* * * * *The receipt of a letter from Lady Aspasia Melbury was the first drop of balm in his Excellency's unwontedly distasteful cup. She pooh-poohed his old-fashioned suggestion that the hostess's enforced absence necessitated a postponement of her visit—announced her arrival at the prescribed time, and her conviction that she and her cousin would get on "like a house on fire." Such being the great lady's opinion, the great man was delighted; and, before many further hours had gone by, the younger and less important Aspasia, with hardly suppressed giggles, heard him hold forth at the dinner table to the following effect:"What my wife requires really is absolute country quiet. I have arranged that she should pass her first weeks in England at her own little place in Dorsetshire, a charming old manor-house. She naturally does not wish to see much society till my return; and, anyhow, there is a small piece of work which she is undertaking at my suggestion." Here he whispered audibly to the General—his guest of the evening: "Poor English, you know—a little biography we are getting up about him. He was killed, you remember, in that Baroghil expedition.""Umph, yes; I remember, Inziri Pass—seven years ago, nasty business," grumbled the General, as he guzzled his soup; and Aspasia's eyes danced and her cheeks grew pink with suppressed laughter. Young Simpson thought she was laughing at him, and became abjectly wretched for the evening.* * * * *Having re-established his supremacy to his own satisfaction, Sir Arthur took an enormous interest in the protocol of his wife's departure. As he himself intended to accompany her to Bombay—he was to meet Lady Aspasia at an intermediate town on her May north—all the pomp and circumstance in which his soul delighted was to grace the occasion: the escorts, the salutes, the special trains, and so forth. Finding that Major Bethune was bound by the same boat, he annexed him to his "progress," with a condescension peculiarly his own. "He is engaged in some literary work, at my request. A very good kind of fellow; very intelligent, too," he explained.And so Raymond Bethune found himself one of the Lieutenant-Governor's brilliant retinue that autumn evening of the departure. "A silent, unemotional man," Sir Arthur might have added to his description, had he, in his own sublime content, ever thought of examining the impressions of others.Yet, under his impassive exterior, Raymond Bethune was conscious of a keener interest than he had felt these many years. But it was not in the smartness of the Lieutenant-Governor's escort, in the gorgeousness of his equipages or the general splendour of the magnate himself that he found food for speculation; it was in the personality of Sir Arthur's wife—a repellent yet fascinating enigma. His thoughts perpetually worked round it without being able to solve it.In another manner, a sweet, vague stirring of his being—totally new experience this!—the girlish presence of Aspasia filled his mind also to an unacknowledged degree. He felt as if his life had been caught up out of its own vastly different course and suddenly intertwined with that of these two women; the one whose every action, every word, was mysterious to him; and the other, clear to the eye as running water, child-heart, child-soul, impulse elemental, nature itself from her spontaneous laugh to her frank impertinence."Do you know," whispered Aspasia to him, as they stood side by side under the great colonnade waiting for their turn to descend to the carriage, "I have been hating myself ever since I was such a beast about poor Aunt Rosamond. I think it has half killed her, this business. Even the Runkle wants her to give it up while she's so ill."The man's eyes had been lost in a musing contemplation of the rosy pointed face surrounded by diaphanous folds of grey gauze. A dainty figure was Aspasia in her soft greys—the sort of travelling companion a man might gladly take with him through the arid and dusty journey of life. But at these words his singular light gaze kindled."Surely," said he, "you do not connect Lady Gerardine's illness with anything that you or I have done? That would be absurd, in the circumstances"—he threw a scornful glance about him—"too absurd a proposition to be entertained for a moment." ("This sensibility in a woman who has consoled herself so quickly and to such good purpose!" he added to himself.)"Oh," said Aspasia back, in a brisk angry whisper, "you don't understand, and neither do I. But I feel, and you don't ... and I think you are perfectly hateful!"She had caught his look, followed his thought, and was indignant.* * * * *And now out into the divine Indian evening they set. The travellers, with their crowd of attendants, moved of necessity slowly, for Lady Gerardine went upon her husband's arm, in the languor of the semi-invalid. Through the frowning gateway, down the stairway they passed, to halt again before the last flight of steps, Rosamond drew herself away from Sir Arthur's support, leaned up against the rough stone slabs of the wall, and laid a slender gloved hand absently in one of five prints that mark it."Do you see those?" cried Baby turning, all her ill-humour forgotten in her desire to impart a thrilling piece of information to Major Bethune as he walked behind her. "Do you see those funny marks? Those are supposed to be made by the hands of the queens, when they came down to be burned. Ugh! I say, Aunt Rosamond, are not you rather glad you are not an ancient Indian princess, and that Runkle is not an old rajah, and that you've not got to look forward to frizzle on his pyre?""You forget," came Rosamond's dreamy voice in reply, "I should not have been alive to grace Sir Arthur's pyre. My ashes would have mingled with other ashes long, long before.... Oh, I'm not so sure," she went on, again fitting a delicate hand into the sinister prints, "I am not sure that it was not a kind law in the end.""Gracious!" cried the irrepressible Aspasia, with a shriek and a laugh. And then she whispered, all bubbling mischief, into Bethune's ear: "The poor Runkle, he is not as bad as all that, after all!"Then, at sight of his face, she suddenly fell grave; and the two stood looking at each other. Bethune had first been startled by Lady Gerardine's look and accents even more than by the words themselves. The next moment, however, he mentally shrugged the shoulder of contempt.Whom did she think to take in by her affectation of sensibility, this languid, self-centred creature in the midst of her chosen luxury?Thus, when his eyes met Aspasia's, they were sad with the scorn of things, sad for the sordid trickeries of the soul of her on whom the love of his dead friend had been lavished.Sir Arthur, with touching unconsciousness of the interlude, was once again affectionately sustaining his wife. Then, as the procession moved on once more, Baby, troubled and discomfited—she could have hardly explained why—moved childishly close to Raymond Bethune, and shivered a little."I am glad to be getting away from this haunted place and this uncanny country," she whispered again. "I feel sure I should have ended by making one of these dreadful natives stick a knife into me. I am always plunging in upon their feelings and offending their castes, and all the rest of it. Just look at Saif-u-din's face—Runkle's new secretary—I never saw such a glare as he threw upon us all just now. I suppose he thought we were making fun of their precious suttee!" Aspasia's idea of native distinctions was still of the vaguest.Bethune turned the keen gaze of the conscious dominator upon the man that Aspasia had indicated with her little indiscreet finger. The red-turbaned, artistically draped figure, with the noble dusky head and the fan-shaped raven beard, was striding in their wake with a serene dignity that looked as if nothing could ever ruffle it. Had he been ruffled? Had the glare existed merely in Aspasia's imagination? While recognising a Pathan (whose contempt for the Hindoo probably exceeded Baby's own), Bethune knew that it was quite possible the irritable pride of the mountain man had taken fire at some real or fancied slight; but the betrayal could have been no more than a flash.The Major of Guides smiled to himself. He knew his native: the man who will never give you more than an accidental peep of the bared blade in the velvet sheath—no, not till he means to strike! About this fellow, a splendid specimen of the noblest race, a creature cut out of steel and bronze, there was, he thought, a more than usual sinister hint of the wild nature under all the exquisite manner and the perfect self-restraint; and he found himself regarding him with the complacent eye of the connoisseur. The artistic lion-tamer likes his lions savage.As he looked he wondered once and again how one so evidently a son of the warlike Pathans could have sought the pacific calling of secretary.Sir Arthur was taking his new toy down to Bombay with him, where there were, he had been informed, certain documents which might be of value to the "monumental work." And so it came to pass that Bethune and Muhammed Saif-u-din, destined to share one of the subordinate vehicles, found themselves presently standing side by side at the foot of the steps.Whether because of the interest he must have seen he had inspired in the officer, or whether he was simply drawn towards him by his racial military instincts, Raymond could not determine, but, as they halted, well-nigh shoulder to shoulder, the Pathan suddenly wheeled round, looked him full in the face in his turn, then smiled. It was a frank smile, showing a flash of splendid teeth; and it lit up the fierce, proud features in a way that was at once bright and sad."It would be curious," reflected Bethune, "to know what sort of a soul dwells in that envelope, which might become the greatest gentleman on earth. I'll warrant the fellow has many a