"And, at each turn, it seemed as thoughFate some huge net round both did throwTo stay their feet, and dim their sight."—W. Morris.
Three weeks later, on a diamond-bright morning of early May, Eldred Lenox was in the saddle, riding at a foot's pace along a strip of a path that links the Strawberry Bank Hotel with Dalhousie's central hill. Brutus trotted soberly to heel, while Shaitan—a black Galloway, half Biluch, half Arab—tossed an impatient head, sneezed several times in succession, and generally declared his intention of taking matters into his own hands, so soon as he should reach the broader expanse of Terah Mall. But Lenox, impelled by an inbred desire to climb, was minded to push on to the higher, emptier levels of Bakrota—the great hill that towered, formidable, directly ahead of him. For the chalet-like dwellings of Dalhousie are scattered sparsely over three hills, Bakrota, Terah, Potrain; and the summit of the last and lowest is crowned by Strawberry Bank Hotel, mainly the resort of captains and subalterns from the four plains stations of the district, doing their two months of signalling, Garrison Class, or of unadulterated loafing, as the case may be.
Lenox himself came under none of these headings. The man had a trick of refusing to be classed collectively, soldier though he was; a trick of isolation, inbred, unconscious, the outcome, perhaps, of much solitary wandering, of intimate association with the uttermost hills. It was as if they had imparted to him something of their own ruggedness, their aloofness, their stoical power of endurance.
A cheery little breeze stirred the branches of horse-chestnuts and rhododendrons, tossed the silver-backed foliage of the ilex, and set the cedar boughs swaying with slow, dignified indolence. Hidden within their depths of shadow, birds and monkeys twittered and chattered; and at intervals there came to Lenox the peculiar long-drawn note with which the hill villagers call to one another across the valleys. An infectious spirit of jubilation pervaded the air. The sun himself, in these cheerful latitudes, is transformed from an instrument of torture to the golden-locked hero of Norse and Greek legend; and with every step of the ascent Lenox felt the blood course more swiftly through his veins.
Ilex and rhododendrons, clustering close to the road's edge, shut off the vast prospect on his left; till, at an abrupt turn of the road, they gave place to a watercourse, descending in a cataract of boulders to the valley below. Then the glorious company of the mountains sprang suddenly into view, lifting scarred heads to heaven, and greeting the new day with a Te Deum audible to the spirit, if not to the ear itself. To the spirit of Eldred Lenox these outward symbols of the eternal verities, fit emblems of the stern faith in which he had been reared, spoke with no uncertain voice; and their message was a message of aspiration, of conquest, of the iron self-mastery and self-restraint indispensable to both. They reminded him, also, that life held many good gifts in atonement for the one gift denied; that a man might do worse than live and work unhindered by the volcanic forces of passion.
The past five years had, after all, been years of fruitful service to the great country he loved; the three letters after his name assured him of that. And there remained much more to be done in the same direction; work that would make unstinted demands upon his energy and fortitude; work that must, in due time, force him to forget.
Arrived on the Mall, with its far-reaching view of valley and hill, and its outcrop of glittering granite, a word of encouragement set Shaitan into a smart canter that brought them speedily to the half-way corner, whence a densely shadowed road climbs upward to the great forest of Kalatope. The glimpse of sun-splashed path and red pine-stems drew Lenox aside from the open Mall; and horse and rider passed into the stretch of scented coolness at a brisk trot. The path, little more than six feet wide, was innocent of railing. But much riding in the Himalayas hardens the nerves to these tight-rope performances, which are part and parcel of life in the hills.
For a while they went steadily forward, well content; till, on rounding a sharp corner, Shaitan stopped dead, his forefeet firmly planted on the roadway, his sensitive ears thrust forward; and Lenox, who had fallen into an absorbing train of thought, found himself confronted by a sufficiently startling reality.
The path ahead of him was blocked by the unwieldy forms of five buffaloes, in charge of a naked brown wisp of humanity four feet high, armed with a no more formidable weapon than a pine branch stripped of its needles. But the crux of the situation lay in the fact that, between the fourth and fifth buffaloes an Englishwoman, in a brown habit, mounted on a restive chestnut pony, was in imminent danger of slipping off the road to certain death among the rocks and boulders below. For the chestnut had succeeded in wrenching his hindquarters outward, his heels were already over the edge, and his rider, leaning well forward, was applying whip and spur with a coolness and vigour that could not fail to excite the man's admiration.
It was a matter of seconds: Lenox could not stop to calculate possible risks. Buffaloes and herd-boy scattered right and left before his furious onset. A swinging blow from his hunting-crop sent two of the bulky beasts scrambling up the inner slope, while Brutus, who found the situation all that heart of dog could desire, sent a third crashing over the khud to the accompaniment of shrill lamentations from the terrified child in charge.
The whole thing passed in a flash; the pony, by a frantic but futile effort to right himself, had just sent a shower of loose stones rattling from under his hind feet, when Lenox, dismounting, gripped the cheek-strap with one hand, the other being occupied with his own reins.
A vigorous forward pull landed the chestnut, panting and quivering, with all four feet on terra firma. But the rider's right arm had fallen limply to her side, and Lenox, looking up, for the first time, into a face deeply shadowed by a wide-brimmed helmet, recognised . . . his wife.
Her breath was still coming In small, quick gasps; but there was no shadow of fear in her eyes; no lightest tremor about her close-set lips.
"Great God!You!" he ejaculated under his breath, and involuntarily took a backward step away from her.
At the shock of their encountering glances her cheeks flamed, and she lowered her lids.
"I suppose I may say thank you for that," she said, and her voice shook ever so little. "A minute later, I should have gone over."
He nodded, keeping his teeth close, his eyes down; and a deadweight of silence fell between them.
Small sounds became suddenly self-assertive. The rustle of squirrels along the pine-stems, the monotonous music of the cuckoo, varied by a charge of toy pistol-shots when an inexperienced monkey alighted on a dead twig. Brutus, standing squarely between them, eyed each in turn with critical speculation, his ugly head cocked very much to one side. He instinctively mistrusted all wearers of petticoats, and had found the buffalo incident very much more to his taste.
At length, in desperation, Quita made a movement as if to pass on. ButLenox laid a peremptory hand upon her bridle.
"Tell me, how do you come to behereof all impossible places on earth?"
His voice was harder than he knew, and a slight shadow passed across her face.
"Is it really necessary to explain?" she asked, coldly.
He relinquished her bridle at that.
"As you please, of course. Only—it is a little awkward our being here together; and it might be as well to come to some sort of understanding before we separate. Are you up here for the season?"
