CHAPTER IXFull winter seemed to have come in a night; everywhere rime lay white upon the land, every blade was a frosted silver spear. Not a leaf yet kept the summer green; shrunken, brown and yellow, they hung by their brittle stems; it was a still morning, and he who had ears to listen to nature sounds, all through the woods could have heard ever and anon the sigh of one, falling here and there. A dim blue winter sky held the world; the sunshine was serene and faintly warm, like the heart of a good old man. The air was like iced wine to drink, invigorating, tingling through the veins. It painted Aspasia's cheeks a splendid scarlet. It filled her with the spirits of all young things, foals and kittens and cubs; so that she could hardly keep from prancing down the iron path, from cutting steps on the stiff grass to hear it crackle beneath her feet.As Bethune looked at her, he thought she was as pretty as a winter robin in her brown furs. Her eyes glistened as she flung quick glances at him; her dimples came and went; her teeth flashed as she chattered at headlong speed. They were going to Sunday service at the village church, a couple of miles away, and Baby was setting forth with a delightful sense of vigour and freedom.Those whose fate binds them to cities can have no idea of the delicate joys of the country walk, with the beloved one—him or her—who fills the thoughts. Alas! for the poor wench that has no better pleasure than to tramp along the crowded street. What does she know of the loveliness of "solitude for two," of the dear sympathy of nature, perfect in every season with the heart that is of her clay?Not, indeed, that Miss Cuningham acknowledged even to herself that Raymond Bethune was the present lord of her mind, much less her beloved. Nevertheless, the glamour of that hour that strikes but once in a lifetime was upon her. Love, first love, the only love, comparable but to the most exquisite mystery of the dawn, of the spring; happiness so evanescent that a touch will destroy it, so delicate that the scent of it is obliterated by fulfilment; so utterly made of anticipation, of unrealised, unformed desire, that to shape it, to seize it, is to lose it—is it not strange that we, to whom such a gift is granted, receive it, nearly all of us, not as we should, on our knees, but grossly, greedily, impatiently, ungratefully, hurrying through the golden moments, tearing apart the gossamer veil, grasping the flower from the stem before its unfolding? No wonder that to most the day that follows on this dawn should be so full of heat and burden; the fruit of this blossom so sour to the parent that the children's teeth are set on edge; that, behind the veil, the vision should prove dull, flat, and unprofitable!Now Aspasia, though a very creature of earth and one that knew no transcendental longings, had kept the pure heart of her childhood; and therefore this hour of her first love, all vague, all unacknowledged, was wholly sweet.They knelt, Bethune and she, side by side, in the small bare church. She flung him a look of comical anguish over the grunting of the harmonium and the unmelodious chants of the village choir. She struck into a hymn herself, in a high clear pipe, as true as a robin's song. A pale young clergyman, with protruding eyeballs, led the service with a sort of anæmic piety; grand old Bible words were gabbled or droned; grand old Church prayers, with the dignity of an antique faith still resounding in them—who, that heard, seemed to care? It was the Sunday routine, and that was all.Bethune saw the girl's fingers unconsciously practising musical exercises on the ledge of the pew; when their eyes met once, she made a childish grimace. She, for one, was frankly bored. As for him, had he any faith? He had hardly ever thought even of putting the question. He went to the Church service of his country as a matter of course, as his grandfathers had done before him. It was part of the etiquette of his military life. Now and again he had been moved to a solemn stir of the feelings during some brief soldier's ceremony: the hurried funeral perhaps of an English lad far away from homeland. But so had he been moved by the bugle-call, by the hurrah on the field. Life and death, love and religion, what did they mean? What are we, when all is said and done, but the toys of a blind fate?There is but one thing sure in the uncertainty, he told himself, but one staff in the wilderness, one anchor in the turmoil—duty.The damp-stained wall at his side was starred with memorials. He began to contemplate them, idly at first, then with an enkindling interest. Here was an old stone slab commemorating, in half-obliterated words, some son of a Dorset house who had died for the country in far Peninsular days. "In the twentieth year of his age." A young existence, to be thus cut short! Yet, had he lived, and given life, his own sons would now be well-nigh forgotten.Under this was a black marble tablet. The blood rushed to his face as he read, and then ebbed, leaving him cold:To THE MEMORY OFCAPTAIN HENRY ENGLISH,OF HER MAJESTY'S INDIAN STAFF CORPS,KILLED ON SERVICE IN THE PAMIRS. AGED 28.Thus ran the sober inscription; followed the text, more triumphant than sorrowful:He that loseth his life shall find it.And then the words:THIS TABLET WAS ERECTED BY HIS MOTHER.Behind him, by just turning his head, he could see another memorial. A plate of flaming brass, this one; large, for it had to hold many names, and very new. It was scored in vermilion tribute to those yeomen—gentlemen and peasant—who, at the first breath of disaster, had hurried overseas from the peaceful district to uphold the mother country in a point of honour and had found quick honour themselves. In a little while these blood-red letters, too, would fade, but not so quickly as the memory of grief in the hearts of those who had sent their lads off with such tears, such acclamations. Bethune thought to himself, with a bitter smile, that there was not one of the churches dotted all over the wide English land where some such brand-new memorial had not been nailed this last year, and how, Sunday after Sunday, the eyes of the congregation would sweep past it, with ever-growing dulness of custom, until the record came to mean no more than the grey stones of the walls themselves. No less quickly than England, the moment of peril past, forgets those who rose to her call and fell for her name, does the thought of the brother, the comrade, the son, pass from the home circle! Not that he pitied the forgotten; not that he wished it otherwise with his country. It was well for England that her sons should think it a matter of course to give their lives for her. And it was what he could wish for himself, to die where his duty was, and be obliterated. Who, indeed, should remember him who had no ties of kinship and had lost his only friend? ... Who should be remembered when Harry English was already forgotten?His lips curled, as he flung a glance along the aisles and wondered if any heart, under these many-coloured Sunday garments, still beat true to the lost lover; nay, how many comfortable widows had already brought a second mate to worship under the tablet that commemorated the first? Hold! yet the mothers remember—this was the church where Harry English had worshipped, beside his mother, the grand tender silent woman whom Bethune, too, had loved: the mother who had been alone, with himself, to mourn!When he had set out on his way this morning he had been moved by the thought that to kneel where his friend had knelt was the last and only tribute he could pay that memory. The mountain torrent had robbed them of his grave; but in the shrine which sheltered his tablet, in this church of a communion that had rigidly severed the old fond ties between the living and the departed, no service could yet now be held that would not be in some sort a commemoration.As the thoughts surged through his mind like wreckage on the waves of his feelings, he seemed to go back, with a passion that almost had something of remorse, to his old sorrow for English and to his old bitterness against the woman who had put another in his comrade's place.In vision he placed the two men before him: Harry, stern, eager, true, with his rare beautiful smile—eagle of glance, clear of mind, unerring of judgment, swift of action; Harry English, the unrecognised hero of the deep strong heart; he whose courage at the crucial moment had maintained the honour of England; who, in saving the frontier stronghold, had, as Bethune knew, saved India from gathering disaster! And Sir Arthur Gerardine, the great man, with his fatuous smile, his fatal self-complacency, his ignorant policy. Sir Arthur Gerardine, in his high place, working untold future mischief to the Empire with inane diligence. Bethune almost laughed, as he pictured the Lieutenant-Governor to himself, one of the many of his order, busy in picking out stone by stone the great foundations planned by the brains of Lawrences, cemented by the blood of Nicholsons.And yet, this Rosamond Gerardine, who had borne the name of English, could not be dismissed merely as one who, light-natured, had found it easy and profitable to forget. Sphinx, she had haunted his thoughts that Indian night as he had walked back from her palace, carrying with him her image, white and stately in the flash of her diamonds and the green fires of her emeralds ... the great lady, who knew the value of her smiles and gave the largess but with condescension. Sphinx she was even more to him now, whether hurrying from her walk to receive him, wide-eyed in the firelight, with the bloom of a girl on her cheek and an exquisite gracious timidity; or wan in her black robes—widow, indeed, it seemed—drinking in with speechless tenderness of sorrow every memory of the lost friend, as if no Sir Arthur Gerardine had ever stepped between her and her beloved.Was this attitude but a phase of a sick woman's fancy, to be dropped when the mood had passed? Was not, in truth, Lady Gerardine in this freakish humour as false to Sir Arthur, who had given her affluence and position, as she had been to him who had given her his love and faith? Deep down under his consciousness there was a little angry grudge against her that she should not have accompanied them this morning. Were she now sincere, she would have felt the same desire as he himself to pray where the walls heralded Harry English's name. Bethune did not know, so little do even the most straightforward know themselves, that had she knelt by his side to-day it would have been perilously sweet to him: that had her footsteps gone with his along the frosted roads between the brown hedges, that way, to him, would have remained in fragrance as with a memory of flowers."Didn't you think," asked Baby, "that Mr. Smith—his name is Algernon Vandeleur Smith, he's the curate—didn't you think his eyes would drop out of his head? They make me feel quite ill!" They were walking down the flagged churchyard path, and Baby was stamping her small cold feet. She was talking in a high irate voice, regardless of hearers. "Did you ever listen to such a sermon?"She opened her bright eyes very wide and made a fish-like mouth in imitation of the Reverend Algernon: "And now, brethren, shortly, briefly, and in a few words, not wishing to detain you longer, I will endeavour to set before you with conciseness and brevity."