bloody page in his story that a man might scarce look upon, and yet he has got a smile to stir you like a woman's."The first horses of the escort began to move with much crisp action, for Sir Arthur was at last installed in his state chariot. Through the great glass windows he might be seen and admired of all beholders, feeling his wife's pulse with an air of profound concern; while she, submissive, her patient smile upon her lips, was gazing up into his face with gentle abstracted eyes."A model couple!" sneered Bethune to himself. And, turning impatiently aside to devote his attention to the more pleasing subject of the oriental, he found the latter just in the act of dropping his glance from the same spectacle, and thought to notice a flicker as of kindred scorn pass across the statuesque composure of the dark face."For ever will the East and the West be as poles apart," cogitated the soldier, even as M. Châtelard had done; "upon no point do they in their heart more despise us than in our subserviency to our women. I am not sure," he pursued to himself, cynically, as the splendid presence of Saif-u-din settled itself with dignity upon the seat beside him; "I am not sure but that the orientals knew what they were about when they made their laws concerning the false and mischievous sex."Loud and deep rang the great guns of the salute: their Excellencies had started. Rosamond Gerardine was bound for England. In a waggon, at the tail of all the other equipages, sat Jani, withered and sad-faced, wrapt in her thoughts as closely as in her dusky chuddah. She would not talk with the bearers or even lament her coming exile. She held on tightly with one thin brown hand to a much-battered military tin case, which she herself had laid on the seat beside her. No one else would she permit to touch it. The other servants mocked her about it, vowing it was full of her hoardings and that they would rob her of it. At that she would menace them fiercely with her monkey paw. Strange, sad, inscrutable little Parca keeping guard on the fate of lives!CHAPTER XBombay, a very dream-city, was fading—ever more dreamlike, enwrapped in pale-tinted sunset mists—into the distance.The salt breeze was in their faces; in their ears was the rushing of the waters from the sides of the ship as she cut her way through. Already the something of England that the sea must always bring her children, the surroundings of an English ship especially, was about them! They seemed to have come from the land of languor and secret doings into open life, into simple action, into a busy, wholesome stir.Beneath them pulsed the great heart of the ship, white foam pointing her way as she forged ahead. Behind her stretched the furrow of her course, two long lines, ever wider divergent till they lost themselves to the eye. And now, by some fantastic mirage effect, the great oriental port, with its glimmering minarets and cupolas, showed as if caught up into the sky itself. Let but this iron heart labour on a little while longer, let but this eager prow cut its way a little deeper towards the sunset, and the East would have vanished altogether.... The travellers would not even see the first glimmer of her evening lights hung a jewel necklace on the horizon, so swiftly had the sea laid hold of them.Homeward bound! The step from pier to steamer had already severed the link of their strange affinity with the East. Its mystery had fallen from them. Already this was England. Rosamond Gerardine and Aspasia, side by side, watched the shores retreat, fade, sink, and vanish."Good-bye, India!" said Aspasia, her head sentimentally inclined, dropping at last the little handkerchief with which she had been frantically signalling long after there was any possibility of the vessel being descried from the land otherwise than as a black spot; "Good-bye, India, and hey for home!"Lady Gerardine fixed the fading vision with wide, abstracted eyes."God grant," she said, under her breath, more to herself than to the girl beside her, "that I may never see those shores again!""Amen!" said Aspasia, cheerfully.Rosamond laid her hand upon Aspasia's wrist as they leaned against the railings and pressed it with a grasp that almost hurt."An accursed land!" she went on, this time in a low, intense voice. It was as if she flung anathema to the retreating shores. "Cruel, cruel, treacherous! Oh, God, what has it not already cost us English! Is there a home among us that has not paid its blood tribute to that relentless monster? Listen, child. I was as young as you when I last beheld its shores—thus—from the sea. It was in the dawn (it is fit it should now be dusk), and we stood together as I stand beside you to-day. And I saw it grow out of the sky, even with the dawn, a city of rose, of pearl, beyond words beautiful—unimaginable, it seemed to me, in promise! He said to me: 'Look, there is the first love of my life; is she not fair? And I am bringing to her my other love ... and you two are all that I will have of life.' And then he laughed and said: 'It would be strange if I wanted more, with two such loves.' And, again: 'Not even for you could I be false to her.'"Aspasia, mystified, turned her bright gaze full upon her aunt's face. In the pupils of Rosamond's eyes there was enkindled a sullen fire."He came back to her," she went on; "and she—that land—lay smiling in the sunrise to receive him. Oh, how she can smile and look beautiful, and smell fragrant, and caress, with the dagger hidden under the velvet, the snake in the rose, and the sudden grave yawning! I've never been home since," she said, with a sudden change of tone, bringing her glance back from the misty horizon, to fix it upon Aspasia with so piteous and haggard a look that the girl lost her composure. "And now I am coming home alone, and he remains there." She made an outward sweep with her left hand towards the north. "I am coming home alone. The other has kept him. She has kept him. I am alone: he is left behind.""Who?" cried the bewildered Baby, who had utterly failed to seize the thread of her aunt's strange discourse. And, upon her usual impulsiveness springing to a conclusion of mingled amazement and derision: "Who—Runkle?" she exclaimed.No sooner had the foolish cry escaped her lips than she could have bitten out her tongue for vexation.A change came over Lady Gerardine's face, colder and greyer than even the rapid tropic evening that was closing upon the scene. The light went out in her eyes, to be replaced by a distant contempt. The features that had quivered with passion became set into their wonted mask of repose; it was as if a veil had dropped between them, as if a cold wind drove them apart."I was not speaking of your uncle," said Rosamond, at length, very gently. Then she suggested that as it was growing late they should take possession of their cabin.And Aspasia, as she meekly acquiesced, trembled upon tears at the thought of her blundering. For one moment this jealously centred heart had been about to open itself to her; for one moment this distant enfolded being had turned to her as woman to woman; impelled by God knows what sudden necessity of complaint, of another's sympathy, of another's understanding, the lonely soul had called upon hers. And she, Aspasia—Baby, well did they name her so—had not been able to seize the precious moment! The sound of her own foolish laugh still rang in her ears, while the unconscious contempt in Rosamond's gaze scorched her cheeks.* * * * *From the very first day, fate, in the shape of an imperiously intimate Aspasia, drew Raymond Bethune, the saturnine lonely man, into the narrow circle of Lady Gerardine's 'board-ship existence. In her double quality of great lady and semi-invalid, the Lieutenant-Governor's wife was to be withdrawn from the familiar intercourse which life on a liner imposes on most travellers. It had been Sir Arthur's care to see that she was provided with an almost royal accommodation, which, as everything in this world is comparative, chiefly consisted in the possession of a small sitting-room over and above the usual sleeping-cabin.Into these sacred precincts Miss Cuningham hustled Bethune unceremoniously, as the first dusk closed round their travelling home on the waste of waters."Steward! ... Oh, isn't it too bad, Major Bethune! I've been ringing like mad, and poor old Jani's bewildered out of her wits; and Gibbons—that's our English fool of a maid—she's taken to groaning already. There's not a creature to do anything for us, and that idiot there says he's nothing to say to the cabins!"Her arms full of flowers, she stood close to him; and the fragrance of the roses and carnations came to him in little gushes with her panting breath. Her rosy face, in the uncertain light, had taken to itself an ethereal charm very different from its usual clear and positive outline. Hardly had this realisation of her personality come to him than, under the hands of the ship's servant she had so contemptuously indicated, the flood of the electric light leaped upon them. And behold, she appeared to him yet fairer—youth triumphant, defying even that cruel glare to find a blemish in bloom or contour."What do you want?" he asked, with the softening of his hard face which so few were ever privileged to see."A vase for our flowers—a big bowl. I hate messy little dabs; and I don't want them to die an hour before they can help it. Oh, a really big bowl, at once!"Her residence in an Indian governor's palace had been short, but sufficient to give Miss Aspasia the habit of command.Raymond Bethune gave his dry chuckle as he set to work to fulfil her behest."I've captured a salad bowl," cried he, almost jovially, when he returned; "and the head steward is in despair!""Tell him to steal the cook's pudding-basins," said Aspasia, and swept him back with her to the minute sitting-room.Here sat Lady Gerardine, still wrapped in her cloak but bareheaded, under