossip, on my honour,” he said. “It is what I saw with my own eyes.”
“Oh, do let him tell us, dear Mrs. Munroe!” Mrs. Raymond had also flashed her glance into the corner where Mrs. Simpson sat. She was not exactly malicious, but she hated people who succeeded in hiding their affairs from her. “Go on, Mr. Pearce,” she turned appealingly to the gentleman. “We get so little romance in our existence out here.”
“Well,” said Pearce, thus pressed and uncomfortably conscious of his hostess’s disapproval, “it’s nothing much really, only a piece of local colour from our friend Kenyon’s romantic existence. And it is romantic, you know. There was a dancing-girl—a damsel from Lahore or some such place—a beautiful creature, infatuated about Kenyon, it seems. Protected him that night of the rising—in fact died for him, so Kenyon said. Munroe and I ran out to his shamba.” He broke off and glanced up as Munroe, late from the office as usual, hurried in to his tea. “I was telling them about Kenyon’s romance, sir.” He made a brave effort to carry the situation off, for he felt that Munroe would approve of him even less than Mrs. Munroe had done. “Do you remember that day, and Kenyon standing at the top of the steps! What was it he called her—‘Rose of All the World.’”
“Oh, what a delicious name,” said Mrs. Raymond; “and what happened—was she dead then, did she die!”
Munroe came forward, frowning a little. Just this morning he had heard news of Kenyon that had shocked him. It annoyed him that people like Mrs. Raymond and Pearce should be sitting here chatting and laughing about the man who was his friend.
“I’ve no memory for these kinds of things,” he said stiffly. “Mrs. Simpson, your cup is empty, can I get you some more tea!” He went across and stood in front of her, shielding her from the others. He could see that her lips trembled a little, that her eyes were dark with some emotion.
“Yes, please,” she said, her voice low, but even and untroubled.
“And Mr. Pearce would perhaps like some more tea,” said Mrs. Munroe. She felt vicious against Pearce; she hoped the tea would burn him. “Try some of that cake, Mrs. Raymond; it’s the new cook’s effort, and not at all bad.”
The talk drifted to cakes and cooks and servants in general. Pearce was playing tennis, and rose presently to make his excuse and slip away. Mrs. Raymond wanted to persuade Mrs. Munroe to call on a new arrival in the station with her.
“And you two?” asked Mrs. Munroe, looking up at her husband. “What are you doing—Jimmie? I expect Mrs. Simpson will have a chair in the garden and that batch of papers that has just come out from home.”
“Then I will join her, if she will have me,” said Munroe. “I am lazy to-day; we can share the papers.”
He moved out to the garden later, after Alice had gone off with Mrs. Raymond, and he found Mrs. Simpson established within the shadow of a flowering oleander. He had something to say to Mrs. Simpson, and he was not sure how to begin. Also, he felt that Pearce’s gossiping must prove an unfortunate prelude to his own remarks.
“That’s a fine bit of colour, isn’t it!” he asked, nodding to the oleander, which shook out its pink blossoms and green, spiky leaves against a background of blue sky and blue lake. “May I sit down and chatter, Mrs. Simpson? I am in the mood for it.”
Maureen glanced up at him and away from him to the oleander. “Please do,” she said. She had opened the paper on her lap, but she had not been reading. Mr. Pearce’s story had hurt her, she hardly knew why, intolerably. Why should it have hurt! It had told her nothing that she did not know, that Kenyon had not himself made her realise. And ever since she had heard he was safe and well, she had known that it had been the other woman who had saved him. In her illness, thinking him dead, he had been all hers; every barrier that had been between them had been swept away; she had dreamt of him and called to him, and felt his hands about her, his lips on hers. But she had known, oh, long before Mr. Pearce’s silly story, she had known that he was not really hers.
The other woman had saved him, and the other woman held him. She had been too proud to question or doubt that. And had she doubted—oh, poor sick heart that could not keep its dreams away—was not his silence, his absence answer enough? All this she had known, and yet his name spoken so lightly to-day had had the power to hurt more than she had imagined possible.
Mr. Munroe sat down rather heavily in his chair, his hands behind his head, his face tilted up to the sky.
“If a man has a friend—I don’t mean just an acquaintance,” he explained, “I mean a real friend—and that man sees his friend making a most intolerable hash of things, I suppose he might be excused for blundering into an attempt to help him. Are my grammar and meaning too involved, Mrs. Simpson?”