—She was a born mimic, and had caught the dreary young divine's very intonation.Bethune had no laugh for her: his heart was sore. For once the girl's mood jarred on him.She was quick to feel the shadow of his thoughts. The dimple went out of her cheek, the spring from her step. The icy brilliancy of the day seemed suddenly dim to her. The walk before them, towards which she had been yearning with delicious anticipation, became instantly a grey project, a weariness.This gossamer of early love—it needs but a breath of adverse wind to tear it apart and set it afloat in forlorn shreds, mere flecks to the caprice of the airs; it that has been a fairy bridge for the dance of the sunbeams! For a long while they trudged together in silence. But all at once, Bethune looking down upon her was smitten, not by any hint of her dawning sentiments towards him, but by the consciousness that he must have seemed surly towards a mirthful child."God knows," he thought heavily, "the world gets sad enough, soon enough, to make it shame to cloud even one moment for the children." Himself, he felt old and sad, and miles away from her happy youth."So silent?" said he, turning upon her that softened look she loved.She glanced up at him, forcing a smile, but over her frank eyes there was a wet shimmer which she winked away indignantly. Once again, as on that Indian evening when he had seen Lady Gerardine fit her slender hand into the death-prints of the burnt queens, it struck him that here, in this open-hearted, sweet-natured, gay-spirited girl, a man might find a companion for life to help and comfort—a piece of charming, wholesome prose, but ...Raymond Bethune, in his lonely isolated life, had had dreams—dreams that his temper had been too narrow, too severely matter-of-fact, to bring into any connection with his actions. He had dreamed his dream as he had read his book of poetry, to lay it aside without a sigh and take up the moment's duty, as one lays aside a flower, a thing of fragrance, a passing pleasure, which has no further influence on life.Now this woman, whom he despised, who had outraged the deepest feeling of his life, had become, in some inexplicable manner, the embodiment of these inconsequent dreams. Her deep eyes, shadowed with sorrow as the tarn by the mountain height; the trick of her sigh, the balm of her rare smile; the melody of her voice, those low tones that seemed as charged with mystery as the wind by the whispers of the forest depths, all were asCharm'd magic casements, opening on the foamOf perilous seas, in faëry lands forlorn....She was a vision of poetry that could be lived, that could become part of a man's very flesh and blood!Of a sudden he realised it. His heart gave a great leap and then seemed to stand still; but the habit of years and the hard common sense of his nature asserted themselves in violent reaction. He coloured to the roots of his hair in shame at the monstrousness, the absurdity of the thought, to which his idle dissatisfied mood had led him.The girl saw his emotion and innocently attributed it to quite another cause; connected it with the expression of his glance when it had rested upon her. The song awoke once more in her heart, circling higher and higher like a June lark. Renewed joy began to bubble from her lips in laughter and talk.When they emerged from the copse to the top of the downs, where the road dipped into the hollow, she halted, with an exclamation."See," she cried, "the grass looks all gold and silver! And oh! did any one ever behold anything so pale, pale, so blue, blue as the sky! Oh! isn't this better than India; don't you love it; wouldn't you like to put your arm round England and kiss her?""England, the mother; India, the mistress," thought Bethune. Then, at a maddening tangent flight, his mind took wing. The words of Dr. Châtelard came back upon him. "Cold, that woman? Touch that coldness and be burnt to the bone!" He revolted from his own soul as it flamed within him. He would have liked to set off running across the frozen downs to that far violet line where washed the sea; to have plunged into the icy waves, into the bitter turmoil of the living waters, to wash the degrading madness from him.Aspasia's fresh laugh brought his spirit back to her with a renewed revulsion."Look, look," she cried once more, "there's Muhammed's turban going up and down, and up and down, the garden path! I wonder what he's thinking of? Not Runkle's monumental work, I'm sure. Ugh! I declare it's uncanny only to look at that absurd turban in this winter land. It's bad enough to have Jani chattering about the house like a human castanet, without having that creature tramping up and down outside the window, day after day. Major Bethune, I wish you'd speak to the creature—and find out what he is up to. I never saw anything so restless in my life.""Oh, we've had several conversations," answered Bethune, following with his eyes the movement of the red head-dress in the distant hollow. "That is to say, I have done a lively bit of talking to him, and he has given me mighty polite answers and said nothing at all. Those fellows, Miss Aspasia, are queer cattle, proud as Lucifer, secret as the tiger in the jungle. That one down there, however, is of the modern school—a sort of animal I don't profess to understand, but one, at any rate, I should not care to trust, myself. Sir Arthur would have done just as well to have left him in India.""Gracious!" cried Aspasia. "Lord!" Her mind sprang: "Perhaps he's after Runkle! Oh, Major Bethune, you know what a mess poor Runkle is making of things out there; I shouldn't like him to be thugged! I always told him he was laying the seed of mutiny," said Miss Aspasia, with tragic emphasis.Bethune gave his rare laugh."Muhammed Saif-u-din would hardly have come over all the way to England to make his private mutiny when he could accomplish the matter with more kudos in India, and have a good chance of saving his own skin besides."Aspasia shook her head, preferring to cling to her own dramatic inspiration."Well, I'll give Runkle a warning, anyhow," said she. "There's something fishy about Muhammed. You may laugh at me, if you like; but the man is eaten up with some secret thought, some sinister thought. There's a look in his eyes that makes me shiver. And when he smiles—ugh! I do hate Easterns."He glanced at her reflectively, then he smiled. Such a sentiment from any one else would have aroused his indignation; but it was impossible to take Miss Aspasia Cuningham's hatreds with seriousness. Only this morning he had seen her half strangle a protesting Jani in vehement embrace."And as for Aunt Rosamond," went on the girl, comfortably, "it upsets her even to see the wretched being. That's the reason we keep him to the orchard, you know; her windows look out on the front. I had to tell him—it was an awful moment; he was so hurt and so grand. Then I explained it was on account of poor Captain English, you know. Oh, you know...!""Do I?" asked the man, with a faint raising of the brows."Well, if it amuses you to pretend you don't," she snapped back. "Anyhow, Muhammed did. He may be a cut-throat, but there's something of a gentleman about it. He put his hand on his heart and bowed. 