the shaded light. Leaning back among her cushions, her feet crossed on a footstool, she seemed to have taken full possession of her quarters. The narrow commonplace surroundings had already received her special personal imprint. The flowers, the cushions, a few books, a great cut-glass scent bottle—the very disorder even of a litter of rich trifles that had not yet found their place, removed the trivial impression of steamer upholstery. She received him without surprise, if without any mark of welcome; and Aspasia chattered, ordered, laughed, kept him employed and amused. Now and again Lady Gerardine smiled vaguely at her niece's outbursts. Bethune could not feel himself an intruder. And certainly it was better than his fourth share of a bachelor's cabin, better than the crowded saloon and smoking-rooms, with their pervading glare and odour of high polish.Through the open port-hole came the sound of the rushing, swirling waters, punctuated by the slap of some sudden wave against the flank of the ship. A wind had arisen, and now and again gusts, cold and briny, rushed in upon the warm inner atmosphere of flowers.Lady Gerardine held a large bouquet of Niphetos roses, and her pale long fingers were busy unrolling the bonds that braced them in artificial deportment. Their petals, thought the man, were no whiter than her cheeks.Presently Aspasia plunged her healthy pink hands down among the languid blossoms and began pulling out the wires."I shouldn't, if I were you," said Rosamond; and then she held up a spray. "See, the poor flower, all stained, all fallen apart, all broken. Never draw away the secret supports, Baby. It is better to hold one's head up, even with the iron in one's heart, and pretend it is not there."Bethune looked at her, a little startled. In some scarcely tangible way the words seemed aimed at him; but he saw that for her, at that moment, he did not exist.For the first time a pang of real misgiving shot through him. He seemed to behold her with new eyes. She struck him as very frail. Could it be true, or did he but imagine it, that that lovely head, once so defiantly uplifted against him, now drooped?Feeling the fixity of his gaze upon her, she glanced up and then smiled. Strange being! Was he, then, so easily forgiven? His heart gave a sudden leap.The memory of this first evening was one which haunted him all his life with a curious intimate sweetness.* * * * *Time passed as time will pass on board ship; vague hours resembling each other, dropping to dreamy length of days; days that yet lapse quickly and moreover work a sure but subtle change. No traveller that lands after a long sea journey is the same as he who started. Sometimes, indeed, he will look back upon his former self as upon another, with surprise.So it was with Raymond Bethune; and if he came to view himself with surprise, still more inexplicable to him was the new Lady Gerardine as he learned to regard her. According to his presentiment, these two women—she to whose puzzling personality he had vowed antipathy, and she whose fresh young presence made dangerously strong demands upon his sympathy—soon began to absorb all the energies of his thoughts. To a man who had hitherto known no other emotion, outside a very ordinary type of home affection, than friendship for another man; whose life, with the exception of one brief period of glamorous hero-worship, had been devoted to duty in its sternest, most virile form, this mental pre-occupation over two women, both comparative strangers, was at first a matter for self-mockery. It was afterwards one of self-conflict. Whoso, however, has reached the point of actually combating an idea is already and obviously its victim, and the final stage of abandonment to the obsession cannot be very distant.Looking back upon his memories, in later days, it was singular to him how completely the girl and the woman divided his most vivid impressions of that journey. If the vision of Aspasia, fresh as the spray, rosy as the dawn, coming to meet him of a morning, brisk and free, across the deck, her young figure outlined against sparkling sea and translucent sky, was a memory all pleasant and all sweet, the picture of that other, slow moving and pallid, so enwrapped in inexplicable mourning, so immeasurably indifferent to himself, was bitten into the tablets of his mind as with burning acid, fixed in lines of pain.It is never flattering for a man to realise that he is of no consequence to a woman with whom he is brought into daily intercourse. And to feel that, though his acts have had a distinct influence upon her life, his personality has failed to make the smallest impression, is a situation certain to pique the most unassuming. In the end Bethune began to wish that Lady Gerardine had retained even her original attitude of resentment. Now and again, indeed, he would find her eye fixed upon him, but at the same time would know unmistakably that her thought was not with him. Sometimes her attitude of inexplicable sorrow seemed harder to bear than her first evidences of heartlessness.One day Aspasia had suddenly attacked her aunt upon the subject of her black garb, crying, with her noted heedlessness:"I declare, any one would think you were in mourning."Lady Gerardine shifted her distant gaze from the far horizon to Aspasia's countenance, and her lips moved but made no sound. In her heart she was saying:"How else should I clothe myself, when I am travelling with my dead?"Almost as if he read her thought, Bethune sneered as he looked at her, and with difficulty restrained the taunt that rose to his tongue. "Lady Gerardine wears belated weeds!"Her attitude of hopeless melancholy, her raiment of mourning, irritated him bitterly. Yet, while he looked at her in harshness, he marked the admirable white throat, rising like a flower stem from the dense black of her dress, and found himself wondering whether any shimmer of colour would have become her half so well.Towards the end of their journey together he was once summoned to speak with her alone. It was about the forthcoming book. Nothing could be more brief, more businesslike than her words, more unemotional than her manner. She asked for his instructions; she discussed, criticised, concurred. It was obvious that, when she chose, her brain could act with quite remarkable clearness. It was also obvious that she had completely capitulated to his wishes; and yet never was victory more savourless.At the conclusion of this conversation she settled with him that, when she had accomplished her part of the task, she would send for him. And as he withdrew, he felt himself dismissed from her thoughts, except as a mere instrument in what now seemed more her undertaking than his own. At heart he found it increasingly difficult to accept the position with good grace.After this, during the few days of ship life together left to them, Lady Gerardine seldom admitted him to her company; and thus Raymond was the more thrown with Aspasia. The girl, unconventional by temperament and somewhat set apart by her position of "Governor's niece," unhesitatingly profited by a situation which afforded her unmixed amusement. She was not in love as yet with the Major of Guides. Indeed, she had other and higher ambitions. Aspasia's dream-pictures of herself were ever of a wonderful artist of world-wide celebrity, surrounded by a sea of clapping hands, graciously curtseying her thanks from the side of a Steinway grand.... But Bethune interested her, and there was something piquantly pleasant in being able to awaken that gleam in his cold, light eye, in noticing that the lines of his impassive face relaxed into softness for her alone.One afternoon, as they sat on deck—the great ship cutting the blue waters of the Adriatic, between the fading of a glorious red and orange sunset and the rising of a thin sickle moon, Aspasia wrapped against the chilly salt airs in some of her aunt's sables, out of which richness the hardy, wild-flower prettiness of her face rose in emphatic contrast—she told him the story of her short life.She spoke of her musical career, of the bright student days at Vienna; the hard work of them, the anguish, the struggle, the joy. Then of the death of her mother, and the falling of all her high hopes under the crushing will of Sir Arthur, her appointed guardian."When mother went," said Aspasia, "everything went." As she spoke two tears leaped out of her eyes, and hung poised on the short, thick eyelashes. "The Runkle thinks it's a disgrace for a lady to do anything in life. 'And, besides,' he says, 'she can't, and she'd better not attempt it.' But wait till I'm twenty-one," cried the girl, vindictively, "and I'll show him what his 'dear Raspasia's' got in her!"She smiled in her young consciousness of power, and the big tears, detaching themselves, ran into her dimples. Raymond, looking at her with all the experience of his hard life behind him, and all the disillusion of his five-and-thirty years, felt so sudden a movement at once of pity and tenderness that he had to stiffen himself in his seat not to catch her in his arms and kiss her on those wet dimples as he would have kissed a child."Oh, you'll do great things," said he, in the tone in which one praises the little one's sand castle on the beach, or tin soldier strategy. "And may I come with a great big laurel crown, tied with gold ribbons, when you give your first concert in the Albert Hall?""Albert Hall," mocked she, "the very place for a piano recital!" Then she let her eyes roam out across the heaving space. Once more she saw herself the centre of an applauding multitude; but, in the foremost rank, there was the lean, brown face, and it was moved to enthusiasm, too. And, somehow, from that evening forth, the dream-visions of her future glory were never to be quite complete without it.