“I am afraid the meaning is,” Maureen agreed, smiling a little. The Munroes were such dear people; they were for ever, she realised, searching for new methods by which to distract her attention.
“Yes,” said Munroe—he blinked his eyes to the blue of the sky—“it is better to come to the point and not to talk rubbish, isn’t it? Mrs. Simpson—Kenyon is my friend, the friend that is making such a damned hash of things.” He was careful not to look at her, but he heard the sudden quick movement with which she drew herself together, and he knew that she was ready now, stiffened at every point to meet sympathy, condemnation, and blame.
“I’ve known Kenyon,” he went on slowly, “ever since we both came to this country, and before that, for we were at college together. He was an amazingly lovable lad. To me he has always remained just that. There have been many things in Kenyon’s life that I have not been able to admire or condone. I don’t know what happened to warp his nature. It occurred during the period when I saw nothing of him between college and when we met out here. But warped or not, the lovableness remains at least to me.”
He looked at her, meeting her eyes. She was sitting very erect in her chair, her hands held tight together.
“Why are you saying all this to me?” she asked.
“Why?” said Munroe; he took his hands away from behind his head and sat up. “It is my way of blundering, Mrs. Simpson. I am worried over Kenyon—almighty worried. There is a rumour in this morning—oh, only through the natives, but they often know what they are talking about. They say he is ill. Gone to pieces, we call it. They phrase it more poetically: ‘Talking with the spirits—listening to Death.’ He has always lived too much on his emotions, Kenyon. Where another man would go away and forget or try to forget, he’ll stay and brood and dream and quote poetry till he goes mad.”
“And I?” Maureen asked. He thought she spoke as though her throat hurt her to form the words. “What part have I in all this—Mr. Munroe?”
His position, he realised, was absurd, impossible. His initial idea, which had been to say frankly, “Look here, you love him, he loves you; get down to it, save him from himself.” How could he say that to her, with the black dress of mourning for her husband about her?
“I really don’t know,” he stammered. “I thought—I guessed. Pearce, with his stupid tittle-tattle, annoyed me. Kenyon is my friend, as I have said. You liked him—I thought.”
Very white was her face, very dark the shadows under her grey eyes. “You thought that I could do something to help him,” she said. “I am afraid it isn’t likely. I think he would resent being interfered with. You see, I have tried, and in some ways, I know——”
Munroe felt a great admiration for her, but he also felt that he was being quite firmly and gently shut outside any further chance to interfere. The knowledge of her love for Kenyon, his for her, lay between them; her eyes challenged him to lift it up or speak of it, and he knew he must not dare.
“I see,” he said quickly. “Will you forgive me, Mrs. Simpson, if my blundering has hurt, brought up any memories that you would rather forget? It was a stupid thought, but indeed it was prompted by a desire to help”—he hesitated a second—“my friend.”
“Of course,” she said; “I understand. There is nothing to forgive.” She looked down at the paper on her lap. “Which would you like to read,” she asked—“the Sketch or the Tatler?—or there are some Daily Mirrors.”
“I’ll take a Daily Mirror,” he answered, following her lead. “That is to say, I like my home news in nice little pills that I can swallow whole.”
For an hour they sat on in the garden, talking now and again of the things they read in the papers; till Mrs. Munroe and the children came in, and after that Mrs. Munroe and Mrs. Simpson went indoors to put the babies to bed, while Munroe stayed on outside and brooded over his failure to enlist Mrs. Simpson on his side. He was really worried over Kenyon. He hated the reports that were to hand. The servants were leaving the shamba, rumour went; they were running away from a house where it was firmly believed in native circles the ghost of a dead girl reigned as queen and danced nightly for the pleasure of a drink-maddened white man.
“I wonder if I could get Alice to persuade her,” Munroe thought to himself. But he felt there was small chance of success along those lines.
As a matter offset, Alice had nothing to do with it. What happened was entirely against her approval.
That night, as the three of them sat in the drawing-room after dinner, the two ladies sewing as usual and Munroe morosely buried in his papers, one of the servants came softly into the room and, standing in front of Munroe, said something in a low voice.
“What?” asked Munroe. He flung down his paper at the repeated message, and stood up. “Where is he?” he said. “I will come.” And then, on a sudden reflection which took in the two listeners, “No, send him here. It is Hamiz, my dear,” he turned to his wife. “Kenyon’s boy. Do you mind if I see him here?”