"Yes, we have been up all the winter, Michael and I, except for two months at Lahore. When the snow melted we moved to the highest cottage on Bakrota. It is beautiful up there. We came out here eighteen months ago," she went on a trifle hurriedly, grateful, now that the ice was broken, for the relief of commonplace speech. "I had heard a good deal about India, you know. I wanted to see it for myself, and if possible put a little of it on canvas."
"And you are not disappointed?"
"No, indeed. It is wonderful beyond words."
They had themselves well in hand now. Each had given the other a false impression at the start, and when two people are living at cross-purposes it is easier to move mountains than to remove that most intangible of all barriers, a false impression.
"And are you—up for the season?" Quita added, after a pause, with a natural touch of hesitancy.
"No. Two months' leave. I am free, therefore, to go elsewhere, if my presence here is in the least degree . . . annoying to you."
"Oh, but that would be a pity. You must have had a special reason for choosing Dalhousie."
"Some friends of mine were coming up, and asked me to come too. But they will quite understand if I say I should prefer to go shooting beyond Chumba."
"Don't say it, though, please. I would really rather you did not put yourself out in the smallest degree onmyaccount. Besides," she added, achieving a rather uncertain smile, "we need not meet often, and no one—except Michael—will have any notion of . . . the truth."
"Of course not," he agreed, with glacial dignity. "I was forgetting that you had—discarded my name."
Again the blood flew to her cheeks.
"It seemed the simplest way to avoid possible complications, or unnecessary lies."
"And you flung away—my ring also?"
The question came out in spite of himself, for he had noted her ungloved left hand.
"No. Only I could not very well wear it—under the circumstances."
He stood aside now to let her pass. He himself then mounted, and followed her along the narrow path, raging against the irony of circumstance, as a man bites upon a sore tooth.
On reaching the spaciousness of Bakrota Mall, he had no choice but to ride abreast of his companion. He did so without remark, and since Quita lacked courage to spur her pony to a canter, they continued to ride thus for a time; each, under an admirable mask of composure, painfully aware of the other's presence.
Speech seemed only likely to widen the gulf between them, and at all times Lenox had a large capacity for silence.
Not so Quita. The last ten minutes had been overcrowded with conflicting emotions; her husband's mute proximity got upon her nerves, and a setting of pine and mountain put a finishing touch to an already intolerable situation. She turned upon him at length, with a small gesture of defiance,—a well-remembered tilt of her chin that pierced him like a sword-thrust.
"Don't feel bound to escort me, please. I am constantly out alone. You may have a long way to go; and we need hardly play at polite conventionalities—you and I."
He glanced at her keenly for a second.
"Thanks; I am in no hurry. But—if you would prefer it?"
"I think it would be less—uncomfortable for us both," she made answer desperately.
"In that case, of course . . ." He gathered up his reins, and lifted his hat, "At least I am glad to have been of some small service to you," he added, quietly. And before her brain or lips could formulate an answer, he had cantered off and vanished round a shoulder of the hill.
"Flower o' the clove,All the Latin I construe is 'Amo, I love'!"—Browning.
Quita drew rein and sat motionless for several seconds, looking straight before her.
"I wonder . . . I wonder very much," she mused, "exactly what one may infer from all that. Either he has superb self-control, or I have been wiped off the slate altogether. Most probably the latter."
Then she moved forward slowly, in a state of mind so complicated that, for all her skill in self-analysis, she could not unravel her own sensations. She only knew that she felt jarred through and through, and in a mood to give way to her most dare-devil impulses. But happily for her, no egregious piece of folly was ready to hand at the moment.
Her appearance in India was itself the outcome of an impulse generated by the arrival of two cheques, whose united figures took away her breath; and confirmed by the fact that Michael's relations with the inevitable woman of the moment threatened serious complications—for the woman. For Michael himself serious complications seemed out of all question. Frank Pagan though he was, he lacked, in a peculiar degree, the needful leavening of common clay. Love, as he knew it, was not inevitably based on passion. It was his imagination rather than his heart that took fire, and only under the influence of a dominant emotion did he appear to be capable of the highest achievement. Briefly, he was in love with Love, with that elixir of the heart that stirs the pulses, and quickens inspiration. The object loved stood second. But, so long as the enchantment held, so long as no new impression caught and whirled him in another direction, he honestly believed her to be supreme.
Hence complications, many and embarrassing, which went far to interpret Quita's inconsequent flittings from one continental town to another. For, although the younger by eighteen months, she was many years older in thought and character than her irresponsible brother; and in all matters of moment she took, and was expected to take, the lead.
The key to a perplexing character may often be found in the idiosyncrasies of its nearest and dearest; and this reversal of the natural order of things explained much in Quita that appeareddifficileand contradictory; explained also her instant gravitation to Lenox, in whom she divined a supply of moral force, and the masculine spirit of protection, both strangely undeveloped in the brother she so devoutly loved. And if at times the uncongenial task of conscience-keeper, and general financier, coupled with complexities, arising from her own false position, had proved something of a strain upon her, Michael had never yet discovered the fact. She understood and shared enough of his Pagan spirit to accept his emotional aids to self-expression at their true value. Do what he might, she could not find it in her heart to be angry with him for long. He carried his fine crop of failings with a cheerfulness and assurance so engaging, that it seemed almost ungracious to be aware of them.
But there were moments when the woman in her rebelled, even to remonstrance, with small result; and when, at length, the arrival of two cheques coincided with Michael's announcement that a certain enamoured Countess obviously expected him to free her from the tyranny of an unloved husband, Quita had laughingly suggested India as an inviting means of escape from entanglements present and to come.
Half a night of meditation had sufficed to set her on the rock of decision. There were possibilities about India not to be named, even to her own heart. There were also empty spaces where white women would be scarce, and where Michael must learn to work without the spur of a fictitious stimulant.
Before the week was out, behold them ploughing through the Mediterranean, leaving the misguided Countess to pacify a suspicious husband. A summer in Kashmir, and a winter in a deserted Himalayan station, had confirmed Quita in the wisdom of their flight; and now her own unnamed possibility had been sprung upon her so suddenly, so strangely, that it took away her breath, and left her as yet neither glad nor sorry, but profoundly disturbed.
Arrived at her own turning, she relieved her feelings a little by getting Yorick at a canter up the twisted scrap of a path that climbed to a wooden doll's house, christened by a poetical Hindu landlord, the "Crow's Nest." Perched on an impossible-looking slope of gravel and granite, eight thousand feet above the Punjab, it seemed only to be saved from falling headlong by an eight-foot ledge of earth, which Quita spoke of proudly as her "garden," and which actually boasted two strips of border aglow with early summer flowers. Here she found hersaissquatting on his heels; and springing from the saddle, dismissed Yorick without his customary lump of sugar.