* * * * *A mist-enwrapped, rain-swept shore, parting the dim grey sea and sky in twain, was their first glimpse of England after years of exile."Ugh," said Aspasia, shivering, "isn't it just like England to go and be damp and horrid for us!"Lady Gerardine, looking out with eager straining gaze towards the weeping land, turned with one of her sudden, unexpected movements of passion upon the girl."I'm glad it's raining," she said. "I'm glad it's cold, and bleak, and grey. I'm glad to feel the raindrops beating on nay face. I'm sick of hard blue skies and fierce sunshine.... And the trees at Saltwoods will be all bent one way by the blowing of the wet sea wind. It's England, it's home; and, oh, I'm glad to be home!"BOOK IICHAPTER IRosamond Gerardine and Aspasia Cuningham lay back, silent, each in her corner of the railway carriage, while the English landscape flew by them, wet and green and autumn brown, gleaming in a fugitive yellow sunlight.Aspasia still felt the pressure of Bethune's unconsciously hard hand-grip. His image, as he had stood bareheaded looking after the moving train, was still vivid before her eyes. His last words: "It is not good-bye," were ringing in her ears. His face had looked wistful, she thought; his cold glance had taken that warm good look she claimed as her own. She was glad it was not good-bye. And yet, as they steamed away, she, watching him as long as she could, saw, and could not hide it from herself, that it was upon Lady Gerardine his eyes were fixed at the last—fixed with an expression which had already become familiar to her. "One would think he hated her—sometimes," said shrewd Baby to herself, "and yet, when she's there, he forgets me. I might as well be dead, or a fright."This puzzled her and troubled her, too, a little. She glanced across now at her aunt's abstracted countenance. "I am sure," she thought, in loyal admiration, "if he were madly in love with her, it would be only natural. But it's not love—it's more like hate and a sort of pain." With all her sageness, Baby was only eighteen.How completely had Raymond Bethune passed from Lady Gerardine's mind—even before he had passed from her sight!She had nearly reached the end of her journey. The burning land she had left behind her—once the land of her desire—seemed now but a place visited in long evil dreams, where she had undergone unimaginable sufferings during the bondage of sleep. The humid air of England beat upon her face through the open window with a comforting assurance as of waking reality.She had told herself she was travelling with her dead. Never for one hour of her long journey had she forgotten the meaning of that box under Jani's care. But, with every sunrise that marked a wider distance between her and India, she drew a freer breath. With every stage she felt herself less Lady Gerardine, wife; and more Mrs. English, widow. There was beginning to be an extraordinary restfulness in the sensation.They sped through the New Forest glades, sodden after the rain, now flashing gold-brown with that shaft of sun; now black-green, cavernous, mysterious, where the pines grow close. And then came the moorland stretches, reaching up to a pale-blue cleft in the storm-weighted clouds. How cool it all was! How soft the colours! How benign the wet sky, how different from the metal glare of the land that had betrayed her!And, by-and-by, white gleams of sunshine began to deepen into primroses and ambers; towards the west the sky grew ever clearer, and the leaden wrack, parting, showed an horizon like to a honey sea against the rising mists of evening. How beautiful was England!When they got out at the little country station, in the rural heart of Dorset, the day was closing in. The vault of the heavens brooded over the earth with a cup-like closeness. November though it was, the air struck upon their cheeks as gently as a caress, all impregnated with the fragrance of wet green indefinably touched with the tart accent of decay.Rosamond drew a long deep breath; it had a poignant pleasure in it; tears sprang to her eyes, but, for the first time in God knew how many years, there was a sweetness in them. Jani at her elbow shivered with an aguish chatter of teeth. With one hand she clutched her shawls across her little lean figure; with the other she held on fiercely to a battered tin box."Oh, Aunt Rosamond," cried Aspasia, ecstatically, as they got into the vehicle awaiting them, "it's a fly, it's a fly! Aren't you glad? Do you smell the musty straw? Oh! doesn't it bring back good old times? Don't you wish you may never sit in a state carriage again?"It was a long drive, through winding lanes. Sometimes they strained uphill, sometimes they skirted the flat down; sometimes the branches of the overhanging trees beat against the roof of the carriage or in at the open window. At first the whole land was wonderfully still. They could hear the moisture drip from the leaves when the horses were at the walk. And, by-and-by, there grew out of the distance the faint yet mighty rumour of the sea. Within such short measure, then, this small, great England was meeting her salt limits! Across the upland down, presently, even on this silent evening, there rose a wind to sing of the surf. The trees by the roadside, in the copses amid fields, on the crest, etched against the glimmer of the sky, had all that regular inland bent that tells of salt winds.At last the rickety fly began to jingle and jolt along a road that was hardly more than a track. The way dipped down an abrupt slope and then branched off unexpectedly into a side lane. Rosamond leaned out of the window; she felt they were drawing near her unknown home."Are we there?" cried Aspasia, entering into a violent state of excitement as they came to a halt before a swing gate.Rosamond did not answer. She was looking with all her eyes, with all her heart. Sudden memories awoke within her—words, never even noted to be forgotten, began to whisper in her ears: "You never saw such a place, love. It isn't a place, it's a queer old house dumped down in a hollow of the downs. And the avenue—there isn't an avenue, it's a road through the orchard, and the orchard comes right up to the house—and you never saw such a bunch of chimney-stacks in your life. But such as it is, I love it. And some day we'll go and live there, you and I...." Here, then, were the orchard trees, twisted shapes, stretching out unpruned branches to them as they passed!"I almost plucked an apple," cried Aspasia, from her side, with a childish scream.The sky was rift just about the horizon—the afterglow primrose against the sullen gloom of the cloud banks. Cut into sharp silhouette against this pallid translucence, rose the black outline of the house and right across it the fantastic old-time chimney-stack, at sight of which Rosamond laughed low to herself as one who recognises the face of a friend. "You never saw such a bunch of chimney-stacks in your life!..."A faint column of smoke ascended pale against the gloom where the chimneys lost themselves in the skies. As Rosamond noted it, her heart stirred; all was not dead then—the old house, his house, was alive and waiting for her!They drew up close to the stone porch, open to the night, flush with the level of the out-jutting gables, and the driver, plunging into the black recess, sent the jangle of a bell ringing through inner spaces. In the waiting pause all was very silent, save the stealthy patter from the overgrown ivy clumps that hung across the entrance. There was a rustle, the hop of an awakened bird, quite close to Rosamond's ear, as she leaned out with the eagerness that had been growing upon her ever since her landing.Then came steps within: the door was opened first but a little space, with the habitual precaution of the lowly caretaker, then suddenly drawn wide. A square of light that seemed golden was cut out of the darkness, and:"You're welcome, ma'am," cried old Mary, tremulously smoothing her apron.Lady Gerardine passed with fixed eyes and straight steps into the hall, but she turned quickly as the words struck her ear. Aspasia, following, saw her face illumined by a smile that was almost joy. And the girl became secretly a little alarmed; her aunt's ways had been all inexplicable to her of late.Rosamond's heart was crying out within her, and it was with actual joy. "Welcome, ma'am," had said his servant—to old Mary the mistress of Saltwoods was Captain English's widow—even to herself might she not now cease to be Lady Gerardine for a brief respite? Oh, then would the manor-house be home indeed!A great sense of peace, accompanied by a sudden lassitude, fell upon her; she sank into an armchair, flinging her arms wide with a gesture of relief. Opposite to her was a sturdy oaken table, upon which the housekeeper had just placed a hand-lamp. The light fell full upon a rack displaying a hunting-crop, a couple of rough walking-sticks; above, there was the sketch of a boy's face. Her gaze wandered, without at first taking in the meaning of what it saw.Noise resounded from the porch; it was Jani, struggling with the coachman for the possession of the old regimental case.Rosamond looked quickly up again at the bright living presentment on the wall; then she rose to her feet and staggered blindly through the nearest door. There, in sheltering darkness, Aspasia promptly overtook her, and was terrified, as she clasped her warm young arms round her aunt's figure, to find it torn by sobs."Let me be, let me be!" exclaimed Lady Gerardine, pushing the girl from her, "it is good to give way at last."And Aspasia, pressing her face in wordless attempt at consolation against her aunt's cheek, found it streaming with a very torrent of tears.* * * * *"Ah," said old Mary, shaking her head, as Miss Cuningham presently besought her for the feminine panacea of tea, "poor lady, it's no wonder: he was a grand young gentleman!"It was, indeed, evident that here Lady Gerardine could never be anything but Captain English's widow.