“Of course not,” said Mrs. Munroe, her lips set in the little line which he knew so well signified displeasure. He would not pay any attention to it, though, nor did he look at Mrs. Simpson.
Hamiz came quickly in on the heels of the other boy. It was a distraught, anxious Hamiz who stood just within the door. He broke into a storm of words. His Bwana was ill. Indeed, it was death that crouched at his elbow, and it was not a sickness that a doctor man could cure. For his Bwana was being killed by the other dead! Hamiz’s eyes rolled in his head while he spoke. “He talks always to the woman who is dead,” he said. “She calls to him, her hands are on his sleeve. The other servants have not seen, yet have they been afraid, and they have run away. Only Hamiz stayed. For to me Bwana Kenyon is like father and wife and mother. Until to-day I, too, have not seen, though I have known and felt the dead about me. But to-day I saw—I saw. She stood beside him, her fingers touched the gun. I snatched it from under her hand, but she will find it again—and she will have her way. So I, Hamiz, have left him; I have driven the car in here. Come with me, Lord District Commissioner. Come back with me to my master, that you may save him from the dead hands that try and kill his life.”
“What is he saying, Jimmie?” Mrs. Munroe asked, as the huge, shaking negro paused for breath. “And I think it was silly to have him in here. He is upsetting Mrs. Simpson.”
For Maureen had risen while Hamiz spoke. She was standing clinging on to the back of her chair. You could see the knuckles showing like shining points on the backs of her hands.
“I am sorry,” said Munroe. He rose quickly. “It’s nothing to be alarmed at. The poor devil is upset; he is very devoted to Kenyon, and he has got hold of an amazing yarn about something that is trying to kill Kenyon. Anyway, it’s evident Kenyon is ill. The man has brought the car in. I’ll run through in it, and see what I can do to persuade Kenyon to come into hospital.”
“Must you go to-night?” said Alice. “Wouldn’t to-morrow do as well? You know how natives exaggerate things, Jim!”
“I know,” he nodded, turning to fill his cigarette-case from the box on the table. “Still, I think I’ll go to-night, if you don’t mind.”
Then Mrs. Simpson moved. She came forward into the light, scarce, so it seemed, seeing Mrs. Munroe. She looked straight at Munroe, and, turning, he was amazed at the sudden, splendid frankness in her eyes.
“Will you take me with you?” she said. “Tonight, I mean? Perhaps—oh, perhaps I can help him! What does anything else matter?”
“Perhaps!” Munroe said. He put out both his hands and took hers. “I am damned sure you are the only person who can. I thank you, from the bottom of my heart, Mrs. Simpson, for finding that the other things don’t matter.”
“Where the old leaves of the year lie rotten,
Dead red leaves and the years thrown by,
The misconceived and the misbegotten,
I would find me a sin to do ere I die.
Sure to destroy and dissolve me all through,
That would set you higher in heaven, serve you,
And leave you happy when clean forgotten—
Like a dead man out of mind am I.”
The room was fall of the scent of attar of roses. It blew in at the open door, clung to the curtains, warred against that other scent of an overturned broken bottle of whisky. And it seemed to envelop the man who sat at the table in the centre of the room, the whisky trickling to a pool at his feet, his hand clenched over the revolver that lay before him on the table.
“And leave you happy when clean forgotten—-
Like a dead man out of mind am I.”
The words throbbed in Kenyon’s brain. His eyes stared in front of him, bloodshot, haggard. He was not drunk to-night; but it was the first time in a fortnight that he had not been drunk. Probably any unbiased observer that had watched him during the last fortnight would have come to the conclusion that the man’s condition, the hallucinations that clouded his mind, the figure that danced and beckoned and lured his eyes, were all a result of his wild bout of drinking. And yet the thing went, in reality, deeper than that. Drink had been only a sordid, pitiful refuge from thoughts that ached and throbbed; from an emotional nature worn to its last thread of endurance.