'The Lady Sahib's wishes are sacred,' he said. And I've seen the poor thing hide behind a tree when she is coming. Rather touching, don't you think?" said the inconsequent Baby."Did Lady Gerardine ask you to speak to Muhammed?""No. Why do you want to know that?""Mere idle curiosity," he answered, striking at a gorse bush with his stick and watching the melted rime fly out in spray."If you knew Aunt Rosamond better, you'd understand she'd never say such a thing as that. She keeps everything close. But we all know she does not want to be reminded of things."He threw back his head with his mirthless laugh."Even I know as much by this time, Miss Aspasia. It is perhaps a little difficult for a solitary man to understand you women; but one thing is quite evident: you never do anything heartless or selfish ... except from excess of feeling."He could not keep the sneer from his tone, and Baby's quick temper was instantly aflame."You never have a good word for Aunt Rosamond," she cried; "but you need not include me in your judgment, I think!"Bethune laughed again, harshly."I am very hard on Lady Gerardine, am I not?" Then fixing his eyes upon her, broodingly; "and, as for you, I hope——"He did not finish the sentence. But to her reading, his glance needed no word. She grew rosily shy and ran on ahead to hide it."Well, I love the Eastern," said the man, abruptly going back to the origin of the dispute. "He's my trade. He will be the death of me one of these days, no doubt. But what of that? Does not the sailor love the sea that will swallow him. And besides, if they weren't always an uncertain quantity, where would be the spice of life out there? One might as well be in a broker's office. But I don't like your westernised Eastern," he said, with a change of tone, and took a first long step upon the downward way.Aspasia skipped on before him."Well, we're a pretty queer lot down there, in the Old Ancient House," she cried, in her high merry pipe. "What with the Thug plotting—I know he's a Thug, whatever you may say, and I know he's plotting," she gave her companion a challenging blink of her bright eye; "and what with crazy old Mary, who's lived so long in this old hollow that she's positively part of the timber and plaster of the house, and can hear the very stones talk. By the way, she's more creepy than ever now, and swears that her pet ghosts are walking with extra vigour. And what with Jani, running about after Aunt, with her dog eyes and poor chattering teeth! Nothing will ever make me believe that Jani has got a soul. And then, my poor aunt herself, with her hyper-what-you-call-'ems, and Runkle bombarding her with telegrams which she don't even notice, and which I have to answer as best I may. I say," said Aspasia, stopping reflectively, "there will be a fine row, I tell you, soon! For if I know Runkle, he'll pounce, one of these days. And Aunt Rosamond; well, you see for yourself what she is just now. Positively there's only you and I that are sane."She sprang on again, to look back at him over her shoulder and laugh like a schoolgirl.His eyes sank before hers. Could she but have guessed on the brink of what ignoble madness he—the sane man—was standing!CHAPTER X"How rosy you look!" said Lady Gerardine."I've been driving Major Bethune in the cart. And the pony went like an angel on four legs," said Aspasia. "I suppose the wind caught my face."She pressed the back of her hands to her cheeks, as she spoke, and her eyes danced above them. It was the rose of happiness and no evanescent wind bloom that glowed in her innocent childish countenance.Women's glances are cruelly quick to read the tender secrets of each other's souls. Lady Gerardine's look hardened as she still fixed the girl; her own wounded inconsequent heart was suddenly aflame with anger against her. Not a fortnight ago had Aspasia been setting flowers before the portrait of Harry English and offering, in passionate love, melodies to that mystic presence. And it had been sufficient that this Bethune's everyday substantiality should show itself, for the fickle creature to change allegiance. She had dared to think she loved Harry English, and now she dared to desecrate this love!They were in the drawing-room waiting the summons for lunch. Bethune had not yet appeared. With an air of embarrassment very foreign to her, Baby tossed off her hat and coat and moved restlessly to the piano. She wished pettishly, to herself, that her aunt would stop staring. But nothing could drive the lustre from her own eyes and the upward tilt from her lips. She had had such a lovely drive over the wet downs; they had watched the scolding, stamping squirrel in the hazel copse. His dark face had brightened so often. His gaze had rested on her so gently now and again. When he got down to open the wicket gate for her he had gathered a little pale belated monthly rose from the bush at the side, and had given it to her. She would always keep it, always.... Her fingers strayed unconsciously over the keys from one harmony to another. They fell into a familiar theme—the Chopin Prelude, with its sobbing rain-beat accompaniment. She forgot Lady Gerardine and her dry hostile tones, her cold violating look. Following the strong pinions of her art, her young emotions had begun to beat tentative wings, when she was brought down to earth, as once before, very suddenly and with no pleasant shock."Whom is your music addressed to now, Aspasia?" asked Lady Gerardine, leaning over towards her with folded arms on the piano.The musician's fingers dropped from the notes."To nobody that belongs to you!" she cried rudely, with a flare of schoolgirl anger. Her face crimsoned.Lady Gerardine's gaze was filled with a lightning contempt. She straightened herself and looked at the empty space on the wall, where Harry English's portrait had hung."In truth," she said, "my dear, you don't take long to change."Her voice was scornful.Quite taken aback and in a hot rage, Aspasia bounced up from the music-stool. But before a coherent word could relieve her, Major Bethune came in upon them.When her anger had somewhat cooled down—never a lengthy process with Aspasia—she began to feel a sort of wonder at herself. What, indeed, had become of the pale, gallant ghost that she had set up to worship in the shrine of her heart? Gone, gone after the way of ghosts, before the first ray of real sunshine—Bethune's hand-clasp, his softened glance, his rare smile. With the realisation of her own fickleness came another, so overwhelming in its suggestion, that all else was swept away by it. She was in love! ... In love for the first time, really, unmistakably, Aspasia Cuningham, who had meant to devote her whole life to her art.Bethune wondered, in his blundering masculine way, what blight had fallen in the little dining-room, to render their wontedly harmonious meeting of the three at meals so constrained that day.But when, later, Lady Gerardine and her niece found themselves once more alone, the memory of her curious resentment seemed to have faded from the elder woman's mind, to have been erased by a fresh tide of thought, as footprints on the sands are washed away by the waves.Old Mary had been with her in the gloaming; old Mary, with her tender memories of the dead past, her mystic whispers of present hauntings."Eh, ma'am, he's been very near to us, these days," she said. "Last night, now, I heard his step come down the passage, as plain, as plain as ever I heard anything. I always knew his step among a thousand, ma'am, from a child; a clean, clear step, with never a slur nor a slouch; not as most people walk.""Oh, Mary," cried Lady Gerardine, a thrill, half exquisite, half terrible, running through her, "why does he come back now?""Why, ma'am, it's because of you, I'm thinking," said the old woman, simply. "You're just calling him back to you.""Oh, Mary!""Does that frighten you, ma'am? Doesn't it make you glad? Why, the other evening, they had not lit the lamps yet in the hall, and I felt him pass me—his own presence, just as I feel yours there. Nothing of the grave, of the cold about it, but warm, comfort—Heaven's warmth. Oh, God is good, ma'am! He makes all easy.""God is good," said Rosamond to herself, weighing the words, as she sat alone. "Is God good?"And within her some voice of truth answered her: answered that God had been good, even to her; had meant well with her; very well, even in her bereavement, could she but have taken His ruling as these women of Harry's old home.Thus, when she was found by Aspasia, there was no room in her heart for any lesser thought.CHAPTER XIWith hands clasped behind his back, head bent, absorbed in thought, the black fan of his beard spreading over the black broadcloth on his breast, the cross-folds of the turban startlingly exotic on top of the fluttering sable garments—the latter pathetically European in intention—an incongruous figure under these bare placid English fruit-trees, Muhammed Saif-u-din came full upon Raymond Bethune.The sodden grass of the long neglected road had swallowed the sound of their footsteps. For once the Pathan was shaken out of his oriental calm for a brief moment as, suddenly looking up, he found himself within a yard of the officer of Guides.The guest of the Old Ancient House had strolled out by himself to smoke a solitary meditative pipe in the wild avenue. Seeing Muhammed's flaming headgear, he had deliberately directed his steps towards him; for Bethune would not have been that self that India had made him, had he not felt instinctively lured into the company of the Eastern, all degenerate as he chose to consider him. Moreover, the personality of Sir Arthur's secretary baffled him, and Bethune resented being baffled. He fixed his eye keenly upon the Pathan, turned babu."Your soul is in the East, Muhammed," said he, addressing him in his own tongue.The dark face opposite relaxed into a smile, the white teeth flashed, Muhammed made the supple Indian salaam."Nay, your honour, my soul is in great England," he said, and would have passed on. But the other arrested him somewhat peremptorily. Muhammed wheeled back and brought his hand to the edge of his turban with a gesture that betrayed the soldier, then drew himself up rigidly.Under Bethune's long scrutinising look the thin face fell into deep lines of gravity; the large dark eyes, somewhat restless as a rule in their brilliancy, gazed back straight and full. The Englishman's heart kindled as the unconquered spirit of the Pathan seemed to rear itself to meet the cold domination of the conquering race. There was nothing of revolt in the man's look, yet something untameable, he thought. And it pleased him hugely. His mind leaped back to his own "devils of boys" on the mountain sides—eagles and leopards of humanity, as compared with the domestic animals. He ran a loving glance over the Indian's muscular yet lithe proportions: built for strength—for endurance—for the strenuous side of life."How comes it, O son of the Mountain," cried he, "that you are not among the Emperor of India's warriors? How come you to bend those eyes over screed and parchment, to cramp that hand round the quill instead of the talwar?"The florid oriental language came oddly enough in stiff, abrupt British accents from the officer's tongue. The flowing guttural which replied was in marked contrast:"I have heard it said," answered the secretary, without moving a muscle of his countenance, "that the pen is mightier than the sword."A sneer, aimed at the Lieutenant-Governor's literary production, trembled on Bethune's lips, but he prudently suppressed it."You cannot deceive me, friend," cried he, abruptly; then: "You have flown with the birds of battle and heard the cannon roar, and thought the smell of the powder sweet."Again the Pathan smiled; and Bethune, watching him, was stirred, he knew not why, as by a glimpse of something at once immeasurably fierce and immeasurably sad."Sir," said Muhammed, in slow deliberate English, "I have seen many things; and no man knows where his fate leads him.""Oh, no doubt!" said Bethune, laughing not very pleasantly. He was irritated with the fellow's impenetrability and his own inability to deal with it."And so fate has brought you to a wealthy master," said he, tauntingly; "and you think that this scribbling business will prove worth your while. 