On the steps of the trellised verandah she paused, nerving herself to recount her astonishing adventure in the right tone of voice, and instinctively her brain noted every detail of the view outspread before her. The golden stillness of morning rested on hill and valley like a benediction. Green cornfields, white watercourses, granite promontories, and black patches of forest—all were bathed in warmth and light without languor. The breath of the snows was still ice-cool, and exhilarating as wine; its freshness penetrated and enhanced by the faint sweet scent of Banksia roses, that clothed the rickety woodwork in a fairy garment of green and ivory-white. Each least sound was crystal clear in the rarefied air; the quarrelling of two sparrows, the high-pitched chatter from the compound behind the cottages, the crooning of ring-doves among the pines. Butterflies, like detached flowers, fluttered in and out. A faint breeze stirred the roses, so that an occasional creamy petal fell circling to the ground.
But for the first time Quita Maurice felt out of tune with it all. A disturbing element had thrust itself into her life, deranging its perspective, altering its values. She felt badly in need of common human sympathy, and the exalted calm of these high latitudes irritated rather than soothed her.
With an impatient sigh she turned to enter the house.
The glass doors of the centre room stood open, a characteristic room, half drawing-room, half studio; furnished mainly with two large easels, painting-stools, and cane chairs, yet bearing in every detail the stamp of Quita's iridescent personality. A pianette, a violin, a litter of music, and back numbers of the 'Art Journal' occupied one corner. A revolving bookcase showed an inviting array of books. Her own canvas was hidden by draperies of dull gold silk, and beside it, on a carved stool, sprays of Banksia roses and honeysuckle soared plumelike from a vase of beaten bronze.
Before the second easel Michael stood, with his back towards her, brush and palette in hand, head critically tilted, his velveteen coat sagging a little from rounded shoulders. Absorbed in his picture, he was quite unconscious of her presence. This irritated her also to an unjustifiable extent. Her vanity had suffered recent shock, and an unreasoning longing possessed her to be cared for, to be supremely needed.
"Michel!" she cried imperatively from her post in the doorway,—Michael objected strongly to the harsher pronunciation of his name; and the two seldom spoke English when alone. "Is it necessary to fire a salute before you will deign to be aware that one has come back?"
At that he turned quickly about, and treated her to a burlesque bow of apology.
"Mais non, chérie. . . a thousand pardons! But it is no fault of mine that you have the footfall of a bird!"
She laughed in spite of herself.
"Keep those sort of speeches for Miss Mayhew. She may possibly believethem. It would be all the same if I had the footfall of an elephant!Nothing short of siege-guns would distract your mind from that picture.It has bewitched you."
"Eh bien! When it is complete it will be a masterpiece," he assured her loftily.
"No doubt! But, in the meanwhile, it may interest you to know that except for a genuine miracle, I should not be here at all."
"Mon Dieu! But what happened? Tell me."
Flinging aside palette and brushes, he caught her hands in his, and it cost her an effort to preserve her lightness of tone.
"Nothing blood-curdling, since you see me without bruise or scratch. Only Yorick and I got tangled up with a herd of buffaloes on the Kajiar Road. In his fright, the little fool slipped half over the khud, and if a knight-errant had not fallen from heaven, in the nick of time, we should both be lying somewhere in the valley by now, 'spoiling a patch of Indian corn'!"
Maurice frowned. "Don't be gruesome, Quita."
"Sorry. I didn't mean to be. I was only quoting that uncannily clever Kipling boy at Lahore. Yorick and I were slithering over, just like the loathly Tertium Quid on the Mushobra Road; and there is plenty of Indian corn in the valley! I thought of it, all in a flash, and it wasn't enlivening, I assure you."
"That is enough," Maurice protested hastily. Tragedy oppressed him to the verge of annoyance. "But tell me—who was the knight-errant, that I may at least shake hands with him."
The blood tingled in Quita's cheeks, and she went quickly forward into the room.
"I doubt if you will want to do that when you know his name," she said."It was—Captain Lenox."
"Nom de Dieu! That fellow!" Michael flung out his hands with a dramatic gesture of despair. "What is he doing here,par exemple, instead of poking about among his glaciers?NowI suppose he will not rest till he has taken you from me again."
The frank selfishness of the man's first thought was so characteristic that Quita smiled. But her smile had an edge to it.
"Set your mind at rest on that point," she said. "He is no more anxious to claim—his property, than I am to be claimed."
"Curse him! Did he dare to tell you so?"
Quita lifted her head; a spark of anger flashed in her eyes.
"You seem to forget that he is a gentleman, and—my husband." Then, recovering herself, she added more gently, "There are ways and ways of telling things,mon cher, and since I have relieved your anxiety, we need not mention him again. The subject is distasteful to me. Now, I want to see how you have got on with the masterpiece!"
She went to the easel; and Maurice, following, stood at her elbow anticipating the sweet savour of praise. For the picture was a notable bit of work, daringly simple in colouring and design, yet arresting, convincing, alive.
It represented a young girl, with the promise of womanhood on her gravely sweet lips, and in the depths of her eyes, half-sitting upon the crossed rails of the verandah. An ivory-white dress of Indian silk fell in shimmering folds to her feet. A dawn of clear amber made a tender background to the dull gold of her hair. Trailing sprays of the rose that ran riot over the house drooped towards her; and a pine branch, striking in abruptly, made an effective splash of shadow in an atmosphere palpitating with the promise of fuller light. The only intense bit of colour in the picture was the violet blue of Elsie Mayhew's eyes—eyes that looked into you and through you to some dream-world unsullied by the disconcerting realities of life, which seemed only awaiting the given moment to rush in and dispel the dream. For, as the sky gave promise of fuller light, so did the girl's spirit seem hovering on the verge of fuller knowledge.
Such at least was Quita's thought, as she stood silently appraising her brother's work; and it brought a contraction to her throat, a stinging sensation to her eyeballs.
"I congratulate you, Michel," said she softly. "You have never done anything to equal that. It is more than a portrait. It is an interpretation, or will be, when it is complete. Her hopeless little 'Button Quail' of a mother won't understand it in the least, but Colonel Mayhew will. I wonder if you know yourself how much you have put into it?"
"I know that I have put some superlative workmanship into it," he answered, looking upon the creation of his hand and brains with critical grey-green eyes, curiously out of keeping with an ill-formed and unrestrained mouth.
