The lady guests at Peliti’s—Mrs. Jack Owen and the rest—were giving a tea in the hotel pavilion. They had the band, the wife of the Commander-in-Chief, the governess from Viceregal Lodge and one little Viceregal girl, three A.D.C.‘s, one member of council, and the Archdeacon. These were the main features, moving among a hundred or so of people more miscellaneous, who, like the ladies at Peliti’s, had come up out of the seething Plains to the Paradise of the summer capital. The Pavilion overhung the Mall; looking down one could see the coming and going of leisurely Government peons in scarlet and gold, Cashmiri vendors of great bales of embroideries and skins, big-turbaned Pahari horse-dealers, chaffering in groups, and here and there a mounted Secretary-sahib trotting to the Club. Beyond, the hills dipped blue and bluer to the plains, and against them hung a single waving yellow laburnum, a note of imagination. Madeline Anderson was looking at it when Mrs. Mickie and Mrs. Gammidge came up with an affectionate observation upon the cut of her skirt, after which Mrs. Mickie harked back to what they had been talking about before.
‘She’s straight enough now, I suppose,’ this lady said.
‘She goes down. But she gives people a good deal of latitude for speculation.’
‘Who is this?’ asked Madeline. ‘I ask for information, to keep out of her way. I find I am developing the most shocking curiosity. I must be in a position to check it.’
The ladies exchanged hardly perceptible glances. Then Mrs. Gammidge said, ‘Mrs. Innes,’ and looked as if, for the moment, at any rate, she would withhold further judgment.
‘But you mustn’t avoid the poor lady,’ put in Mrs. Mickie, ‘simply because of her past. It wouldn’t be fair. Besides—’
‘Her past?’ Madeline made one little effort to look indifferent, and then let the question leap up in her.
‘My dear,’ said Mrs. Gammidge, with brief impatience, ‘he married her in Cairo, and she was—dancing there. Case of chivalry, I believe, though there are different versions. Awful row in the regiment—he had to take a year’s leave. Then he succeeded to the command, and the Twenty-third were ordered out here. She came with him to Lucknow—and made slaves of every one of them. They’ll swear to you now that she was staying at Shepheard’s with an invalid mother when he met her. And now she’s accepted like everybody else; and that’s all there is about it.’
‘There’s nothing in that,’ said Madeline, determinedly, ‘to prove that she wasn’t—respectable.’
‘N—no. Of course not,’ and again the eye of Mrs. Gammidge met that of Mrs. Mickie.
‘Though, you see love,’ added the latter lady, ‘it would have been nicer for his people—they’ve never spoken to him since—if she had been making her living otherwise in Cairo.’
‘As a barmaid, for instance,’ said Madeline, sarcastically.
‘As a barmaid, for instance,’ repeated Mrs. Gammidge, calmly.
‘But Simla isn’t related to him—Simla doesn’t care!’ Mrs. Mickie exclaimed. ‘Everybody will be as polite as possible when she turns up. You’ll see. You knew, didn’t you, that she was coming out in the Caledonia?’
‘No,’ said Madeline. She looked carefully where she was going to put her coffee-cup, and then she glanced out again at the laburnum hanging over the plains. ‘I—I am glad to hear it. These separations you take so lightly out here are miserable, tragic.’
The other ladies did not exchange glances this time. Miss Anderson’s change of tone was too marked for comment which she might have detected.
‘Colonel Innes got the telegram this morning. She wired from Brindisi,’ Mrs. Gammidge said.
‘Does he seem pleased?’ asked Mrs. Mickie, demurely.
‘He said he was afraid she would find it very hot coming up here from Bombay. And, of course, he is worried about a house. When a man has been living for months at the Club—’
‘Of course, poor fellow! I do love that dear old Colonel Innes, though I can’t say I know him a bit. He won’t take the trouble to be nice to me, but I am perfectly certain he must be the dearest old thing inside of him. Worth any dozen of these little bow-wows that run round after rickshaws,’ said Mrs. Mickie, with candour.
‘I think he’s a ridiculous old glacier,’ Mrs. Gammidge remarked, and Mrs. Mickie looked at Madeline and said, ‘Slap her!’
‘What for?’ asked Miss Anderson, with composure. ‘I dare say he is—occasionally. It isn’t a bad thing to be, I should think, in Indian temperatures.’
‘I guess you got it that time, dear lady,’ said Mrs. Mickie to Mrs. Gammidge, as Madeline slipped toward the door.