'Tis certainly an odd job for a Pathan! ... I trust well paid?""I sought the post, sir," said Muhammed. "My master, since he is to be called my master," a sudden fire leaped and died in his eyes, "will no doubt pay me what he owes me. When I come into my own country again, it may be I shall have found it worth my while."To this the officer made no reply. After a second's pause, Muhammed lifted his hand to his brow once more and moved away on the noiseless turf. Bethune turned to watch the swing of the strange figure through the trees."Greed for money, and wily determination to get to lucrative posts in life—ambition to play the European—or—what?" No motive that his sober common sense could accept as a plausible alternative. Yes, his previous impression had been correct; nothing but a desire for self-advancement—nothing but greed and an Eastern cleverness to seek opportunities—animated that splendid bronze, after all! A disappointing specimen to one who loved the warrior race; a specimen of the westernised Eastern—degenerate leopard, with the spirit eliminated and the wiliness twice developed, according to the law of nature that so often strengthens one attribute by the elimination of another.CHAPTER XIIThe old tin box again and the breath of terrible India in this quiet English room. Siege, struggle, treachery, bloodshed, hunger, thirst, and fever, the extremes of heat and cold, the death agony of the young comrade—this was the story it held. The story of the difficult grave dug in the rock; of the inexorable exigency of the moment, the narrow strait for England's honour which could allow no lingering thought for him that was become useless; of the drawing together of the ranks to hide the gap and keep up the long fight. The story of every conceivable distress of the flesh, every sordid misery of the body, every anxiety of the mind; of hopeless outlook, lingering torture. But, above all, the record of the indomitable purpose; of the white and red crossed flag floating high—of the spirit unconquerable, even to death.Rosamond sat down on the slanting floor, lifted and took into her lap—as a mother may lift her dead child from the cradle—the old leather case that contained in such small compass so great a story; Captain English's papers of the siege. The parcel had been delivered to her even as he had prepared it for her. To the elastic band that clasped it a scrap of paper was still pinned: "For my wife."And she had never opened it!All these years his voice had been waiting to speak to her; his own words for her had been there, the last cry of his soul to hers; nay—how did she know?—the message that should have shaped her future. Something of himself that could not die, he had left her, something of himself to go with her through the desolation! But she, the wife so tenderly loved and thought of to the last—she had, as it were, denied herself to his death-bed. She had closed her ears to his dying speech. She had thrust his dear ghost from her. How was it possible for any woman to have been so cruel, so cowardly? How was it possible ... yet it had been!"It is we who make our dead dead," had said the mourning mother. Rosamond, the wife, had done worse: she had buried what was not yet dead. She had heaped earth upon the lips that still spoke, that she might not feel the sorrow of their last utterance!When trouble comes it is woman's way, as a rule, to yield herself up to it, to gloat upon her grief, to feed upon tears. She has a fine scorn for man's mode of mourning, so different from hers; for the seeker of distraction, of forgetfulness; for his deliberate shunning of those emotions in which she sinks herself. And yet it may be that this divergence comes less from man's more selfish nature than from the fact that he is a creature of passion, where she is a creature of sentiment; that he knows within himself forces which are to her undreamed of; that her sorrow is as the chill rain that wraps the land and clears in lassitude at last over tender tints, while his sorrow is as the dry convulsion that defaces the earth and rends the foundations of life's whole edifice.But there are women apart; women who unite with their own innate spirituality the virile capacity of feeling; who can love fiercely and suffer as fiercely. Of such was Rosamond. And she had been called to suffering before her undeveloped girl-nature had had time to lay hold on love. Love and sorrow, they had fallen upon her together, in her ignorant youth, like monstrous angels of destruction. What wonder then that she should have cried out against them and hidden her face! What wonder that she should have shrunk with a sickly terror from her own unplumbed deep capacity for pain!But no one may deny himself to himself. And the passionate soul makes for passion, be it a Paul or an Augustine! The nemesis of her nature had come upon Rosamond; and she was to be fulfilled to herself, after so many years, at this moment of her woman's maturity, with a handful of relics and the dust and the smell of the distant Indian fort upon them.Out of the far far past her love and her sorrow were claiming her—at last.* * * * *The logs from the Dorset beech-woods flamed in the queer corner chimney-piece of Harry's attic room. The light flickered on the scattered papers in Rosamond's lap and threw illusive ruddy gleams on the pale hands, on the pale cheek that turned to the glow, yet felt it not.When she had sat down to read, it was some time still before noon. The December sun crept out between two rain-storms, threw a yellow circle on the boards, marked the shadow of the ivy spray, then paled and passed. The merry logs grew red, grew grey; they fell together with sighs into white ash; and the last creeping flicker of life in the grate sparkled and went out. Below, the placid life of the Old Ancient House jogged its round. Baby's business-like morning music was ground out and caught into the silence. The tinkling bell, that from time immemorial had sounded the homely meal-time gatherings, rang its thin summons up the wooden stairs from the hall. Some one came to the attic door and rattled it against the drawn bolt; knocked and called. And later the stillness of the attic room was troubled again, and Aspasia cried out between petulance and anxiety. So insistent was she that within the room some one answered back at last in a strange hoarse voice of anger. And the steps pattered away, and silence reigned once more.The rain dried on the window pane, shadows stole forth from the room corners. The air grew cold and colder; a grey dimness settled upon everywhere; the chilling bars of the grate clicked. But still the woman sat by the empty hearth ... reading, reading, reading.CHAPTER XIIIAs Rosamond read, that page of her womanhood which she had hitherto so deliberately kept blank was printed as with a tale of fire. Between those short winter hours, between the leaping of the wood flames and the fall of the cold chill twilight, all that she had cheated her heart of—the tears, the passion, the grief—came upon her like a storm. And fate worked its will.* * * * *It's no use mincing matters (wrote Harry English); we are besieged, and the worst of it is, our work's not done. For Cartwright and his good fellows have either fallen into the wily old chief's hands, or are as hotly pressed as we are ourselves. We have been able to get no tidings from him so far. It's rather a joke, isn't it—though a grim one? We started so cocksure of setting him free, and here we are in a trap ourselves. Well, I'm going to try and get this letter through to you, as the Major—we call him the Colonel now—is trying to run another despatch. It will probably be the last for some time, so don't be alarmed, love, if you are long without news. The old fort is sturdy and well placed, and we shan't have even the glory of danger. God keep you.The letter—in its incredibly soiled and creased cover—was docketed with soldierly neatness: "Brought back by messenger unable to pass."The rest of the papers in the case were all loose sheets. The earlier of these were carefully dated. But presently this methodic precision was dropped. Most of them seemed to be merely disconnected jottings, at times scarcely more than a phrase or two—as it were the fixing of a passing thought—others, again, a sort of outpouring that covered whole pages: thus, nearly to the end. But the last two sheets were once more inscribed with something of the formality of a document.
CHAPTER IX
Full winter seemed to have come in a night; everywhere rime lay white upon the land, every blade was a frosted silver spear. Not a leaf yet kept the summer green; shrunken, brown and yellow, they hung by their brittle stems; it was a still morning, and he who had ears to listen to nature sounds, all through the woods could have heard ever and anon the sigh of one, falling here and there. A dim blue winter sky held the world; the sunshine was serene and faintly warm, like the heart of a good old man. The air was like iced wine to drink, invigorating, tingling through the veins. It painted Aspasia's cheeks a splendid scarlet. It filled her with the spirits of all young things, foals and kittens and cubs; so that she could hardly keep from prancing down the iron path, from cutting steps on the stiff grass to hear it crackle beneath her feet.