"Indeed you have. The thing is full of atmosphere, and your flesh tints are worthy of Perugino. You mean to give it to her?"
"Cela va sans dire. She wants it as a present for her father."
"Why not hang it first, at Home?"
"Afterwards, perhaps. If she permits."
"It is a big gift, Michel. It would fetch a high price; and we need money."
Michael shrugged his shoulders with all an artist's scorn of "the common drudge."
"Since when have you turned commercialist,petite soeur? If it is a question of starving, I can always paint another. I do not sell this one,voilà tout. If it were only mine, I would have five lines of Swinburne under it for title. They express her to perfection. Listen—
'Her flower-soft lips were meek and passionate,For love upon them like a shadow sat,Patient, a foreseen vision of sweet things,A dream with eyes fast shut and plumeless wings,That know not what man's love or life shall be.'"
On the last line his voice deepened to an impassioned tone that brought an anxious crease to Quita's forehead.
"I wonder which you are most in love with," she said on a forced note of lightness. "The girl herself, or your picture of her? Do you ever treat her to such rhapsodies in the flesh? They must be a little embarrassing for a child of twenty!"
"Your 'child of twenty' is already very much a woman, and I have the right to say to her what I please."
"Not altogether,mon ami—unless——"
But Michael dismissed criticism as serenely as he dismissed consequences. The episode of the Countess was as though it had never been.
"I have no concern with 'unless.' Such uncomfortable words are wiped out of my vocabulary. They affect me like a false note in music."
Quita laughed. "No one knows that better than I do! But speaking simply as a woman, I know also that the man who opens our eyes to the passionate side of things involves himself in a big moral responsibility. And evenyoucannot shelve the moralities altogether."
"Dela dépend. If the moralities hamper one's art, the shelf is the best place for them in my opinion."
His sister did not answer at once. Michael's confession of faith was not a matter to be lightly dismissed; for the simple reason that he lived up to it in so far as human inconsistency will allow any man to live up to his faith, however ignoble.
"I sometimes wonder whether one's art really does gain by that form of freedom," she said thoughtfully, "or only—one's consuming egotism."
But the suggestion was rank heresy, and Michael would have none of it.
"Really, Quita, you are as enlivening as a Lenten service! Upon my soul, I'd sooner you turned vegetarian than developed a conscience! But believe me, I am devoted to Miss Mayhew. She is enchanting. A wild rose, half-open, with the dew still on her petals. Metaphorically, I am at her feet. Does that satisfy you,ma belle?"
"It might, if I had not heard a good deal of it before. You are chronically devoted to one or other of us, my beloved Pagan! That's the root of the difficulty."
In atonement for directness of speech, she laid hands upon his shoulders, and smiled very tenderly into his face.
"I am chronically devoted to you,coeur de mon coeur," he declared in all sincerity. "That is the only form of it I have yet known."
His reward was a butterfly kiss between the eyebrows.
"Out of your own mouth you stand condemned! It is quite charming for me; and for the rest—one accepts the unavoidable! But in sober prosaic truth, Michel, Elsie Mayhew is a great deal too good for you; and that nice Engineer boy, Mr Malcolm, is desperately in earnest about her, I have seen his whole heart in his eyes when he looks at her——"
"Mais, ma chère, what a serious derangement of his organism!" Michael broke in with irreverent laughter. "When all's said, the heart is a practical machine—even the heart of a lover, and a little of it must have been left below for pumping purposes!"
She stamped her foot in helpless irritation.
"Michel, how exasperating you are! Can't you see that I am in earnest?"
"Like my incomparable rival?" he queried unabashed. "Poor devil! I wish him no harm. Is it my fault, after all, if the lady prefers a man who is not cut out on a pattern, and filed for reference at the War Office? He is immaculate,ce cher Malcolm, from his parting to the toes of his boots. And,ma foi, he is clean—like all that redoubtable army of British officers—aggressively clean, inside and out, which one cannot always say with truth! But he has no finesse, nosavoir fairewhere women are concerned. If he is in earnest let him try weapons more compelling than hisbeaux yeux. A man was not given lips and a pair of hands for eating and fighting merely; and if he cannot turn them to good account, he deserves the fate that will assuredly be his."
Quita's sigh, as she turned impatiently away, may have arisen from a passing thought of that other, who had also been remiss in putting lips and hands to their legitimate use, and had reaped disaster accordingly. She took off her helmet, as if suddenly aware of its weight, and tossed it into a chair.
"Is Miss Mayhew giving you another sitting after our sunrise picnic, onDynkund, to-morrow?" she asked in a changed voice.
"Yes, and I intend that she shall stay on for tiffin also."
"Then I will persuade Major Garth to follow suit, so that we may be aparti carré. And now, as it's more than half-past breakfast-time, we might begin to think about sitting down! I believe Major Garth is riding up this morning with some books I lent him, and I must get forward a little with my picture before he comes."
"His office hours seem to have become a negligible quantity lately,"Maurice remarked casually, his eyes on Elsie's face.
"Yes, I told him so a few days ago, apparently without much effect. Major Garth is one of those men who combine a maximum of pleasure and a minimum of work with the capacity for securing good appointments, which is quite an achievement—of its kind. I suppose I must gently point out to him that now the station is waking up it would be well to consider the proprieties a little more than we have done so far; or the 'Button Quail' will be forbidding Elsie the house. She is volubly disapproving already, denounces him as a 'dangerous man' . . . delectable adjective! But the cackle of Quails is nothing to me. So long as the man behaves himself, and amuses me, I shall continue to see just as much of him as I think fit."
Major Garth, it may be mentioned in passing, had lately secured the coveted post of Station Staff Officer. He also had spent the winter months in Dalhousie; and he could by no means be reckoned among the men who fail with women through undue fastidiousness in regard to ways and means.
"A bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter."—Eccles.
"Tired already? Nonsense! The air at this height is pure elixir vitae. It gives one a foretaste of the joy of being disembodied! I feel five years younger since I left the bungalow."
"And I, on the other hand, feel uncomfortably aware that I shall never see the forty-third milestone again!" And, seating himself deliberately on the trunk of a fallen deodar, James Garth looked up at his companion, where she stood above him on a rough-hewn block of granite, her alpenstock held high like a shepherd's crook, the slender, shapely form of her outlined upon a sky already athrill with the foreknowledge of dawn.