* * * * *
The receipt of a letter from Lady Aspasia Melbury was the first drop of balm in his Excellency's unwontedly distasteful cup. She pooh-poohed his old-fashioned suggestion that the hostess's enforced absence necessitated a postponement of her visit—announced her arrival at the prescribed time, and her conviction that she and her cousin would get on "like a house on fire." Such being the great lady's opinion, the great man was delighted; and, before many further hours had gone by, the younger and less important Aspasia, with hardly suppressed giggles, heard him hold forth at the dinner table to the following effect:
"What my wife requires really is absolute country quiet. I have arranged that she should pass her first weeks in England at her own little place in Dorsetshire, a charming old manor-house. She naturally does not wish to see much society till my return; and, anyhow, there is a small piece of work which she is undertaking at my suggestion." Here he whispered audibly to the General—his guest of the evening: "Poor English, you know—a little biography we are getting up about him. He was killed, you remember, in that Baroghil expedition."
"Umph, yes; I remember, Inziri Pass—seven years ago, nasty business," grumbled the General, as he guzzled his soup; and Aspasia's eyes danced and her cheeks grew pink with suppressed laughter. Young Simpson thought she was laughing at him, and became abjectly wretched for the evening.
* * * * *
Having re-established his supremacy to his own satisfaction, Sir Arthur took an enormous interest in the protocol of his wife's departure. As he himself intended to accompany her to Bombay—he was to meet Lady Aspasia at an intermediate town on her May north—all the pomp and circumstance in which his soul delighted was to grace the occasion: the escorts, the salutes, the special trains, and so forth. Finding that Major Bethune was bound by the same boat, he annexed him to his "progress," with a condescension peculiarly his own. "He is engaged in some literary work, at my request. A very good kind of fellow; very intelligent, too," he explained.
And so Raymond Bethune found himself one of the Lieutenant-Governor's brilliant retinue that autumn evening of the departure. "A silent, unemotional man," Sir Arthur might have added to his description, had he, in his own sublime content, ever thought of examining the impressions of others.
Yet, under his impassive exterior, Raymond Bethune was conscious of a keener interest than he had felt these many years. But it was not in the smartness of the Lieutenant-Governor's escort, in the gorgeousness of his equipages or the general splendour of the magnate himself that he found food for speculation; it was in the personality of Sir Arthur's wife—a repellent yet fascinating enigma. His thoughts perpetually worked round it without being able to solve it.
In another manner, a sweet, vague stirring of his being—totally new experience this!—the girlish presence of Aspasia filled his mind also to an unacknowledged degree. He felt as if his life had been caught up out of its own vastly different course and suddenly intertwined with that of these two women; the one whose every action, every word, was mysterious to him; and the other, clear to the eye as running water, child-heart, child-soul, impulse elemental, nature itself from her spontaneous laugh to her frank impertinence.
"Do you know," whispered Aspasia to him, as they stood side by side under the great colonnade waiting for their turn to descend to the carriage, "I have been hating myself ever since I was such a beast about poor Aunt Rosamond. I think it has half killed her, this business. Even the Runkle wants her to give it up while she's so ill."
The man's eyes had been lost in a musing contemplation of the rosy pointed face surrounded by diaphanous folds of grey gauze. A dainty figure was Aspasia in her soft greys—the sort of travelling companion a man might gladly take with him through the arid and dusty journey of life. But at these words his singular light gaze kindled.
"Surely," said he, "you do not connect Lady Gerardine's illness with anything that you or I have done? That would be absurd, in the circumstances"—he threw a scornful glance about him—"too absurd a proposition to be entertained for a moment." ("This sensibility in a woman who has consoled herself so quickly and to such good purpose!" he added to himself.)
"Oh," said Aspasia back, in a brisk angry whisper, "you don't understand, and neither do I. But I feel, and you don't ... and I think you are perfectly hateful!"
She had caught his look, followed his thought, and was indignant.
* * * * *
And now out into the divine Indian evening they set. The travellers, with their crowd of attendants, moved of necessity slowly, for Lady Gerardine went upon her husband's arm, in the languor of the semi-invalid. Through the frowning gateway, down the stairway they passed, to halt again before the last flight of steps, Rosamond drew herself away from Sir Arthur's support, leaned up against the rough stone slabs of the wall, and laid a slender gloved hand absently in one of five prints that mark it.
"Do you see those?" cried Baby turning, all her ill-humour forgotten in her desire to impart a thrilling piece of information to Major Bethune as he walked behind her. "Do you see those funny marks? Those are supposed to be made by the hands of the queens, when they came down to be burned. Ugh! I say, Aunt Rosamond, are not you rather glad you are not an ancient Indian princess, and that Runkle is not an old rajah, and that you've not got to look forward to frizzle on his pyre?"
"You forget," came Rosamond's dreamy voice in reply, "I should not have been alive to grace Sir Arthur's pyre. My ashes would have mingled with other ashes long, long before.... Oh, I'm not so sure," she went on, again fitting a delicate hand into the sinister prints, "I am not sure that it was not a kind law in the end."
"Gracious!" cried the irrepressible Aspasia, with a shriek and a laugh. And then she whispered, all bubbling mischief, into Bethune's ear: "The poor Runkle, he is not as bad as all that, after all!"
Then, at sight of his face, she suddenly fell grave; and the two stood looking at each other. Bethune had first been startled by Lady Gerardine's look and accents even more than by the words themselves. The next moment, however, he mentally shrugged the shoulder of contempt.
Whom did she think to take in by her affectation of sensibility, this languid, self-centred creature in the midst of her chosen luxury?
Thus, when his eyes met Aspasia's, they were sad with the scorn of things, sad for the sordid trickeries of the soul of her on whom the love of his dead friend had been lavished.
Sir Arthur, with touching unconsciousness of the interlude, was once again affectionately sustaining his wife. Then, as the procession moved on once more, Baby, troubled and discomfited—she could have hardly explained why—moved childishly close to Raymond Bethune, and shivered a little.
"I am glad to be getting away from this haunted place and this uncanny country," she whispered again. "I feel sure I should have ended by making one of these dreadful natives stick a knife into me. I am always plunging in upon their feelings and offending their castes, and all the rest of it. Just look at Saif-u-din's face—Runkle's new secretary—I never saw such a glare as he threw upon us all just now. I suppose he thought we were making fun of their precious suttee!" Aspasia's idea of native distinctions was still of the vaguest.
Bethune turned the keen gaze of the conscious dominator upon the man that Aspasia had indicated with her little indiscreet finger. The red-turbaned, artistically draped figure, with the noble dusky head and the fan-shaped raven beard, was striding in their wake with a serene dignity that looked as if nothing could ever ruffle it. Had he been ruffled? Had the glare existed merely in Aspasia's imagination? While recognising a Pathan (whose contempt for the Hindoo probably exceeded Baby's own), Bethune knew that it was quite possible the irritable pride of the mountain man had taken fire at some real or fancied slight; but the betrayal could have been no more than a flash.
The Major of Guides smiled to himself. He knew his native: the man who will never give you more than an accidental peep of the bared blade in the velvet sheath—no, not till he means to strike! About this fellow, a splendid specimen of the noblest race, a creature cut out of steel and bronze, there was, he thought, a more than usual sinister hint of the wild nature under all the exquisite manner and the perfect self-restraint; and he found himself regarding him with the complacent eye of the connoisseur. The artistic lion-tamer likes his lions savage.
As he looked he wondered once and again how one so evidently a son of the warlike Pathans could have sought the pacific calling of secretary.
Sir Arthur was taking his new toy down to Bombay with him, where there were, he had been informed, certain documents which might be of value to the "monumental work." And so it came to pass that Bethune and Muhammed Saif-u-din, destined to share one of the subordinate vehicles, found themselves presently standing side by side at the foot of the steps.
Whether because of the interest he must have seen he had inspired in the officer, or whether he was simply drawn towards him by his racial military instincts, Raymond could not determine, but, as they halted, well-nigh shoulder to shoulder, the Pathan suddenly wheeled round, looked him full in the face in his turn, then smiled. It was a frank smile, showing a flash of splendid teeth; and it lit up the fierce, proud features in a way that was at once bright and sad.
"It would be curious," reflected Bethune, "to know what sort of a soul dwells in that envelope, which might become the greatest gentleman on earth. I'll warrant the fellow has many a bloody page in his story that a man might scarce look upon, and yet he has got a smile to stir you like a woman's."