As Bethune looked at her, he thought she was as pretty as a winter robin in her brown furs. Her eyes glistened as she flung quick glances at him; her dimples came and went; her teeth flashed as she chattered at headlong speed. They were going to Sunday service at the village church, a couple of miles away, and Baby was setting forth with a delightful sense of vigour and freedom.
Those whose fate binds them to cities can have no idea of the delicate joys of the country walk, with the beloved one—him or her—who fills the thoughts. Alas! for the poor wench that has no better pleasure than to tramp along the crowded street. What does she know of the loveliness of "solitude for two," of the dear sympathy of nature, perfect in every season with the heart that is of her clay?
Not, indeed, that Miss Cuningham acknowledged even to herself that Raymond Bethune was the present lord of her mind, much less her beloved. Nevertheless, the glamour of that hour that strikes but once in a lifetime was upon her. Love, first love, the only love, comparable but to the most exquisite mystery of the dawn, of the spring; happiness so evanescent that a touch will destroy it, so delicate that the scent of it is obliterated by fulfilment; so utterly made of anticipation, of unrealised, unformed desire, that to shape it, to seize it, is to lose it—is it not strange that we, to whom such a gift is granted, receive it, nearly all of us, not as we should, on our knees, but grossly, greedily, impatiently, ungratefully, hurrying through the golden moments, tearing apart the gossamer veil, grasping the flower from the stem before its unfolding? No wonder that to most the day that follows on this dawn should be so full of heat and burden; the fruit of this blossom so sour to the parent that the children's teeth are set on edge; that, behind the veil, the vision should prove dull, flat, and unprofitable!
Now Aspasia, though a very creature of earth and one that knew no transcendental longings, had kept the pure heart of her childhood; and therefore this hour of her first love, all vague, all unacknowledged, was wholly sweet.
They knelt, Bethune and she, side by side, in the small bare church. She flung him a look of comical anguish over the grunting of the harmonium and the unmelodious chants of the village choir. She struck into a hymn herself, in a high clear pipe, as true as a robin's song. A pale young clergyman, with protruding eyeballs, led the service with a sort of anæmic piety; grand old Bible words were gabbled or droned; grand old Church prayers, with the dignity of an antique faith still resounding in them—who, that heard, seemed to care? It was the Sunday routine, and that was all.
Bethune saw the girl's fingers unconsciously practising musical exercises on the ledge of the pew; when their eyes met once, she made a childish grimace. She, for one, was frankly bored. As for him, had he any faith? He had hardly ever thought even of putting the question. He went to the Church service of his country as a matter of course, as his grandfathers had done before him. It was part of the etiquette of his military life. Now and again he had been moved to a solemn stir of the feelings during some brief soldier's ceremony: the hurried funeral perhaps of an English lad far away from homeland. But so had he been moved by the bugle-call, by the hurrah on the field. Life and death, love and religion, what did they mean? What are we, when all is said and done, but the toys of a blind fate?
There is but one thing sure in the uncertainty, he told himself, but one staff in the wilderness, one anchor in the turmoil—duty.
The damp-stained wall at his side was starred with memorials. He began to contemplate them, idly at first, then with an enkindling interest. Here was an old stone slab commemorating, in half-obliterated words, some son of a Dorset house who had died for the country in far Peninsular days. "In the twentieth year of his age." A young existence, to be thus cut short! Yet, had he lived, and given life, his own sons would now be well-nigh forgotten.
Under this was a black marble tablet. The blood rushed to his face as he read, and then ebbed, leaving him cold:
To THE MEMORY OFCAPTAIN HENRY ENGLISH,OF HER MAJESTY'S INDIAN STAFF CORPS,KILLED ON SERVICE IN THE PAMIRS. AGED 28.
Thus ran the sober inscription; followed the text, more triumphant than sorrowful:
He that loseth his life shall find it.
And then the words:
THIS TABLET WAS ERECTED BY HIS MOTHER.
Behind him, by just turning his head, he could see another memorial. A plate of flaming brass, this one; large, for it had to hold many names, and very new. It was scored in vermilion tribute to those yeomen—gentlemen and peasant—who, at the first breath of disaster, had hurried overseas from the peaceful district to uphold the mother country in a point of honour and had found quick honour themselves. In a little while these blood-red letters, too, would fade, but not so quickly as the memory of grief in the hearts of those who had sent their lads off with such tears, such acclamations. Bethune thought to himself, with a bitter smile, that there was not one of the churches dotted all over the wide English land where some such brand-new memorial had not been nailed this last year, and how, Sunday after Sunday, the eyes of the congregation would sweep past it, with ever-growing dulness of custom, until the record came to mean no more than the grey stones of the walls themselves. No less quickly than England, the moment of peril past, forgets those who rose to her call and fell for her name, does the thought of the brother, the comrade, the son, pass from the home circle! Not that he pitied the forgotten; not that he wished it otherwise with his country. It was well for England that her sons should think it a matter of course to give their lives for her. And it was what he could wish for himself, to die where his duty was, and be obliterated. Who, indeed, should remember him who had no ties of kinship and had lost his only friend? ... Who should be remembered when Harry English was already forgotten?
His lips curled, as he flung a glance along the aisles and wondered if any heart, under these many-coloured Sunday garments, still beat true to the lost lover; nay, how many comfortable widows had already brought a second mate to worship under the tablet that commemorated the first? Hold! yet the mothers remember—this was the church where Harry English had worshipped, beside his mother, the grand tender silent woman whom Bethune, too, had loved: the mother who had been alone, with himself, to mourn!
When he had set out on his way this morning he had been moved by the thought that to kneel where his friend had knelt was the last and only tribute he could pay that memory. The mountain torrent had robbed them of his grave; but in the shrine which sheltered his tablet, in this church of a communion that had rigidly severed the old fond ties between the living and the departed, no service could yet now be held that would not be in some sort a commemoration.
As the thoughts surged through his mind like wreckage on the waves of his feelings, he seemed to go back, with a passion that almost had something of remorse, to his old sorrow for English and to his old bitterness against the woman who had put another in his comrade's place.
In vision he placed the two men before him: Harry, stern, eager, true, with his rare beautiful smile—eagle of glance, clear of mind, unerring of judgment, swift of action; Harry English, the unrecognised hero of the deep strong heart; he whose courage at the crucial moment had maintained the honour of England; who, in saving the frontier stronghold, had, as Bethune knew, saved India from gathering disaster! And Sir Arthur Gerardine, the great man, with his fatuous smile, his fatal self-complacency, his ignorant policy. Sir Arthur Gerardine, in his high place, working untold future mischief to the Empire with inane diligence. Bethune almost laughed, as he pictured the Lieutenant-Governor to himself, one of the many of his order, busy in picking out stone by stone the great foundations planned by the brains of Lawrences, cemented by the blood of Nicholsons.
And yet, this Rosamond Gerardine, who had borne the name of English, could not be dismissed merely as one who, light-natured, had found it easy and profitable to forget. Sphinx, she had haunted his thoughts that Indian night as he had walked back from her palace, carrying with him her image, white and stately in the flash of her diamonds and the green fires of her emeralds ... the great lady, who knew the value of her smiles and gave the largess but with condescension. Sphinx she was even more to him now, whether hurrying from her walk to receive him, wide-eyed in the firelight, with the bloom of a girl on her cheek and an exquisite gracious timidity; or wan in her black robes—widow, indeed, it seemed—drinking in with speechless tenderness of sorrow every memory of the lost friend, as if no Sir Arthur Gerardine had ever stepped between her and her beloved.
Was this attitude but a phase of a sick woman's fancy, to be dropped when the mood had passed? Was not, in truth, Lady Gerardine in this freakish humour as false to Sir Arthur, who had given her affluence and position, as she had been to him who had given her his love and faith? Deep down under his consciousness there was a little angry grudge against her that she should not have accompanied them this morning. Were she now sincere, she would have felt the same desire as he himself to pray where the walls heralded Harry English's name. Bethune did not know, so little do even the most straightforward know themselves, that had she knelt by his side to-day it would have been perilously sweet to him: that had her footsteps gone with his along the frosted roads between the brown hedges, that way, to him, would have remained in fragrance as with a memory of flowers.