Standing thus, lightly poised, impatient of delay, slim and upright as a young birch-tree, a cluster of roses at her waist, her expressive face shadowed by the wide-brimmed helmet, she appeared triumphantly, girlishly young, for all her eight-and-twenty years. Her cheeks glowed; irrepressible animation sparkled in her eyes. The shock and jar of twenty-four hours ago seemed forgotten, as though they had never been, for Quita Maurice was blessed with the happy faculty of living vividly and exclusively in the present, and the exhilaration of ascent, the prospect of watching the world's awakening from a pine-crowned pinnacle, nine thousand feet up, were, for the moment, all-sufficing.
James Garth, in his upward glance, appraised every detail of her dress and person; savoured to the full her very individual—if, at times, thorn-set—charm. He was a connoisseur of woman—of their moods, their minor vanities, their methods of defence and attack—this man whose career had been mainly remarkable for a succession of sentimental friendship, innocuous and otherwise.
During the past air months he had spent an infinite deal of leisure in a pastime whose every move and countermove he knew by heart, and for the first time in eighteen years he had found himself out of his reckoning.
An element little known to him had upset the balance of power. He was beginning to be aware that, for all his unquenchable self-assurance, he had never for one moment felt sure of this woman, whose companionship was so accessible, and whose inner self stood always just out of reach, airy, impregnable, and by a natural sequence, the more entirely desirable. It had taken Garth some months to realise the truth: and on this morning of golden promise he decided that Quita Maurice must be made to realise it also.
Quita herself, meeting the eloquence of his eyes with that frank look of hers which had been largely responsible for the unprecedented turn of affairs, was vainly trying to repress a mischievous enjoyment of the fact that her companion was patently out of his element; that his drawing-room attitudes and demeanour struck an almost ludicrous note of discord with the untamed majesty of his surroundings.
Face, figure, and point-device attire, culminating in a buttonhole of freshly picked violets, stamped him as a man mentally and physically addicted to the levels of life; a soldier of carpet conquests and ball-room achievements. A brow not ill-formed, and a bold pair of eyes, more green than brown, suggested some measure of cultivated intelligence, without which Quita could not have endured his companionship for many hours together. But the proportions of his thick-set figure, and a certain amplitude of chin and jaw, bewrayed him; classed him indubitably with the type for whom comfort and leisure are the first and last words of life. The fact that he had ascended a matter of fifteen hundred feet before daybreak, and that with no more than the mildest sense of martyrdom, was proof conclusive that the balance of power had been very completely upset; and it is quite in keeping with the delicate irony of things that the one woman who had succeeded in upsetting it was, at that moment, dissecting him with the merciless accuracy of the artist.
"Poor man!" she remarked, sympathetically. "I'm afraid I have been treating you rather mercilessly; and you don't look particularly happy sitting on that deodar, either! I suppose I may consider it something of a triumph to have dragged a high priest of the arm-chair unprotesting up to the heights at this unearthly hour of the morning?"
"A triumph exclusively your own," he answered, with lingering emphasis."No other woman in the world could have achieved as much."
Quita glanced at him quizzically.
"I honestly wonder," she said slowly, "if you could reckon up at random how many times you have said that sort of thing before."
Garth reddened visibly; less at the justice of the retort than at the humiliation of being put out of countenance by a woman from whom he desired no less a gift than the gift of herself.
"Well, I never meant it fair and square before," he declared stoutly.Whereat, to his consternation, she laughed outright.
"You seem to have a high opinion of my powers of credulity! That is too big a compliment for me to digest without salt! But I think we have talked nonsense enough for one while, and it's growing lighter every minute. Are you coming on? Or would you sooner sit there in peace while I push up to the top?"
The suggestion brought him to his feet.
"No, by no means. When I set out to do a thing, I go through with it."
"Rally your forces, then, for one more spurt of climbing. Time is precious. Can you really manage this formidable boulder, or would you like a hand up?"
She laughingly flung out her free left hand; and the mockery in her clear voice fired the man to make good his opportunity. He took prompt possession of the proffered hand, crushing it in his with unnecessary force, but made no attempt to scale the rock; while she, instantly perceiving his manoeuvre, sprang down to his side and freed herself with imperious decision. Then she turned upon him, her head held high, a spark of genuine scorn in her eyes; and he realised that he was dealing with no mere coquette, whose elusiveness might be taken as an inverted form of encouragement, but with a woman of character and spirit.
"Major Garth," she said in a tone of quietness more cutting than anger, "when I pay a man the compliment of going out alone with him, I take it for granted that he is in the habit of behaving like a gentleman. I should be sorry to find myself mistaken in your case."
Without giving him time to answer, she leapt lightly on to her deserted rock, leaving him to follow, if he chose.
And he did choose. For her scorn, while it stung his vanity to the quick, fired his lukewarm blood with a lust of conquest far removed from his usual cool-headed assurance at the critical moment. He seemed destined to experience more than one new sensation this morning; and new sensations rarely came amiss to this epicure of the emotions.
Being quite incapable of emulating his companion's chamois method of cutting corners, and striking out a direct line for the summit, he did not succeed in coming up with her till the arduous feat was accomplished,—the Pisgah height attained. Here he found her established on a slab of granite, hands loosely clasped over her knee, helmet tilted a little backward, forming a halo round her head and face. He arrived in a very unheroic state of breathlessness, and she greeted him with a frankly forgiving smile.
"That last bit came rather hard on you, I'm afraid. But surely all this makes ample amends."
She included in a wide sweep of her arm the superb panorama of hill and valley and far-stretching plain, robed in a haze of its own tierce breath, through which a silver network of rivers could be faintly discerned in the crescent light. Uprising from this blue interminable distance, the first crumplings of the foothills showed like purple velvet, and from these again the giant Himalayas—the "home of the greater gods"—sprang aloft, in a medley of lovely lines and hues, till they reached the uttermost north where the hoar head of Nanga Parbat soared twenty-five thousand feet into the blue.
Quita motioned her companion to another rock, a little distance behind her own.
"Sit down there, and recover your lost breath," she commanded, gently. "I would rather not talk for the present, if you don't mind. It would jar somehow. I daresay you understand what I mean."
He was many leagues removed from understanding: but he obeyed in silence, wondering at himself, no less than at her. And straightway Quita forgot all about him, in the mere rapture of looking, and of feeling in every fibre the incommunicable thrill of dawn.
A passionate nobility, freedom, and power breathed from the wide scene. Already a pearly glimmer pulsed along the east; already the mountains were awake and aware. Peak beyond peak, range beyond range, a shadowy pageant of purple and grey, they swept upwards to the far horizon, where the still wonder of the snows shone pale and pure against the dovelike tones of the sky. Away across the valley, where night still brooded, Kalatope ridge, serrated and majestic of outline, made a massive incident of shadow amid the tenderer tints around. The great hushed world seemed holding its breath in expectation of a miracle—the unconsidered miracle of dawn.