The first horses of the escort began to move with much crisp action, for Sir Arthur was at last installed in his state chariot. Through the great glass windows he might be seen and admired of all beholders, feeling his wife's pulse with an air of profound concern; while she, submissive, her patient smile upon her lips, was gazing up into his face with gentle abstracted eyes.
"A model couple!" sneered Bethune to himself. And, turning impatiently aside to devote his attention to the more pleasing subject of the oriental, he found the latter just in the act of dropping his glance from the same spectacle, and thought to notice a flicker as of kindred scorn pass across the statuesque composure of the dark face.
"For ever will the East and the West be as poles apart," cogitated the soldier, even as M. Châtelard had done; "upon no point do they in their heart more despise us than in our subserviency to our women. I am not sure," he pursued to himself, cynically, as the splendid presence of Saif-u-din settled itself with dignity upon the seat beside him; "I am not sure but that the orientals knew what they were about when they made their laws concerning the false and mischievous sex."
Loud and deep rang the great guns of the salute: their Excellencies had started. Rosamond Gerardine was bound for England. In a waggon, at the tail of all the other equipages, sat Jani, withered and sad-faced, wrapt in her thoughts as closely as in her dusky chuddah. She would not talk with the bearers or even lament her coming exile. She held on tightly with one thin brown hand to a much-battered military tin case, which she herself had laid on the seat beside her. No one else would she permit to touch it. The other servants mocked her about it, vowing it was full of her hoardings and that they would rob her of it. At that she would menace them fiercely with her monkey paw. Strange, sad, inscrutable little Parca keeping guard on the fate of lives!
CHAPTER X
Bombay, a very dream-city, was fading—ever more dreamlike, enwrapped in pale-tinted sunset mists—into the distance.
The salt breeze was in their faces; in their ears was the rushing of the waters from the sides of the ship as she cut her way through. Already the something of England that the sea must always bring her children, the surroundings of an English ship especially, was about them! They seemed to have come from the land of languor and secret doings into open life, into simple action, into a busy, wholesome stir.
Beneath them pulsed the great heart of the ship, white foam pointing her way as she forged ahead. Behind her stretched the furrow of her course, two long lines, ever wider divergent till they lost themselves to the eye. And now, by some fantastic mirage effect, the great oriental port, with its glimmering minarets and cupolas, showed as if caught up into the sky itself. Let but this iron heart labour on a little while longer, let but this eager prow cut its way a little deeper towards the sunset, and the East would have vanished altogether.... The travellers would not even see the first glimmer of her evening lights hung a jewel necklace on the horizon, so swiftly had the sea laid hold of them.
Homeward bound! The step from pier to steamer had already severed the link of their strange affinity with the East. Its mystery had fallen from them. Already this was England. Rosamond Gerardine and Aspasia, side by side, watched the shores retreat, fade, sink, and vanish.
"Good-bye, India!" said Aspasia, her head sentimentally inclined, dropping at last the little handkerchief with which she had been frantically signalling long after there was any possibility of the vessel being descried from the land otherwise than as a black spot; "Good-bye, India, and hey for home!"
Lady Gerardine fixed the fading vision with wide, abstracted eyes.
"God grant," she said, under her breath, more to herself than to the girl beside her, "that I may never see those shores again!"
"Amen!" said Aspasia, cheerfully.
Rosamond laid her hand upon Aspasia's wrist as they leaned against the railings and pressed it with a grasp that almost hurt.
"An accursed land!" she went on, this time in a low, intense voice. It was as if she flung anathema to the retreating shores. "Cruel, cruel, treacherous! Oh, God, what has it not already cost us English! Is there a home among us that has not paid its blood tribute to that relentless monster? Listen, child. I was as young as you when I last beheld its shores—thus—from the sea. It was in the dawn (it is fit it should now be dusk), and we stood together as I stand beside you to-day. And I saw it grow out of the sky, even with the dawn, a city of rose, of pearl, beyond words beautiful—unimaginable, it seemed to me, in promise! He said to me: 'Look, there is the first love of my life; is she not fair? And I am bringing to her my other love ... and you two are all that I will have of life.' And then he laughed and said: 'It would be strange if I wanted more, with two such loves.' And, again: 'Not even for you could I be false to her.'"
Aspasia, mystified, turned her bright gaze full upon her aunt's face. In the pupils of Rosamond's eyes there was enkindled a sullen fire.
"He came back to her," she went on; "and she—that land—lay smiling in the sunrise to receive him. Oh, how she can smile and look beautiful, and smell fragrant, and caress, with the dagger hidden under the velvet, the snake in the rose, and the sudden grave yawning! I've never been home since," she said, with a sudden change of tone, bringing her glance back from the misty horizon, to fix it upon Aspasia with so piteous and haggard a look that the girl lost her composure. "And now I am coming home alone, and he remains there." She made an outward sweep with her left hand towards the north. "I am coming home alone. The other has kept him. She has kept him. I am alone: he is left behind."
"Who?" cried the bewildered Baby, who had utterly failed to seize the thread of her aunt's strange discourse. And, upon her usual impulsiveness springing to a conclusion of mingled amazement and derision: "Who—Runkle?" she exclaimed.
No sooner had the foolish cry escaped her lips than she could have bitten out her tongue for vexation.
A change came over Lady Gerardine's face, colder and greyer than even the rapid tropic evening that was closing upon the scene. The light went out in her eyes, to be replaced by a distant contempt. The features that had quivered with passion became set into their wonted mask of repose; it was as if a veil had dropped between them, as if a cold wind drove them apart.
"I was not speaking of your uncle," said Rosamond, at length, very gently. Then she suggested that as it was growing late they should take possession of their cabin.
And Aspasia, as she meekly acquiesced, trembled upon tears at the thought of her blundering. For one moment this jealously centred heart had been about to open itself to her; for one moment this distant enfolded being had turned to her as woman to woman; impelled by God knows what sudden necessity of complaint, of another's sympathy, of another's understanding, the lonely soul had called upon hers. And she, Aspasia—Baby, well did they name her so—had not been able to seize the precious moment! The sound of her own foolish laugh still rang in her ears, while the unconscious contempt in Rosamond's gaze scorched her cheeks.
* * * * *
From the very first day, fate, in the shape of an imperiously intimate Aspasia, drew Raymond Bethune, the saturnine lonely man, into the narrow circle of Lady Gerardine's 'board-ship existence. In her double quality of great lady and semi-invalid, the Lieutenant-Governor's wife was to be withdrawn from the familiar intercourse which life on a liner imposes on most travellers. It had been Sir Arthur's care to see that she was provided with an almost royal accommodation, which, as everything in this world is comparative, chiefly consisted in the possession of a small sitting-room over and above the usual sleeping-cabin.
Into these sacred precincts Miss Cuningham hustled Bethune unceremoniously, as the first dusk closed round their travelling home on the waste of waters.
"Steward! ... Oh, isn't it too bad, Major Bethune! I've been ringing like mad, and poor old Jani's bewildered out of her wits; and Gibbons—that's our English fool of a maid—she's taken to groaning already. There's not a creature to do anything for us, and that idiot there says he's nothing to say to the cabins!"
Her arms full of flowers, she stood close to him; and the fragrance of the roses and carnations came to him in little gushes with her panting breath. Her rosy face, in the uncertain light, had taken to itself an ethereal charm very different from its usual clear and positive outline. Hardly had this realisation of her personality come to him than, under the hands of the ship's servant she had so contemptuously indicated, the flood of the electric light leaped upon them. And behold, she appeared to him yet fairer—youth triumphant, defying even that cruel glare to find a blemish in bloom or contour.
"What do you want?" he asked, with the softening of his hard face which so few were ever privileged to see.
"A vase for our flowers—a big bowl. I hate messy little dabs; and I don't want them to die an hour before they can help it. Oh, a really big bowl, at once!"
Her residence in an Indian governor's palace had been short, but sufficient to give Miss Aspasia the habit of command.
Raymond Bethune gave his dry chuckle as he set to work to fulfil her behest.
"I've captured a salad bowl," cried he, almost jovially, when he returned; "and the head steward is in despair!"
"Tell him to steal the cook's pudding-basins," said Aspasia, and swept him back with her to the minute sitting-room.