Up to a certain extent we can all play with our natures. Given a strength of will, we can hide fear with courage, we can conceal sensitiveness under a cloak of indifference, we can show an impassive front to the outside world, while torture eats into our hearts. Up to a certain point—and that once past, Nature turns triumphantly and rends us, the stronger, the fiercer, because of the restrictions we have put upon her. Kenyon was an emotional man, and all his life he had hidden and repressed emotion. As a child, as a boy, he had been taught that to show feeling was unmanly, weak. As a man he had rather purposely chosen to walk in a world of deceit where love was a thing to mock at; purity and goodness and God were mere names that roused nothing but scornful laughter. And all the time, behind it all, his own heart and mind stayed sensitively aloof, emotional. He was capable of passionate love, and he fed himself on the mockery. He could have worshipped where he often forced himself to jeer. The hard mask of the man had almost obliterated and suffocated the quivering self within. And then came the breaking-point, and Nature turned to rend him. He loved Maureen. In loving her he had laid aside the cheap armour that had protected him from hurt, and the agony of her rejection and scorn had torn its way right to the roots of his being.
He had not, physically or mentally, been fit for the strain of Noormahal’s dying. It had an effect on him beyond and above its rightful value. It seemed as though, by her death, her exotic influence laid a persistent claim upon him. He could not rid himself of the sense of her presence. She was always beside him, her lips whispering against his ears, her soft hands holding and pulling. She wanted something from him. Her desire was so urgent that she could find no rest in the narrow, dark grave he had made for her under the lilies. This, at least, was the phantasy which his tired brain wove round her memory. And he grew pitifully afraid of that watching, waiting, urging spirit. She was striving to draw him to death, for in death he would be all hers. As the days slipped by, as the thought grew more urgent, more persistent, the fear, the distaste increased, till it became in reality a shrinking, all-pervading terror.
Hamiz had known this; the other servants had realised it, and they had fled from before it. Hamiz had stayed, and Hamiz’s hands, eager to serve, anxious to save, had been the ones that had first brought forgetfulness to Kenyon through drink. It was not a thing that Kenyon had ever done before, but after the first night he did it deliberately, cynically. “I would find me a sin to do ere I die.”
This was a sin, surely—debasing, bestial enough to make the scorn harden for ever in her eyes, to make her glad, in truth, that she had discovered his worthlessness in time to save her own purity from contamination. And, drunk, he could flout at the persistent spirit of Noormahal; the fumes of whisky drowned the scent of the attar of roses. He would lie back in his chair and laugh vacantly at her enticements and her dancing, sensuous grace. He could mock her with derisive arguments, flourish the revolver at her, and promise that he would come to her in time. But not yet; not till all the whisky in the house was exhausted. And then he would fall back and sleep—horrible, hopeless, drunken sleep; and Hamiz, never far distant, would creep to him and carry him to his bed, and crouch beside him, watching while Kenyon slept; hurling, by his silent guard, defiance at the ghost he was quite superstitious enough to believe in. And because Kenyon, in speaking to Hamiz, talked of how Noormahal’s hand for ever guided his finger to the trigger of the revolver, Hamiz’s brain, his faithful eyes, evolved the picture which he had recounted to Munroe.
Faith is most prolific in imagination. There was no doubt at all in Hamiz’s mind. He saw the thing that Kenyon’s sick brain evolved, he felt her hand upon the revolver that lay always beside his master next the whisky bottle. So that when Kenyon slept that evening, Hamiz had risen quickly from his watch and, taking the revolver, he had hidden it—as he had said to Munroe. Then, bitterly conscious that the drink which he had planned should give strength was, in reality, dealing death, he had hurried, as has been seen, to enlist the white man’s service on his master’s behalf. He did not mention that Kenyon had been drunk for a fortnight, because to him that was unimportant compared to the fact that there was a ghost in the house. Nor was it necessary to mention it. Munroe had heard that report from other sources. And a little of what he had heard he imparted to Mrs. Simpson on their drive out.
“You’ve got to know,” he said; “probably it is unconcealable by this time. Kenyon has been drinking heavily. I have heard that from the natives. It is not a habit of his, I can swear to that, but—well, I don’t want you to fail him at the most critical moment. I am—I suppose—selfish for my friend.”
“Oh, you don’t understand!” she answered impulsively; “how could you? Why, I have not understood myself. But I think I have come to a knowledge of what love means now, Mr. Munroe. You need not be afraid. I shall not be afraid; I shall not fail him.”
“That is good,” said Munroe. “You know, Mrs. Simpson, fortunately for us our love isn’t often tested like this; but, to be worth anything, it has got to go down into the shadows and search us out when we have failed, hasn’t it? And it hasn’t got to be afraid of soiling its wings in the process.”