A Himalayan dawn is brief, as it is beautiful. One after one, the snow-peaks passed from the pallor of death to the glow of life. Then, sudden as an inspiration, the full splendour of morning broke, sublime as the eternity from which it came. Rapier-like shafts of light pierced the purple lengths of shadows that engulfed the valley. Threading their way through fir and deodar and pine, they flung all their radiant length across a rock-studded carpet of fir-needles and moss, and rested, like a caress, upon Quita's face and figure.
At last, with a long breath of satisfaction, she forced her sun-dazzled eyes and mind back to earth; only to discover that Garth had risen and was standing at her side. The man had seen and studied her in many moods. But never in one so exalted, so self-forgetful, as the present; and to the varied new experiences of the morning was added a wholesome sense of his own unworthiness to lay a hand upon her. In that illumined moment he was vouchsafed a glimpse into the temple of Love; a temple he had desecrated and defiled time and again; whose holy of holies he had never entered, nor ever could.
"Does it really mean as much as all that to you?" he asked, still watching her, with unusual concentration.
She nodded, and a soft light gleamed in her eyes. "Yes—as much as that, and more—infinitely more. One's cramped mind and heart seem to need expanding to take it all in."
Garth's smile lacked its habitual touch of cynicism.
"I am afraid even sunrise on Dynkund in your company has no power to lift me to such flights of ecstasy."
"I never supposed it had, you poor fellow! I wouldn't change souls with you for half a kingdom. Nearly every day of my life I thank the goodness and the grace that dowered me with the spirit of an artist. Think what a heritage it is to be eternally interested in a world full of people who seem to be eternally bored!"
"I suppose you include me in that noble army of martyrs?"
"Decidedly. It is one of your worst faults."
"At least I never commit it in your presence."
She laughed, and lifted her shoulders.
"At least you know how to flatter a woman! But, for goodness' sake, don't let's talk trivialities in the face of these stupendous mountains."
"And why not? In my opinion, the trivialities of a human being are worth more than the grandeur of a mountain, any day. But, seriously, Miss Maurice—if you can be serious with me for five minutes—does all this, and the Art in which you live and breathe, so satisfy you that you feel no need for the far better things a man might have to offer you?"
She frowned, and looked with sudden intentness at a distant, abject in the valley.
"Yes—seriously—it does. What is more, it seems to me that most men set too high a value on what they have to offer a woman, and that a good many of us are better off without it."
Garth set his teeth, and did not answer at once. That his first genuine attempt at a proposal of marriage should be thus cavalierly nipped in the bud was disconcerting, to say the least of it.
"But not you—of all women," he protested, incredulously. "Are you quite sure you understand what I mean? Won't you give me a chance to explain——?"
Her low laughter maddened him.
"Oh, no—please have mercy on me! Explanations are the root of all evil! If only people had not such a passion for explaining themselves, there would be fifty per cent fewer misunderstandings in the world. Don't you know the delightful story of a zealous mother reading the Bible to her boy, and explaining profusely to bring it within the scope of his small mind, and when she asked him, anxiously, 'Are you quite sure you understand it all, darling?' he answered, with the heavenly frankness of childhood, 'Yes, beautifully, mummy—except when you explain.' That's my feeling exactly; so we'll skip the explanations, if you don't mind."
He stifled an oath, and flung his half-smoked cigar down the khud.
"You're enough to drive a sane man distracted!" he declared hotly, and was not a little surprised at his own vehemence.
"No, no! That's exaggeration, I assure you. The strong wine of the morning has got into your head. Do be reasonable now, and keep personalities at arm's length. I detest them."
He moved away for a space; then, turning on his heel, came back again.
"At least you don't object to my companionship?" he said, ignoring her request.
"Of course not, so long as it amuses you to bestow it upon me."
"Amuses me! God in heaven, what makes you so hopelessly detached?"
"Some radical defect in me, I suppose. The Pagan strain, perhaps, that comes out so strong in Michael. I believe I am incapable ofles grandes passions. But that does not prevent me from being a good friend, and a constant one, as you will find, if you care to test me in that capacity. Now you may sit down here," she patted her slab of rock invitingly, "and discourse about anything you please, except myself. Egoist though I am, I have had enough of the subject for to-day!"
And Garth—the man of surface emotions and ready tongue—found nothing to say in answer to this kindly but inexorable dismissal of his unspoken suit. He had no choice but to accept the inevitable, and the proffered seat. But the permission to discourse about anything he pleased left him dumb, and it was Quita herself who guided their talk into a less personal channel.
"Have you had any new arrivals at the Strawberry Bank lately?" she asked, conversationally; and the question was more relevant to the tabooed topic than Garth was likely to guess. He lived close to the hotel, and dined there when he felt convivially disposed.
"Yes; two new fellows came up this week. A doctor from Mooltan and a Gunner from 'Dera Dismal,'—the Thibet man,—Lenox, who seems to be making a reputation of sorts. But he looks a wreck. Smokes like a chimney; and is apparently working himself to death; a thankless form of folly."
"Perhaps. Yet India needs a few unsparing workers—like Captain Lenox."
She spoke with studied indifference; but her fingers were busy uprooting a patch of moss.
"Oh yes, India has a healthy appetite for unsparing workers! She is a grasping harridan, who demands all and offers nothing. She devours the lives of men who are foolish enough to lose their hearts to her, and wrecks their bodies by way of thanks."
Quita's lips lifted in the merest shadow of a smile. "Aren't you a little ungrateful to her? She has been fairly merciful to you!"
"I have never given her the ghost of a chance to be otherwise! I don't believe in overwork, plus the Indian climate. More men kill themselves by a happy mixture of both than the importance of their achievements justifies. I was chaffing Lenox only last night about his leaning towards that unrecognised form of suicide; and all the answer I got was that a man might die of a more degrading disease. You never by any chance get a rise out of old Lenox!"
"Do you know him well?"
"As well as it's possible to know a fellow who lives with all his shutters up. And in any case an anchorite, and a woman-hater, would never be much in my line. The symptoms appear to have developed in the last few years. Not without reason, as I happen to know."
"Whatdo you happen to know?"
The question came almost in a whisper; but Garth, who had all a woman's weakness for other people's affairs, was too intent upon his ill-gotten scrap of gossip to observe his companion's slight change of manner.
"Why, that it's simply a case ofcherchez la femme, as usual," he answered, lightly. "I believe it's a fact that he went so far as to marry one of these women he affects to despise, when he was on leave five years ago."