"Didn't you think," asked Baby, "that Mr. Smith—his name is Algernon Vandeleur Smith, he's the curate—didn't you think his eyes would drop out of his head? They make me feel quite ill!" They were walking down the flagged churchyard path, and Baby was stamping her small cold feet. She was talking in a high irate voice, regardless of hearers. "Did you ever listen to such a sermon?"
She opened her bright eyes very wide and made a fish-like mouth in imitation of the Reverend Algernon: "And now, brethren, shortly, briefly, and in a few words, not wishing to detain you longer, I will endeavour to set before you with conciseness and brevity."—She was a born mimic, and had caught the dreary young divine's very intonation.
Bethune had no laugh for her: his heart was sore. For once the girl's mood jarred on him.
She was quick to feel the shadow of his thoughts. The dimple went out of her cheek, the spring from her step. The icy brilliancy of the day seemed suddenly dim to her. The walk before them, towards which she had been yearning with delicious anticipation, became instantly a grey project, a weariness.
This gossamer of early love—it needs but a breath of adverse wind to tear it apart and set it afloat in forlorn shreds, mere flecks to the caprice of the airs; it that has been a fairy bridge for the dance of the sunbeams! For a long while they trudged together in silence. But all at once, Bethune looking down upon her was smitten, not by any hint of her dawning sentiments towards him, but by the consciousness that he must have seemed surly towards a mirthful child.
"God knows," he thought heavily, "the world gets sad enough, soon enough, to make it shame to cloud even one moment for the children." Himself, he felt old and sad, and miles away from her happy youth.
"So silent?" said he, turning upon her that softened look she loved.
She glanced up at him, forcing a smile, but over her frank eyes there was a wet shimmer which she winked away indignantly. Once again, as on that Indian evening when he had seen Lady Gerardine fit her slender hand into the death-prints of the burnt queens, it struck him that here, in this open-hearted, sweet-natured, gay-spirited girl, a man might find a companion for life to help and comfort—a piece of charming, wholesome prose, but ...
Raymond Bethune, in his lonely isolated life, had had dreams—dreams that his temper had been too narrow, too severely matter-of-fact, to bring into any connection with his actions. He had dreamed his dream as he had read his book of poetry, to lay it aside without a sigh and take up the moment's duty, as one lays aside a flower, a thing of fragrance, a passing pleasure, which has no further influence on life.
Now this woman, whom he despised, who had outraged the deepest feeling of his life, had become, in some inexplicable manner, the embodiment of these inconsequent dreams. Her deep eyes, shadowed with sorrow as the tarn by the mountain height; the trick of her sigh, the balm of her rare smile; the melody of her voice, those low tones that seemed as charged with mystery as the wind by the whispers of the forest depths, all were as
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foamOf perilous seas, in faëry lands forlorn....
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foamOf perilous seas, in faëry lands forlorn....
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faëry lands forlorn....
She was a vision of poetry that could be lived, that could become part of a man's very flesh and blood!
Of a sudden he realised it. His heart gave a great leap and then seemed to stand still; but the habit of years and the hard common sense of his nature asserted themselves in violent reaction. He coloured to the roots of his hair in shame at the monstrousness, the absurdity of the thought, to which his idle dissatisfied mood had led him.
The girl saw his emotion and innocently attributed it to quite another cause; connected it with the expression of his glance when it had rested upon her. The song awoke once more in her heart, circling higher and higher like a June lark. Renewed joy began to bubble from her lips in laughter and talk.
When they emerged from the copse to the top of the downs, where the road dipped into the hollow, she halted, with an exclamation.
"See," she cried, "the grass looks all gold and silver! And oh! did any one ever behold anything so pale, pale, so blue, blue as the sky! Oh! isn't this better than India; don't you love it; wouldn't you like to put your arm round England and kiss her?"
"England, the mother; India, the mistress," thought Bethune. Then, at a maddening tangent flight, his mind took wing. The words of Dr. Châtelard came back upon him. "Cold, that woman? Touch that coldness and be burnt to the bone!" He revolted from his own soul as it flamed within him. He would have liked to set off running across the frozen downs to that far violet line where washed the sea; to have plunged into the icy waves, into the bitter turmoil of the living waters, to wash the degrading madness from him.
Aspasia's fresh laugh brought his spirit back to her with a renewed revulsion.
"Look, look," she cried once more, "there's Muhammed's turban going up and down, and up and down, the garden path! I wonder what he's thinking of? Not Runkle's monumental work, I'm sure. Ugh! I declare it's uncanny only to look at that absurd turban in this winter land. It's bad enough to have Jani chattering about the house like a human castanet, without having that creature tramping up and down outside the window, day after day. Major Bethune, I wish you'd speak to the creature—and find out what he is up to. I never saw anything so restless in my life."
"Oh, we've had several conversations," answered Bethune, following with his eyes the movement of the red head-dress in the distant hollow. "That is to say, I have done a lively bit of talking to him, and he has given me mighty polite answers and said nothing at all. Those fellows, Miss Aspasia, are queer cattle, proud as Lucifer, secret as the tiger in the jungle. That one down there, however, is of the modern school—a sort of animal I don't profess to understand, but one, at any rate, I should not care to trust, myself. Sir Arthur would have done just as well to have left him in India."
"Gracious!" cried Aspasia. "Lord!" Her mind sprang: "Perhaps he's after Runkle! Oh, Major Bethune, you know what a mess poor Runkle is making of things out there; I shouldn't like him to be thugged! I always told him he was laying the seed of mutiny," said Miss Aspasia, with tragic emphasis.
Bethune gave his rare laugh.
"Muhammed Saif-u-din would hardly have come over all the way to England to make his private mutiny when he could accomplish the matter with more kudos in India, and have a good chance of saving his own skin besides."
Aspasia shook her head, preferring to cling to her own dramatic inspiration.
"Well, I'll give Runkle a warning, anyhow," said she. "There's something fishy about Muhammed. You may laugh at me, if you like; but the man is eaten up with some secret thought, some sinister thought. There's a look in his eyes that makes me shiver. And when he smiles—ugh! I do hate Easterns."
He glanced at her reflectively, then he smiled. Such a sentiment from any one else would have aroused his indignation; but it was impossible to take Miss Aspasia Cuningham's hatreds with seriousness. Only this morning he had seen her half strangle a protesting Jani in vehement embrace.
"And as for Aunt Rosamond," went on the girl, comfortably, "it upsets her even to see the wretched being. That's the reason we keep him to the orchard, you know; her windows look out on the front. I had to tell him—it was an awful moment; he was so hurt and so grand. Then I explained it was on account of poor Captain English, you know. Oh, you know...!"
"Do I?" asked the man, with a faint raising of the brows.
"Well, if it amuses you to pretend you don't," she snapped back. "Anyhow, Muhammed did. He may be a cut-throat, but there's something of a gentleman about it. He put his hand on his heart and bowed. 'The Lady Sahib's wishes are sacred,' he said. And I've seen the poor thing hide behind a tree when she is coming. Rather touching, don't you think?" said the inconsequent Baby.
"Did Lady Gerardine ask you to speak to Muhammed?"
"No. Why do you want to know that?"
"Mere idle curiosity," he answered, striking at a gorse bush with his stick and watching the melted rime fly out in spray.
"If you knew Aunt Rosamond better, you'd understand she'd never say such a thing as that. She keeps everything close. But we all know she does not want to be reminded of things."
He threw back his head with his mirthless laugh.
"Even I know as much by this time, Miss Aspasia. It is perhaps a little difficult for a solitary man to understand you women; but one thing is quite evident: you never do anything heartless or selfish ... except from excess of feeling."
He could not keep the sneer from his tone, and Baby's quick temper was instantly aflame.
"You never have a good word for Aunt Rosamond," she cried; "but you need not include me in your judgment, I think!"
Bethune laughed again, harshly.
"I am very hard on Lady Gerardine, am I not?" Then fixing his eyes upon her, broodingly; "and, as for you, I hope——"
He did not finish the sentence. But to her reading, his glance needed no word. She grew rosily shy and ran on ahead to hide it.
"Well, I love the Eastern," said the man, abruptly going back to the origin of the dispute. "He's my trade. He will be the death of me one of these days, no doubt. But what of that? Does not the sailor love the sea that will swallow him. And besides, if they weren't always an uncertain quantity, where would be the spice of life out there? One might as well be in a broker's office. But I don't like your westernised Eastern," he said, with a change of tone, and took a first long step upon the downward way.