“Yes,” she repeated softly, “down into the shadows. It is no use at all if it can’t do that.”
For the rest they sat silent, and Hamiz drove through the night as furiously as his master had driven on that other evening when Kenyon rushed into Wala with the news of the rising.
Hamiz would certainly have said, did say till the end of his life, that Noormahal was responsible for the finding of the revolver that lay now in Kenyon’s hands, but, as a matter of fact, Kenyon had found it for himself. He had wakened from his sleep, for Hamiz had been in too great a hurry to carry him into the far room, and he had slept where he sat, his head against the revolver. So that he missed it as soon as he woke, and, missing it, he had come to the sudden eager conclusion that here and now was the end of things. He was sober, and soberly he would go and find death. He was sober enough to realise that Hamiz must have hidden the revolver, and he smiled a little wearily, thinking of Hamiz’s devotion, his loyal service. Nor was the revolver difficult to find. Hamiz had a simple mind, and he had not sought for any obscure hiding-place.
With the thing in his hand, Kenyon staggered back to the table and sat down. He was very weak, for he had eaten little during the last few days, and the poison of the whisky was doing its work well. Yet, just in this half-hour’s sanity before the end, he sat there, staring before him, reviewing the past: his love for Maureen; his played-out passion for Noormahal; the rapture of his thoughts that day he had brought Maureen back to his house, and the torment of derision that had laughed at his soul when he found that she had left him. The scent of the roses crept round—and up to his face. Noormahal—well, Noormahal had loved him—she loved him still. “I shall but love thee better after death,” he had quoted to Maureen, and the words came back to him mockingly out of Noormahal’s lips.
Why, all these days, had he been afraid of her love? With hands as soft and tender as Death’s she would hold him; with the warm darkness of earth she would cover his eyes; she would bring him ease and forgetfulness and rest. Why had he been afraid? His lips formed to a kiss, his eyes smiled, the scent of the roses was pleasant to his senses. He put out his left hand as though to touch and hold something that was passing. “‘Rose of All the World,’” he thought to himself. “When I feel her lips against mine, I’ll fire. She shall fetch me with a kiss.”
So, for a second, Maureen saw him, his head thrown back waiting for that kiss, his revolver lifted a little in his hand—saw him and swayed, with a sob of desperation; so ill, so hopeless he looked. And then Munroe’s hand had tightened on her wrist; he was speaking in a sharp, stern whisper.
“Go straight up to him, Mrs. Simpson. You are the one most likely to succeed. Take the revolver from him. When you’ve got that, I’ll come in and help. My God—we are only just in time!”
In a flash, then, it came to her how short a time was left, how quickly she must act without faltering if she were to save him! With a sigh of relief Munroe saw her straighten herself. He did not see the shadow standing at Kenyon’s right hand, but then his imagination was not nearly so alert or young as Hamiz’s. He had seen, in his one quick glance at Kenyon, quite enough to make him desperately afraid. Hamiz, crouching to the ground beside him, said nothing. It was no time for speech, Hamiz knew; the two women stood close together, the living and the dead, and which would win it remained to be seen.
Straight forward Maureen moved, the silk of her grey, shimmering evening-dress making a little sound against the ground as she passed. The cloud of her dark hair was tied back with a narrow ribbon of black velvet, and her face was white and very beautiful. More beautiful, Munroe thought, than any other woman’s face he had ever seen. For it was radiant with love and love’s eager desire to serve. The scent of the attar of roses reached her too, sickened her a little; she put out her hands as though to brush it aside. Hamiz saw the movement and came to his own conclusions. The white woman was very brave, for she faced the spirit of her that was dead and pushed it gently out of her way. And then Maureen was beside Kenyon; leaning forward a little, she had slipped her hand upon his hand where it lay on the revolver.
“Gerald!” she whispered; “Gerald!” her voice broke on a little sob of pity. She knelt beside him, and her other arm went round his shoulder. “Oh, my dear, my dear!” she said.
He swayed round, looking at her. Did the scent of the roses grow fainter? Did some cheated, angry presence draw away from him?
“Maureen!” he muttered. “My God! What are you doing here—you, of all people!”
“I came because I needed you,” said Maureen.
Munroe touched Hamiz on the shoulder, and the two of them tiptoed back into the darkness of the verandah.