Quita started, and bit her lips. "What reason can you have for believing anything . . . so improbable?"
"My dear lady, marriage is never improbable. You women have a knack of tripping up the most unlikely subjects! In this case, I had the details from an old friend of mine. She happened to be stopping at the same hotel as Lenox at Zermatt. Then one morning he disappeared; and, as she had taken rather a fancy to him, she tried to find out what had become of him. After a good deal of questioning, it transpired that he had been seen coming out of the English church with a lady; and further inquiry revealed the fact that an officer named Lenox had been quietly married there the day before. Naturally, she scented a romance, and was keen to know more. But he seemed to have vanished outright. Then ten days later she met him on the station platform, travelling alone, and obviously down on his luck. He told her he was off to join his battery in India: nothing more. Problem: What, in the name of mystery, had he done with the lady?"
At that Quita rose abruptly, her cheeks on fire, her whole frame tense with suppressed agitation.
"Oh, stop—stop. I can't stand any more!" she protested, in a smothered voice; and at once Garth was beside her, contrite and amazed.
"Miss Maurice—what have I said to upset you so?"
"It's not your fault. You couldn't help it," she answered, without looking up. "But—you were telling me my own story!"
"Good Lord! Then—it wasyou?"
"Don't say any more, please. I never meant to speak; only—one had to stop you—somehow. It's time we went back to the others now. I am sure you must be wanting your breakfast. And remember"—she faced him at last, with brave deliberation—"I trust you, as a gentleman, never to speak of this again—to me, or to any one else."
And Garth bowed his head, and followed her, in a bewildered silence.
"He that getteth a wife beginneth a possession; a help like unto himself, and a pillar of rest."—Ecclesiasticus.
Eldred Lenox stood alone in the Desmonds' diminutive drawing-room, patiently impatient for companionship more responsive than that of cane chairs and tables, pictures and a piano. Yet the room itself, with its atmosphere of peace and refinement, gave him a foretaste of the restfuluess that made Honor Desmond's companionship a growing necessity to this man, whose heart and brain were in a state of civil war. It was filled with afternoon sunlight, with the faint, clean fragrance of violets, wild roses, and maiden-hair fern, and its emptiness was informed and pervaded by countless suggestions of a woman's presence; a woman versed in that finest of all fine arts, the beautifying of daily life.
In this era of hotels, clubs, and motors, of days spent in sowing hurry and reaping shattered nerves, the type is growing rarer, and it will be an ill day for England's husbands and sons, nay, for her supremacy among nations, if it should ever become extinct. For it is no over-statement, but simple fact, that the women who follow, soon or late, in the track of her victorious arms, women of Honor Desmond's calibre—home-loving, home-making, skilled in the lore of heart and spirit—have done fully as much to establish, strengthen, and settle her scattered Empire as shot, or steel, or the doubtful machinations of diplomacy.
A half-acknowledged conviction of this truth was undermining Eldred's skin-deep cynicism; and it did not tend to alleviate his renewed sense of loss. A week had passed since his astounding experience on the Kajiar Road; a week in which the hours of sleep had been a more negligible quantity than usual; in which he had fought squarely against an imperative need to escape from the haunting consciousness of his wife's presence, and had been squarely beaten. His present need to see and speak with Honor Desmond was an ultimate confession of that defeat.
On reaching the bungalow, he was told that the Mem-sahib bad gone out with the Chota Sahib, but would doubtless be back before long, and had decided to await her return. During his ride with her that morning, he had not been able to bring himself to speak. But this time he intended to go through with the ordeal. He felt too restless to sit down; and she did not keep him waiting long.
Footsteps and low voices, punctuated with silver laughter, heralded her coming, and a few minutes later she entered, carrying a pocket edition of herself, who clung about her neck, and pressed a cool rose-petal cheek against her own.
Lenox had described her as a magnificent woman. A Scot may generally be trusted not to overstate his facts; and certainly Honor Desmond, in those radiant early days of marriage, deserved no less an adjective. Height, and a buoyant stateliness of bearing, lent a regal quality to her beauty. Her grey-blue eyes under very level brows were the eyes of a woman dwelling in the heart of life, not merely in its outskirts and pleasure-grounds.
She expressed no surprise at seeing Lenox again so soon. Come when he might, his presence was accepted as a matter of course; the surest way to put a man at his ease.
"So sorry I kept you waiting," she said simply, and the hand she gave him was at once soft and strong,—an epitome of the woman. "Theo was lunching out with Colonel Mayhew—they are both very full of that book of his on the Hill Tribes—and I have been devoting most of my time to this very exacting person!"
Lenox caressed the child's red-gold hair with a cautious reverent hand, and a contraction of envy at his heart.
"What a beautiful little chap he is! Begins to look an out-and-outMeredith already. Desmond must be tremendously proud of him."
She smiled and pressed him closer.
"He is; and I'm nearly as bad! One son, three fools, you know! Poor little Paul, it's not fair to call him names when he can't hit back."
"You called him after Wyndham?"
"Yes. They're like brothers, those two. Now let me get rid of him, and we'll have a quiet talk till Theo comes back. Sit down and smoke, please."
He complied; and she, returning, established herself beside her work-table, and took up an elaborate bit of smocking without question or remark.
His trouble and stress of mind were very evident to her; but she was one of those rare women who are chary of questions—who, for all their desire to help and serve, never approach too near, or say the word too much, which was, perhaps, one reason why men found her so restful, and instinctively talked to her about themselves.
But Lenox was long in beginning.
By imperceptible degrees, this unsought gift of friendship was melting the morsel of ice at his heart; was reviving in him, against his will, that keen appreciation of a cultivated woman's sympathy and companionship, which, among finely tempered men, is as potent a factor in the shaping of destinies as passion, or hot-headed emotion.
For a while he permitted himself the bitter-sweet satisfaction of merely watching her where she sat, in a shaft of sunlight, that struck golden gleams through the burnished abundance of her hair; of noting the grace and dignity of her pose, and speculating as to the nature of her thoughts. His wife's reckless impulse on that fateful September day was bringing him now within measurable distance of a very human danger. The deep, passionate heart of him, crushed and stifled during the past five years, was in no safe state to be brought into contact with a lighted match. But of this danger he was, by his very nature, sublimely unaware.
Finally he took the short pipe from his lips and spoke.
"Of course you know I have something definite to say, or I should hardly have the cheek to inflict myself on you twice in the twenty-four hours."
She looked up and smiled. "You're evidently in one of your bad moods, or you would not vex me by putting it like that."