Aspasia skipped on before him.
"Well, we're a pretty queer lot down there, in the Old Ancient House," she cried, in her high merry pipe. "What with the Thug plotting—I know he's a Thug, whatever you may say, and I know he's plotting," she gave her companion a challenging blink of her bright eye; "and what with crazy old Mary, who's lived so long in this old hollow that she's positively part of the timber and plaster of the house, and can hear the very stones talk. By the way, she's more creepy than ever now, and swears that her pet ghosts are walking with extra vigour. And what with Jani, running about after Aunt, with her dog eyes and poor chattering teeth! Nothing will ever make me believe that Jani has got a soul. And then, my poor aunt herself, with her hyper-what-you-call-'ems, and Runkle bombarding her with telegrams which she don't even notice, and which I have to answer as best I may. I say," said Aspasia, stopping reflectively, "there will be a fine row, I tell you, soon! For if I know Runkle, he'll pounce, one of these days. And Aunt Rosamond; well, you see for yourself what she is just now. Positively there's only you and I that are sane."
She sprang on again, to look back at him over her shoulder and laugh like a schoolgirl.
His eyes sank before hers. Could she but have guessed on the brink of what ignoble madness he—the sane man—was standing!
CHAPTER X
"How rosy you look!" said Lady Gerardine.
"I've been driving Major Bethune in the cart. And the pony went like an angel on four legs," said Aspasia. "I suppose the wind caught my face."
She pressed the back of her hands to her cheeks, as she spoke, and her eyes danced above them. It was the rose of happiness and no evanescent wind bloom that glowed in her innocent childish countenance.
Women's glances are cruelly quick to read the tender secrets of each other's souls. Lady Gerardine's look hardened as she still fixed the girl; her own wounded inconsequent heart was suddenly aflame with anger against her. Not a fortnight ago had Aspasia been setting flowers before the portrait of Harry English and offering, in passionate love, melodies to that mystic presence. And it had been sufficient that this Bethune's everyday substantiality should show itself, for the fickle creature to change allegiance. She had dared to think she loved Harry English, and now she dared to desecrate this love!
They were in the drawing-room waiting the summons for lunch. Bethune had not yet appeared. With an air of embarrassment very foreign to her, Baby tossed off her hat and coat and moved restlessly to the piano. She wished pettishly, to herself, that her aunt would stop staring. But nothing could drive the lustre from her own eyes and the upward tilt from her lips. She had had such a lovely drive over the wet downs; they had watched the scolding, stamping squirrel in the hazel copse. His dark face had brightened so often. His gaze had rested on her so gently now and again. When he got down to open the wicket gate for her he had gathered a little pale belated monthly rose from the bush at the side, and had given it to her. She would always keep it, always.... Her fingers strayed unconsciously over the keys from one harmony to another. They fell into a familiar theme—the Chopin Prelude, with its sobbing rain-beat accompaniment. She forgot Lady Gerardine and her dry hostile tones, her cold violating look. Following the strong pinions of her art, her young emotions had begun to beat tentative wings, when she was brought down to earth, as once before, very suddenly and with no pleasant shock.
"Whom is your music addressed to now, Aspasia?" asked Lady Gerardine, leaning over towards her with folded arms on the piano.
The musician's fingers dropped from the notes.
"To nobody that belongs to you!" she cried rudely, with a flare of schoolgirl anger. Her face crimsoned.
Lady Gerardine's gaze was filled with a lightning contempt. She straightened herself and looked at the empty space on the wall, where Harry English's portrait had hung.
"In truth," she said, "my dear, you don't take long to change."
Her voice was scornful.
Quite taken aback and in a hot rage, Aspasia bounced up from the music-stool. But before a coherent word could relieve her, Major Bethune came in upon them.
When her anger had somewhat cooled down—never a lengthy process with Aspasia—she began to feel a sort of wonder at herself. What, indeed, had become of the pale, gallant ghost that she had set up to worship in the shrine of her heart? Gone, gone after the way of ghosts, before the first ray of real sunshine—Bethune's hand-clasp, his softened glance, his rare smile. With the realisation of her own fickleness came another, so overwhelming in its suggestion, that all else was swept away by it. She was in love! ... In love for the first time, really, unmistakably, Aspasia Cuningham, who had meant to devote her whole life to her art.
Bethune wondered, in his blundering masculine way, what blight had fallen in the little dining-room, to render their wontedly harmonious meeting of the three at meals so constrained that day.
But when, later, Lady Gerardine and her niece found themselves once more alone, the memory of her curious resentment seemed to have faded from the elder woman's mind, to have been erased by a fresh tide of thought, as footprints on the sands are washed away by the waves.
Old Mary had been with her in the gloaming; old Mary, with her tender memories of the dead past, her mystic whispers of present hauntings.
"Eh, ma'am, he's been very near to us, these days," she said. "Last night, now, I heard his step come down the passage, as plain, as plain as ever I heard anything. I always knew his step among a thousand, ma'am, from a child; a clean, clear step, with never a slur nor a slouch; not as most people walk."
"Oh, Mary," cried Lady Gerardine, a thrill, half exquisite, half terrible, running through her, "why does he come back now?"
"Why, ma'am, it's because of you, I'm thinking," said the old woman, simply. "You're just calling him back to you."
"Oh, Mary!"
"Does that frighten you, ma'am? Doesn't it make you glad? Why, the other evening, they had not lit the lamps yet in the hall, and I felt him pass me—his own presence, just as I feel yours there. Nothing of the grave, of the cold about it, but warm, comfort—Heaven's warmth. Oh, God is good, ma'am! He makes all easy."
"God is good," said Rosamond to herself, weighing the words, as she sat alone. "Is God good?"
And within her some voice of truth answered her: answered that God had been good, even to her; had meant well with her; very well, even in her bereavement, could she but have taken His ruling as these women of Harry's old home.
Thus, when she was found by Aspasia, there was no room in her heart for any lesser thought.
CHAPTER XI
With hands clasped behind his back, head bent, absorbed in thought, the black fan of his beard spreading over the black broadcloth on his breast, the cross-folds of the turban startlingly exotic on top of the fluttering sable garments—the latter pathetically European in intention—an incongruous figure under these bare placid English fruit-trees, Muhammed Saif-u-din came full upon Raymond Bethune.
The sodden grass of the long neglected road had swallowed the sound of their footsteps. For once the Pathan was shaken out of his oriental calm for a brief moment as, suddenly looking up, he found himself within a yard of the officer of Guides.
The guest of the Old Ancient House had strolled out by himself to smoke a solitary meditative pipe in the wild avenue. Seeing Muhammed's flaming headgear, he had deliberately directed his steps towards him; for Bethune would not have been that self that India had made him, had he not felt instinctively lured into the company of the Eastern, all degenerate as he chose to consider him. Moreover, the personality of Sir Arthur's secretary baffled him, and Bethune resented being baffled. He fixed his eye keenly upon the Pathan, turned babu.
"Your soul is in the East, Muhammed," said he, addressing him in his own tongue.
The dark face opposite relaxed into a smile, the white teeth flashed, Muhammed made the supple Indian salaam.
"Nay, your honour, my soul is in great England," he said, and would have passed on. But the other arrested him somewhat peremptorily. Muhammed wheeled back and brought his hand to the edge of his turban with a gesture that betrayed the soldier, then drew himself up rigidly.
Under Bethune's long scrutinising look the thin face fell into deep lines of gravity; the large dark eyes, somewhat restless as a rule in their brilliancy, gazed back straight and full. The Englishman's heart kindled as the unconquered spirit of the Pathan seemed to rear itself to meet the cold domination of the conquering race. There was nothing of revolt in the man's look, yet something untameable, he thought. And it pleased him hugely. His mind leaped back to his own "devils of boys" on the mountain sides—eagles and leopards of humanity, as compared with the domestic animals. He ran a loving glance over the Indian's muscular yet lithe proportions: built for strength—for endurance—for the strenuous side of life.
"How comes it, O son of the Mountain," cried he, "that you are not among the Emperor of India's warriors? How come you to bend those eyes over screed and parchment, to cramp that hand round the quill instead of the talwar?"
The florid oriental language came oddly enough in stiff, abrupt British accents from the officer's tongue. The flowing guttural which replied was in marked contrast:
"I have heard it said," answered the secretary, without moving a muscle of his countenance, "that the pen is mightier than the sword."