Here sat Lady Gerardine, still wrapped in her cloak but bareheaded, under the shaded light. Leaning back among her cushions, her feet crossed on a footstool, she seemed to have taken full possession of her quarters. The narrow commonplace surroundings had already received her special personal imprint. The flowers, the cushions, a few books, a great cut-glass scent bottle—the very disorder even of a litter of rich trifles that had not yet found their place, removed the trivial impression of steamer upholstery. She received him without surprise, if without any mark of welcome; and Aspasia chattered, ordered, laughed, kept him employed and amused. Now and again Lady Gerardine smiled vaguely at her niece's outbursts. Bethune could not feel himself an intruder. And certainly it was better than his fourth share of a bachelor's cabin, better than the crowded saloon and smoking-rooms, with their pervading glare and odour of high polish.
Through the open port-hole came the sound of the rushing, swirling waters, punctuated by the slap of some sudden wave against the flank of the ship. A wind had arisen, and now and again gusts, cold and briny, rushed in upon the warm inner atmosphere of flowers.
Lady Gerardine held a large bouquet of Niphetos roses, and her pale long fingers were busy unrolling the bonds that braced them in artificial deportment. Their petals, thought the man, were no whiter than her cheeks.
Presently Aspasia plunged her healthy pink hands down among the languid blossoms and began pulling out the wires.
"I shouldn't, if I were you," said Rosamond; and then she held up a spray. "See, the poor flower, all stained, all fallen apart, all broken. Never draw away the secret supports, Baby. It is better to hold one's head up, even with the iron in one's heart, and pretend it is not there."
Bethune looked at her, a little startled. In some scarcely tangible way the words seemed aimed at him; but he saw that for her, at that moment, he did not exist.
For the first time a pang of real misgiving shot through him. He seemed to behold her with new eyes. She struck him as very frail. Could it be true, or did he but imagine it, that that lovely head, once so defiantly uplifted against him, now drooped?
Feeling the fixity of his gaze upon her, she glanced up and then smiled. Strange being! Was he, then, so easily forgiven? His heart gave a sudden leap.
The memory of this first evening was one which haunted him all his life with a curious intimate sweetness.
* * * * *
Time passed as time will pass on board ship; vague hours resembling each other, dropping to dreamy length of days; days that yet lapse quickly and moreover work a sure but subtle change. No traveller that lands after a long sea journey is the same as he who started. Sometimes, indeed, he will look back upon his former self as upon another, with surprise.
So it was with Raymond Bethune; and if he came to view himself with surprise, still more inexplicable to him was the new Lady Gerardine as he learned to regard her. According to his presentiment, these two women—she to whose puzzling personality he had vowed antipathy, and she whose fresh young presence made dangerously strong demands upon his sympathy—soon began to absorb all the energies of his thoughts. To a man who had hitherto known no other emotion, outside a very ordinary type of home affection, than friendship for another man; whose life, with the exception of one brief period of glamorous hero-worship, had been devoted to duty in its sternest, most virile form, this mental pre-occupation over two women, both comparative strangers, was at first a matter for self-mockery. It was afterwards one of self-conflict. Whoso, however, has reached the point of actually combating an idea is already and obviously its victim, and the final stage of abandonment to the obsession cannot be very distant.
Looking back upon his memories, in later days, it was singular to him how completely the girl and the woman divided his most vivid impressions of that journey. If the vision of Aspasia, fresh as the spray, rosy as the dawn, coming to meet him of a morning, brisk and free, across the deck, her young figure outlined against sparkling sea and translucent sky, was a memory all pleasant and all sweet, the picture of that other, slow moving and pallid, so enwrapped in inexplicable mourning, so immeasurably indifferent to himself, was bitten into the tablets of his mind as with burning acid, fixed in lines of pain.
It is never flattering for a man to realise that he is of no consequence to a woman with whom he is brought into daily intercourse. And to feel that, though his acts have had a distinct influence upon her life, his personality has failed to make the smallest impression, is a situation certain to pique the most unassuming. In the end Bethune began to wish that Lady Gerardine had retained even her original attitude of resentment. Now and again, indeed, he would find her eye fixed upon him, but at the same time would know unmistakably that her thought was not with him. Sometimes her attitude of inexplicable sorrow seemed harder to bear than her first evidences of heartlessness.
One day Aspasia had suddenly attacked her aunt upon the subject of her black garb, crying, with her noted heedlessness:
"I declare, any one would think you were in mourning."
Lady Gerardine shifted her distant gaze from the far horizon to Aspasia's countenance, and her lips moved but made no sound. In her heart she was saying:
"How else should I clothe myself, when I am travelling with my dead?"
Almost as if he read her thought, Bethune sneered as he looked at her, and with difficulty restrained the taunt that rose to his tongue. "Lady Gerardine wears belated weeds!"
Her attitude of hopeless melancholy, her raiment of mourning, irritated him bitterly. Yet, while he looked at her in harshness, he marked the admirable white throat, rising like a flower stem from the dense black of her dress, and found himself wondering whether any shimmer of colour would have become her half so well.
Towards the end of their journey together he was once summoned to speak with her alone. It was about the forthcoming book. Nothing could be more brief, more businesslike than her words, more unemotional than her manner. She asked for his instructions; she discussed, criticised, concurred. It was obvious that, when she chose, her brain could act with quite remarkable clearness. It was also obvious that she had completely capitulated to his wishes; and yet never was victory more savourless.
At the conclusion of this conversation she settled with him that, when she had accomplished her part of the task, she would send for him. And as he withdrew, he felt himself dismissed from her thoughts, except as a mere instrument in what now seemed more her undertaking than his own. At heart he found it increasingly difficult to accept the position with good grace.
After this, during the few days of ship life together left to them, Lady Gerardine seldom admitted him to her company; and thus Raymond was the more thrown with Aspasia. The girl, unconventional by temperament and somewhat set apart by her position of "Governor's niece," unhesitatingly profited by a situation which afforded her unmixed amusement. She was not in love as yet with the Major of Guides. Indeed, she had other and higher ambitions. Aspasia's dream-pictures of herself were ever of a wonderful artist of world-wide celebrity, surrounded by a sea of clapping hands, graciously curtseying her thanks from the side of a Steinway grand.... But Bethune interested her, and there was something piquantly pleasant in being able to awaken that gleam in his cold, light eye, in noticing that the lines of his impassive face relaxed into softness for her alone.
One afternoon, as they sat on deck—the great ship cutting the blue waters of the Adriatic, between the fading of a glorious red and orange sunset and the rising of a thin sickle moon, Aspasia wrapped against the chilly salt airs in some of her aunt's sables, out of which richness the hardy, wild-flower prettiness of her face rose in emphatic contrast—she told him the story of her short life.
She spoke of her musical career, of the bright student days at Vienna; the hard work of them, the anguish, the struggle, the joy. Then of the death of her mother, and the falling of all her high hopes under the crushing will of Sir Arthur, her appointed guardian.
"When mother went," said Aspasia, "everything went." As she spoke two tears leaped out of her eyes, and hung poised on the short, thick eyelashes. "The Runkle thinks it's a disgrace for a lady to do anything in life. 'And, besides,' he says, 'she can't, and she'd better not attempt it.' But wait till I'm twenty-one," cried the girl, vindictively, "and I'll show him what his 'dear Raspasia's' got in her!"
She smiled in her young consciousness of power, and the big tears, detaching themselves, ran into her dimples. Raymond, looking at her with all the experience of his hard life behind him, and all the disillusion of his five-and-thirty years, felt so sudden a movement at once of pity and tenderness that he had to stiffen himself in his seat not to catch her in his arms and kiss her on those wet dimples as he would have kissed a child.
"Oh, you'll do great things," said he, in the tone in which one praises the little one's sand castle on the beach, or tin soldier strategy. "And may I come with a great big laurel crown, tied with gold ribbons, when you give your first concert in the Albert Hall?"
"Albert Hall," mocked she, "the very place for a piano recital!" Then she let her eyes roam out across the heaving space. Once more she saw herself the centre of an applauding multitude; but, in the foremost rank, there was the lean, brown face, and it was moved to enthusiasm, too. And, somehow, from that evening forth, the dream-visions of her future glory were never to be quite complete without it.
* * * * *
A mist-enwrapped, rain-swept shore, parting the dim grey sea and sky in twain, was their first glimpse of England after years of exile.
"Ugh," said Aspasia, shivering, "isn't it just like England to go and be damp and horrid for us!"