"Sorry to vex you, but Iamin a bad mood; have been for the last week; so you must make allowances, I can't sleep, and a restless devil inside me won't let me settle to steady work. Nerves, I suppose. I don't look a likely subject, do I? But they give me a deal of trouble at times; and I came to say that I must go back on my arrangement with you and Desmond and clear out of this before the end of the week."
"Oh, but surely that would be a great pity; a great disappointment to us both. Is it really a case of 'must'?"
"I think so."
"And you have only been here a fortnight! Isn't it rather early days to give in?"
"Very early days—as the case must appear to you; and the evil of it is that I have no power to make things clearer. Think me an overwrought fool; a broken-backed corn-stalk, if you choose. It will hurt, of course; but it can't be helped."
He spoke with undisguised bitterness, and, laying down her work, she looked at him straightly, a great compassion in her eyes.
"You misunderstand the fundamentals of friendship if you can talk like that," she said gently. "It is rooted in reticence in respect for another's individuality. Whatever you choose to do, you may be very sure that I shall neither doubt your good reasons, nor seek to know them. That is my idea of what it means to be a friend."
"I stand rebuked," he answered gravely, "and I'm not likely to forget what you have said."
"At the same time," she added in a lighter tone, "one is only human! And I can't let you leave Dalhousie without a word of protest—even if it is useless." She hesitated. "May I speak straight?"
"As straight as you please. I should prefer it."
"Well, I think that if it is a case of nerves, or—worry of any kind, nothing can be worse for you than your own society. Such amusement as we can offer you up here may be frivolous and insignificant enough, but, believe me, it is far better for you just now than the most sublime snowfields and glaciers at the back of Beyond! You know you are free to come here whenever you please. Theo enjoys having you; so do I. And I'm sure it's good for you to fraternise with something more human than a mountain!"
He smiled, but did not answer at once; and suddenly she lifted her head, her face all animation.
"Look here, I have a notion—an inspired notion. Why should not you two get Colonel Mayhew's permission to go off on a week's shooting trip beyond Chumba. Ten days if you like. Theo would love it. You would come back to your writing like a giant refreshed. There now, isn't that a plan worth thinking over?"
Moved beyond his wont, Lenox leaned impulsively towards her.
"My dear Mrs Desmond, your kindness overpowers me. But I really can't see that you and your husband are called upon to put yourselves out like that, on my behalf. You are up here to enjoy your short holiday together; and you are rare good companions, as I know. What right have I to monopolise him for ten days, and leave you alone? Why should you care, after all, if I do go and knock myself to bits in the interior?"
"That question is unworthy of you, and doesn't deserve an answer," she said on a note of gentle reproof. "Mine does. Will you do what I ask?"
"Since you ask it of me—yes. Always supposing that it suits Desmond to go."
"Of course it will suit him. We will settle it when he comes in."
He leaned back in his chair, and sighed.
"You're amazingly good to me, Mrs Desmond; and I'm an ungrateful brute. Will you overlook that, and play me something warranted to soothe jarred nerves, till your husband comes?"
"Of course I will, gladly. Only you mustn't expect real music from a hireling!"
She chose one of Beethoven's most tenderly gracious Allegrettos, and the soul of the hireling responded creditably to the magic of her touch.
But before she had played many bars a clatter of hoofs announced Desmond's return. He flung himself from the saddle, cleared the verandah steps at a bound, and entered the room:—a man of magnetic vitality, with a temperament like a clear flame; a typical officer of that isolated force to whose gallantry and unwearied devotion to duty India owes more than she is apt to acknowledge, or, possibly, to perceive. He nodded a welcome to Lenox, signed to him to remain seated, and going straight to the piano laid a hand on his wife's shoulder.
"Don't stop. Finish your piece," he said, as she smiled up at him; and he did not remove his hand, but remained standing there, in simple satisfaction at having got back to her.
Now and again, at very rare intervals, Nature seems to select a favoured man and woman to uphold the torch of the ideal, lest it be reduced to sparks and smoke, to refute the cynic and the pessimist; to hearten a world nauseated and discouraged by the eternal tragi-comedy of marriage, with the spectacle of a human relationship of unsullied beauty: a relationship that passes, by imperceptible degrees, from the first antiphony of passionate hearts to a deep deliberate bliss, "durable from the daily dust of life."
Desmond's first marriage had brought him no such revelation of the hidden mysteries of union; no companionship worthy of the name; and the happiness that comes late, on the heels of conflict and pain, takes a more conscious grip on the heart, is more firmly held to, more jealously guarded, than that which meets us on the threshold, and is accepted as part of the natural order of things. Blest with vivacity, courage, and an ardent zest for Frontier soldiering, Desmond had rarely found life other than very good; but he had only proven the full measure of its goodness since his marriage with Honor Meredith. And the mouths brought increasing reliance on her comradeship; increasing insight into the depths and delicacies of a passion that was almost genius. His need of her was deeper now than it had been two years ago, when he had believed himself at the summit of desire. For a great love is like a great mountain-range. Each height scaled reveals farther heights beyond. Attainment is no part of our programme here; and there may well be truth in the axiom that "to travel hopefully is better than to arrive."
But Eldred Lenox, tangled in the twofold cords of temperament and circumstance, was denied even the privilege of travelling hopefully, and at moments like the present he suffered the additional torment of looking into happiness through another man's eyes. It was futile to reiterate the obvious drawbacks of marriage for an ambitious man, standing on the threshold of a coveted career. These distracting Desmonds cheerfully and unconsciously refuted them all! But he accepted the thorns of the situation as toll paid for the privilege of an intimacy he would on no account have forgone, and endured them with the grim stoicism that was his.
The Allegretto ended, Honour swung round on her stool, and set forth her Chumba project without reference to Eldred's threatened departure. Desmond laughingly professed himself ready to obey orders, within reasonable limits; and it was finally decided that he should write at once to Colonel Mayhew, Resident of the native State in which Dalhousie's hills are situated, and whose capital lies in a cup-shaped valley eighteen miles below the English station.
Thereupon Lenox rose to take his leave; but on the threshold he paused, as though an afterthought had occurred to him.
"Next time you happen to go out calling, Mrs Desmond," he said, with studied carelessness, "you might like to look up a Miss Maurice and her brother. They've been here all the winter; and are living on the top of Bakrotas. I met them—some years ago, in Switzerland. Artists, out here for painting purposes—and rather out of the common run. You might find them interesting."
"They sound as if they would be! Thank you for letting me know of their existence. I'll amuse myself by exploiting them while you two are away."
But Lenox had no wish to expatiate upon the subject, and with a muttered disclaimer he was gone.