A sneer, aimed at the Lieutenant-Governor's literary production, trembled on Bethune's lips, but he prudently suppressed it.
"You cannot deceive me, friend," cried he, abruptly; then: "You have flown with the birds of battle and heard the cannon roar, and thought the smell of the powder sweet."
Again the Pathan smiled; and Bethune, watching him, was stirred, he knew not why, as by a glimpse of something at once immeasurably fierce and immeasurably sad.
"Sir," said Muhammed, in slow deliberate English, "I have seen many things; and no man knows where his fate leads him."
"Oh, no doubt!" said Bethune, laughing not very pleasantly. He was irritated with the fellow's impenetrability and his own inability to deal with it.
"And so fate has brought you to a wealthy master," said he, tauntingly; "and you think that this scribbling business will prove worth your while. 'Tis certainly an odd job for a Pathan! ... I trust well paid?"
"I sought the post, sir," said Muhammed. "My master, since he is to be called my master," a sudden fire leaped and died in his eyes, "will no doubt pay me what he owes me. When I come into my own country again, it may be I shall have found it worth my while."
To this the officer made no reply. After a second's pause, Muhammed lifted his hand to his brow once more and moved away on the noiseless turf. Bethune turned to watch the swing of the strange figure through the trees.
"Greed for money, and wily determination to get to lucrative posts in life—ambition to play the European—or—what?" No motive that his sober common sense could accept as a plausible alternative. Yes, his previous impression had been correct; nothing but a desire for self-advancement—nothing but greed and an Eastern cleverness to seek opportunities—animated that splendid bronze, after all! A disappointing specimen to one who loved the warrior race; a specimen of the westernised Eastern—degenerate leopard, with the spirit eliminated and the wiliness twice developed, according to the law of nature that so often strengthens one attribute by the elimination of another.
CHAPTER XII
The old tin box again and the breath of terrible India in this quiet English room. Siege, struggle, treachery, bloodshed, hunger, thirst, and fever, the extremes of heat and cold, the death agony of the young comrade—this was the story it held. The story of the difficult grave dug in the rock; of the inexorable exigency of the moment, the narrow strait for England's honour which could allow no lingering thought for him that was become useless; of the drawing together of the ranks to hide the gap and keep up the long fight. The story of every conceivable distress of the flesh, every sordid misery of the body, every anxiety of the mind; of hopeless outlook, lingering torture. But, above all, the record of the indomitable purpose; of the white and red crossed flag floating high—of the spirit unconquerable, even to death.
Rosamond sat down on the slanting floor, lifted and took into her lap—as a mother may lift her dead child from the cradle—the old leather case that contained in such small compass so great a story; Captain English's papers of the siege. The parcel had been delivered to her even as he had prepared it for her. To the elastic band that clasped it a scrap of paper was still pinned: "For my wife."
And she had never opened it!
All these years his voice had been waiting to speak to her; his own words for her had been there, the last cry of his soul to hers; nay—how did she know?—the message that should have shaped her future. Something of himself that could not die, he had left her, something of himself to go with her through the desolation! But she, the wife so tenderly loved and thought of to the last—she had, as it were, denied herself to his death-bed. She had closed her ears to his dying speech. She had thrust his dear ghost from her. How was it possible for any woman to have been so cruel, so cowardly? How was it possible ... yet it had been!
"It is we who make our dead dead," had said the mourning mother. Rosamond, the wife, had done worse: she had buried what was not yet dead. She had heaped earth upon the lips that still spoke, that she might not feel the sorrow of their last utterance!
When trouble comes it is woman's way, as a rule, to yield herself up to it, to gloat upon her grief, to feed upon tears. She has a fine scorn for man's mode of mourning, so different from hers; for the seeker of distraction, of forgetfulness; for his deliberate shunning of those emotions in which she sinks herself. And yet it may be that this divergence comes less from man's more selfish nature than from the fact that he is a creature of passion, where she is a creature of sentiment; that he knows within himself forces which are to her undreamed of; that her sorrow is as the chill rain that wraps the land and clears in lassitude at last over tender tints, while his sorrow is as the dry convulsion that defaces the earth and rends the foundations of life's whole edifice.
But there are women apart; women who unite with their own innate spirituality the virile capacity of feeling; who can love fiercely and suffer as fiercely. Of such was Rosamond. And she had been called to suffering before her undeveloped girl-nature had had time to lay hold on love. Love and sorrow, they had fallen upon her together, in her ignorant youth, like monstrous angels of destruction. What wonder then that she should have cried out against them and hidden her face! What wonder that she should have shrunk with a sickly terror from her own unplumbed deep capacity for pain!
But no one may deny himself to himself. And the passionate soul makes for passion, be it a Paul or an Augustine! The nemesis of her nature had come upon Rosamond; and she was to be fulfilled to herself, after so many years, at this moment of her woman's maturity, with a handful of relics and the dust and the smell of the distant Indian fort upon them.
Out of the far far past her love and her sorrow were claiming her—at last.
* * * * *
The logs from the Dorset beech-woods flamed in the queer corner chimney-piece of Harry's attic room. The light flickered on the scattered papers in Rosamond's lap and threw illusive ruddy gleams on the pale hands, on the pale cheek that turned to the glow, yet felt it not.
When she had sat down to read, it was some time still before noon. The December sun crept out between two rain-storms, threw a yellow circle on the boards, marked the shadow of the ivy spray, then paled and passed. The merry logs grew red, grew grey; they fell together with sighs into white ash; and the last creeping flicker of life in the grate sparkled and went out. Below, the placid life of the Old Ancient House jogged its round. Baby's business-like morning music was ground out and caught into the silence. The tinkling bell, that from time immemorial had sounded the homely meal-time gatherings, rang its thin summons up the wooden stairs from the hall. Some one came to the attic door and rattled it against the drawn bolt; knocked and called. And later the stillness of the attic room was troubled again, and Aspasia cried out between petulance and anxiety. So insistent was she that within the room some one answered back at last in a strange hoarse voice of anger. And the steps pattered away, and silence reigned once more.
The rain dried on the window pane, shadows stole forth from the room corners. The air grew cold and colder; a grey dimness settled upon everywhere; the chilling bars of the grate clicked. But still the woman sat by the empty hearth ... reading, reading, reading.
CHAPTER XIII
As Rosamond read, that page of her womanhood which she had hitherto so deliberately kept blank was printed as with a tale of fire. Between those short winter hours, between the leaping of the wood flames and the fall of the cold chill twilight, all that she had cheated her heart of—the tears, the passion, the grief—came upon her like a storm. And fate worked its will.
* * * * *
It's no use mincing matters (wrote Harry English); we are besieged, and the worst of it is, our work's not done. For Cartwright and his good fellows have either fallen into the wily old chief's hands, or are as hotly pressed as we are ourselves. We have been able to get no tidings from him so far. It's rather a joke, isn't it—though a grim one? We started so cocksure of setting him free, and here we are in a trap ourselves. Well, I'm going to try and get this letter through to you, as the Major—we call him the Colonel now—is trying to run another despatch. It will probably be the last for some time, so don't be alarmed, love, if you are long without news. The old fort is sturdy and well placed, and we shan't have even the glory of danger. God keep you.
It's no use mincing matters (wrote Harry English); we are besieged, and the worst of it is, our work's not done. For Cartwright and his good fellows have either fallen into the wily old chief's hands, or are as hotly pressed as we are ourselves. We have been able to get no tidings from him so far. It's rather a joke, isn't it—though a grim one? We started so cocksure of setting him free, and here we are in a trap ourselves. Well, I'm going to try and get this letter through to you, as the Major—we call him the Colonel now—is trying to run another despatch. It will probably be the last for some time, so don't be alarmed, love, if you are long without news. The old fort is sturdy and well placed, and we shan't have even the glory of danger. God keep you.
The letter—in its incredibly soiled and creased cover—was docketed with soldierly neatness: "Brought back by messenger unable to pass."
The rest of the papers in the case were all loose sheets. The earlier of these were carefully dated. But presently this methodic precision was dropped. Most of them seemed to be merely disconnected jottings, at times scarcely more than a phrase or two—as it were the fixing of a passing thought—others, again, a sort of outpouring that covered whole pages: thus, nearly to the end. But the last two sheets were once more inscribed with something of the formality of a document.