‘Meant to be cross, did she? How silly of her! If she gives her little heart away like that often, people will begin to make remarks.’
‘The worst of that girl is,’ Mrs. Mickie continued, ‘that you never can depend upon her. For days together she’ll be just as giddy and jolly as anybody and then suddenly she’ll give you a nasty superior bit of ice down the back of your neck like that. I’ve got her coming to tea tomorrow afternoon,’ Mrs. Mickie added, with sudden gloom, ‘and little Lord Billy and all that set are coming. They’ll throw buns at each other—I know they will. What, in heaven’s name, made me ask her?’
‘Oh, she’ll have recovered by then. You must make allowance for the shock we gave her, poor dear. Consider how you would feel if Lady Worsley suddenly appeared upon the scene, and demanded devotion from Sir Frank.’
‘She wouldn’t get it,’ Mrs. Mickie dimpled candidly. ‘Frank always loses his heart and his conscience at the same time. But you don’t suppose there’s anything serious in this affair? Pure pretty platonics, I should call it.’
Mrs. Gammidge lifted her eyebrows. ‘I dare say that is what they imagine it. Well, they’re never in the same room for two minutes without being aware of it, and their absorption when they get in a corner—I saw her keep the Viceroy waiting, the other night after dinner, while Colonel Innes finished a sentence. And then she was annoyed at the interruption. Here’s Kitty Vesey, lookin’ SUCH a dog! Hello, Kitty! where did you get that hat, where did you get that tile? But that wasn’t the colour of your hair last week, Kitty!’
‘Don’t feel any kind of a dog’—Mrs. Vesey’s pout, though becoming, was genuine. ‘I’m in a perfectly furious rage, my dears, and I’m coming home to cry, just as soon as I’ve had an ice. What do you think—they won’t let me have Val for Captain Wynne’s part in ‘The Outcast Pearl’—they say he’s been tried before, and he’s a stick. Did you ever hear of such brutes? They want me to act with Major Dalton, and he’s MUCH too old for the part.’
‘Kitten,’ said Mrs. Mickie, with conviction, ‘Valentine Drake on the stage would be fatal to your affection for him.’
‘I don’t care, I won’t act with anybody else—I’ll throw up the part. Haven’t I got to make love to the man? How am I to play up to such an unkissable-looking animal as Major Dalton? I shall CERTAINLY throw up the part.’
‘Don’t do anything rash, Kitty. If you do, they’ll probably offer it to me, and I warn you I won’t give it back to you.’
‘Oh, refuse it, like a dear! I am dying to put them in a hole. It’s jealousy, that’s what it is. Goodbye, Mrs. Jack, I’ve had a lovely time. Val and I have been explaining our affection to the Archdeacon, and he says it’s perfectly innocent. We’re going to get him to put it on paper to produce when Jimmy sues for a divorce, aren’t we, Val?’
‘You’re not going?’ said Mrs. Jack Owen.
‘Oh, yes, I must. But I’ve enjoyed myself awfully, and so has everybody I’ve been talking to. I say, Mickie, dear—about tomorrow afternoon—I suppose I may bring Val?’
‘Oh, dear, yes,’ Mrs. Mickie replied. ‘But you must let me hold his hand.’
‘I don’t know which of you is the most ridiculous,’ Mrs. Owen remarked; ‘I shall write to both your husbands this very night,’ but as the group shifted and left her alone with Mrs. Gammidge, she said she didn’t know whether Mrs. Vesey would be quite so chirpy three weeks hence. ‘When Mrs. Innes comes out,’ she added in explanation. ‘Oh, yes, Valentine Drake is quite her property. My own idea is that Kitty won’t be in it.’
Where the road past Peliti’s dips to the Mall Madeline met Horace Innes. When she appeared in her rickshaw he dismounted, and gave the reins to his syce. She saw in his eyes the look of a person who has been all day lapsing into meditation and rousing himself from it. ‘You are very late,’ she said as he came up.
‘Oh, I’m not going; at least, you are just coming away, aren’t you? I think it is too late. I’ll turn back with you.’
‘Do,’ she said, and looked at his capable, sensitive hand as he laid it on the side of her little carriage. Miss Anderson had not the accomplishment of palm-reading, but she took general manual impressions. She had observed Colonel Innes’s hand before, but it had never offered itself so intimately to her inspection. That, perhaps, was why the conviction seemed new to her, as she thought ‘He is admirable—and it is all there.’