“Because I could not do without you any longer. I love you, Gerald. I missed your love.”
“It’s a little late,” he said stupidly. He felt stupid and tired and ill. “You see what I’ve been doing. Don’t kneel there, Maureen; your dress will be spoilt with that damned whisky.” The hand that held the revolver under hers struggled to be free. He seemed embarrassed, abashed by her nearness. “I am filthy, and I have only just finished being drunk,” he said. “For God’s sake, get up, Maureen. It isn’t right that you should be here.”
“Ah, don’t send me away!” she pleaded. “You want me, Gerald. I am not going to mind what you say, for I know you want me. And I—dear heart—I have found I cannot live without you. Take me, Gerald; hold me close, let me feel your arms about me. I—I—want to cry.”
Her head was against his heart, the fragrance of her hair brushed his lips, and it was true that she was crying, little broken sobs of pity for his hurt.
It levelled the barrier between them as nothing else could have done. It gave him back suddenly his manhood. He caught her to him with fierce hands, he buried his face amongst her hair.
“Don’t, Maureen, don’t,” he said. There was a new ring of hope, of bewildered gladness in his voice. “My very dear, that you should cry for me, and the beast I have become!”
She stirred a little against him, lifting her face till her lips lay close to his. “I wasn’t crying for that,” she whispered. “Oh, Gerald, kiss me—kiss me. Let us forget how poor and pitiful a thing I tried to make my love appear.”
So held, and kissed, they comforted each other, and when Munroe came back presently it was to find them standing side by side at the open window, with the curtains thrown back, so that the room was full of the keen, cool wind of an oncoming storm of rain.
“There is going to be a deluge,” said Munroe prosaically. “Shall we make for Wala before it bursts? Hamiz is all agog to drive us back as quickly as he brought us out.”
They turned to him, still hand in hand.
“Great God in the Machine!” laughed Kenyon, a little unsteadily. “See what happiness your hand has wrought!”
“I would like to appropriate the credit,” said Munroe, his eyes were very kindly. “But I don’t know. I think a certain black, very loyal hand on the wheel of a car had something to do with it, and much of it was due to the courage of a very brave lady.” He took Maureen’s hand in his and very gravely stooped to kiss it.
“Yes,” agreed Kenyon softly. “Much is due to that.”
She stood between them, softly flushed, smiling a little, with tear-wet eyes. In her heart, for that second, she felt a throb of pity for Noormahal,— fair “Rose of All the World,”—who had also loved Gerald, and loved well enough in life to face death for his sake. She had not Hamiz’s eyes. She had not seen the figure that had stood to bar her way, that had melted before her as the scent of the attar of roses faded before the fresh wet wind. She only remembered that the Indian girl had died, and in dying had given back to life the man she loved.
Poor, frail, sweet-scented ghost! The natives hold that she still haunts the big, empty house on the shamba. They say she dances there to the faint, tingling sound of the gold bangles on her feet and wrists. Sometimes, when the wind sings through the low bushes of the garden, they say that they can hear her weep. But no one has ever seen her, not even jealous-eyed Hamiz, who remains in charge. And periodically, once a year, when the house is opened up, when it hums with people and movement and noise, when Mr. and Mrs. Kenyon come back for a brief sojourn on the estate, and Hamiz goes about ecstatically, looking after motor and master again, there is no sight or sound of any ghost. As far as they are concerned, the house is a cheerful, sun-laden building, very pleasant to spend a few months of every year in. And the lilies are again things to wonder at and admire. Hamiz sees to that. If he keeps a certain grave behind the lilies well stamped in, and always sprinkled with a little holy water looted from the R.C. Mission at Nuonga, that is his lookout. What he knows, or thinks about ghosts, he keeps to himself, and he is quite right to take whatever precaution he thinks fit.
For the rest—life offers to no one perfect bliss. To Maureen and Kenyon it has given, at least, sweet understanding and unfailing comradeship and love. Love that went down into the shadows, that passed through the mud and came back into the sunshine again unspoilt—unhurt. For you cannot tarnish Love. Pure gold it comes from God; pure gold it must go back—though often in its journeyings through life men strive to maim and smirch it. And to those who really love, Love’s presence shines through all their days as a thread of gold will shine through dull glass beads.
“Life, what is life? Love’s foreglow in the skies.
Death, what is death? Love dawning in our eyes.”