Lady Gerardine, looking out with eager straining gaze towards the weeping land, turned with one of her sudden, unexpected movements of passion upon the girl.
"I'm glad it's raining," she said. "I'm glad it's cold, and bleak, and grey. I'm glad to feel the raindrops beating on nay face. I'm sick of hard blue skies and fierce sunshine.... And the trees at Saltwoods will be all bent one way by the blowing of the wet sea wind. It's England, it's home; and, oh, I'm glad to be home!"
BOOK II
CHAPTER I
Rosamond Gerardine and Aspasia Cuningham lay back, silent, each in her corner of the railway carriage, while the English landscape flew by them, wet and green and autumn brown, gleaming in a fugitive yellow sunlight.
Aspasia still felt the pressure of Bethune's unconsciously hard hand-grip. His image, as he had stood bareheaded looking after the moving train, was still vivid before her eyes. His last words: "It is not good-bye," were ringing in her ears. His face had looked wistful, she thought; his cold glance had taken that warm good look she claimed as her own. She was glad it was not good-bye. And yet, as they steamed away, she, watching him as long as she could, saw, and could not hide it from herself, that it was upon Lady Gerardine his eyes were fixed at the last—fixed with an expression which had already become familiar to her. "One would think he hated her—sometimes," said shrewd Baby to herself, "and yet, when she's there, he forgets me. I might as well be dead, or a fright."
This puzzled her and troubled her, too, a little. She glanced across now at her aunt's abstracted countenance. "I am sure," she thought, in loyal admiration, "if he were madly in love with her, it would be only natural. But it's not love—it's more like hate and a sort of pain." With all her sageness, Baby was only eighteen.
How completely had Raymond Bethune passed from Lady Gerardine's mind—even before he had passed from her sight!
She had nearly reached the end of her journey. The burning land she had left behind her—once the land of her desire—seemed now but a place visited in long evil dreams, where she had undergone unimaginable sufferings during the bondage of sleep. The humid air of England beat upon her face through the open window with a comforting assurance as of waking reality.
She had told herself she was travelling with her dead. Never for one hour of her long journey had she forgotten the meaning of that box under Jani's care. But, with every sunrise that marked a wider distance between her and India, she drew a freer breath. With every stage she felt herself less Lady Gerardine, wife; and more Mrs. English, widow. There was beginning to be an extraordinary restfulness in the sensation.
They sped through the New Forest glades, sodden after the rain, now flashing gold-brown with that shaft of sun; now black-green, cavernous, mysterious, where the pines grow close. And then came the moorland stretches, reaching up to a pale-blue cleft in the storm-weighted clouds. How cool it all was! How soft the colours! How benign the wet sky, how different from the metal glare of the land that had betrayed her!
And, by-and-by, white gleams of sunshine began to deepen into primroses and ambers; towards the west the sky grew ever clearer, and the leaden wrack, parting, showed an horizon like to a honey sea against the rising mists of evening. How beautiful was England!
When they got out at the little country station, in the rural heart of Dorset, the day was closing in. The vault of the heavens brooded over the earth with a cup-like closeness. November though it was, the air struck upon their cheeks as gently as a caress, all impregnated with the fragrance of wet green indefinably touched with the tart accent of decay.
Rosamond drew a long deep breath; it had a poignant pleasure in it; tears sprang to her eyes, but, for the first time in God knew how many years, there was a sweetness in them. Jani at her elbow shivered with an aguish chatter of teeth. With one hand she clutched her shawls across her little lean figure; with the other she held on fiercely to a battered tin box.
"Oh, Aunt Rosamond," cried Aspasia, ecstatically, as they got into the vehicle awaiting them, "it's a fly, it's a fly! Aren't you glad? Do you smell the musty straw? Oh! doesn't it bring back good old times? Don't you wish you may never sit in a state carriage again?"
It was a long drive, through winding lanes. Sometimes they strained uphill, sometimes they skirted the flat down; sometimes the branches of the overhanging trees beat against the roof of the carriage or in at the open window. At first the whole land was wonderfully still. They could hear the moisture drip from the leaves when the horses were at the walk. And, by-and-by, there grew out of the distance the faint yet mighty rumour of the sea. Within such short measure, then, this small, great England was meeting her salt limits! Across the upland down, presently, even on this silent evening, there rose a wind to sing of the surf. The trees by the roadside, in the copses amid fields, on the crest, etched against the glimmer of the sky, had all that regular inland bent that tells of salt winds.
At last the rickety fly began to jingle and jolt along a road that was hardly more than a track. The way dipped down an abrupt slope and then branched off unexpectedly into a side lane. Rosamond leaned out of the window; she felt they were drawing near her unknown home.
"Are we there?" cried Aspasia, entering into a violent state of excitement as they came to a halt before a swing gate.
Rosamond did not answer. She was looking with all her eyes, with all her heart. Sudden memories awoke within her—words, never even noted to be forgotten, began to whisper in her ears: "You never saw such a place, love. It isn't a place, it's a queer old house dumped down in a hollow of the downs. And the avenue—there isn't an avenue, it's a road through the orchard, and the orchard comes right up to the house—and you never saw such a bunch of chimney-stacks in your life. But such as it is, I love it. And some day we'll go and live there, you and I...." Here, then, were the orchard trees, twisted shapes, stretching out unpruned branches to them as they passed!
"I almost plucked an apple," cried Aspasia, from her side, with a childish scream.
The sky was rift just about the horizon—the afterglow primrose against the sullen gloom of the cloud banks. Cut into sharp silhouette against this pallid translucence, rose the black outline of the house and right across it the fantastic old-time chimney-stack, at sight of which Rosamond laughed low to herself as one who recognises the face of a friend. "You never saw such a bunch of chimney-stacks in your life!..."
A faint column of smoke ascended pale against the gloom where the chimneys lost themselves in the skies. As Rosamond noted it, her heart stirred; all was not dead then—the old house, his house, was alive and waiting for her!
They drew up close to the stone porch, open to the night, flush with the level of the out-jutting gables, and the driver, plunging into the black recess, sent the jangle of a bell ringing through inner spaces. In the waiting pause all was very silent, save the stealthy patter from the overgrown ivy clumps that hung across the entrance. There was a rustle, the hop of an awakened bird, quite close to Rosamond's ear, as she leaned out with the eagerness that had been growing upon her ever since her landing.
Then came steps within: the door was opened first but a little space, with the habitual precaution of the lowly caretaker, then suddenly drawn wide. A square of light that seemed golden was cut out of the darkness, and:
"You're welcome, ma'am," cried old Mary, tremulously smoothing her apron.
Lady Gerardine passed with fixed eyes and straight steps into the hall, but she turned quickly as the words struck her ear. Aspasia, following, saw her face illumined by a smile that was almost joy. And the girl became secretly a little alarmed; her aunt's ways had been all inexplicable to her of late.
Rosamond's heart was crying out within her, and it was with actual joy. "Welcome, ma'am," had said his servant—to old Mary the mistress of Saltwoods was Captain English's widow—even to herself might she not now cease to be Lady Gerardine for a brief respite? Oh, then would the manor-house be home indeed!
A great sense of peace, accompanied by a sudden lassitude, fell upon her; she sank into an armchair, flinging her arms wide with a gesture of relief. Opposite to her was a sturdy oaken table, upon which the housekeeper had just placed a hand-lamp. The light fell full upon a rack displaying a hunting-crop, a couple of rough walking-sticks; above, there was the sketch of a boy's face. Her gaze wandered, without at first taking in the meaning of what it saw.
Noise resounded from the porch; it was Jani, struggling with the coachman for the possession of the old regimental case.
Rosamond looked quickly up again at the bright living presentment on the wall; then she rose to her feet and staggered blindly through the nearest door. There, in sheltering darkness, Aspasia promptly overtook her, and was terrified, as she clasped her warm young arms round her aunt's figure, to find it torn by sobs.
"Let me be, let me be!" exclaimed Lady Gerardine, pushing the girl from her, "it is good to give way at last."
And Aspasia, pressing her face in wordless attempt at consolation against her aunt's cheek, found it streaming with a very torrent of tears.
* * * * *
"Ah," said old Mary, shaking her head, as Miss Cuningham presently besought her for the feminine panacea of tea, "poor lady, it's no wonder: he was a grand young gentleman!"
It was, indeed, evident that here Lady Gerardine could never be anything but Captain English's widow.