When they got to the level Mall he kept his hold, which was a perfectly natural and proper thing for him to do, walking alongside; but she still looked at it.
‘I have heard your good news,’ she said, smiling congratulation at him.
‘My good news? Oh, about my wife, of course. Yes, she ought to be here by the end of the month. I thought of writing to tell you when the telegram came, and then I—didn’t. The files drove it out of my head, I fancy.’
‘Heavy day?’
‘Yes,’ he said, absently. They went along together in an intimacy of silence, and Madeline was quite aware of the effort with which she said:
‘I shall look forward to meeting Mrs. Innes.’
It was plain that his smile was perfunctory, but he put it on with creditable alacrity.
‘She will be delighted. My wife is a clever woman,’ he went on, ‘very bright and attractive. She keeps people well amused.’
‘She must be a great success in India, then.’
‘I think she is liked. She has a tremendous fund of humour and spirits. A fellow feels terribly dull beside her sometimes.’
Madeline cast a quick glance at him, but he was only occupied to find other matters with which he might commend his wife.
‘She is very fond of animals,’ he said, ‘and she sings and plays well—really extremely well.’
‘That must be charming,’ murmured Madeline, privately iterating, ‘He doesn’t mean to damn her—he doesn’t mean to damn her.’ ‘Have you a photograph of her?’
‘Quantities of them,’ he said, with simplicity.
‘You have never shown me one. But how could you?’ she added in haste; ‘a photograph is always about the size of a door nowadays. It is simply impossible to keep one’s friends and relations in a pocketbook as one used to do.’
They might have stopped there, but some demon of persistence drove Madeline on. She besought help from her imagination; she was not for the moment honest. It was an impulse—an equivocal impulse—born doubtless of the equivocal situation, and it ended badly.
‘She will bring something of the spring out to you,’ said Madeline—‘the spring in England. How many years is it since you have seen it? There will be a breath of the cowslips about her, and in her eyes the soft wet of the English sky. Oh, you will be very glad to see her.’ The girl was well aware of her insincerity, but only dimly of her cruelty. She was drawn on by something stronger than her sense of honesty and humanity, a determination to see, to know, that swept these things away.
Innes’s hand tightened on the rickshaw, and he made at first no answer. Then he said:
‘She has been staying in town, you know.’
There was just a quiver of Madeline’s eyelid; it said nothing of the natural rapacity behind. This man’s testimony was coming out in throes, and yet—it must be said—again she probed.
‘Then she will put you in touch again,’ she cried; ‘you will remember when you see her all the vigour of great issues and the fascination of great personalities. For a little while, anyway, after she comes, you will be in a world—far away from here—where people talk and think and live.’
He looked at her in wonder, not understanding, as indeed how could he?
‘Why,’ he said, ‘you speak of what YOU have done’; and before the truth of this she cast down her eyes and turned a hot, deep red, and had nothing to say.
‘No,’ he said, ‘my wife is not like that.’
He walked along in absorption, from which he roused himself with resentment in his voice.
‘I can not leave such a fabric of illusion in your mind. It irritates me that it should be there—about anybody belonging to me. My wife is not in the least what you imagine her. She has her virtues, but she is—like the rest. I can not hope that you will take to her, and she won’t like you either—we never care about the same people. And we shall see nothing of you—nothing. I can hardly believe that I am saying this of my own wife, but—I wish that she had stayed in England.’
‘Mrs. Mickie!’ cried Madeline to a passing rickshaw, ‘what are you rushing on like that for? Just go quietly and peaceably along with us, please, and tell us what Mrs. Vesey decided to do about her part in ‘The Outcast Pearl’. I’m dining out tonight—I must know.’ And Mrs. Mickie was kind enough to accompany them all the rest of the way.
Miss Anderson dined out, and preferred to suppose that she had no time to think until she was on her way home along the empty road round Jakko at eleven o’clock that night. Then it pleased her to get out of her rickshaw and walk. There was an opulent moon, the vast hills curving down to the plains were all grey and silvery, and the deodars overhead fretted the road with dramatic shadows. About her hung the great stillness in a mighty loneliness in which little Simla is set, and it freed her from what had happened, so that she could look at it and cry out. She actually did speak, pausing in the little pavilion on the road where the nursemaids gather in the daytime, but very low, so that her words fell round her even in that silence, and hardly a deodar was aware. ‘I will not go now,’ she said. ‘I will stay and realize that he is another woman’s husband. That should cure me if anything will—to see him surrounded by the commonplaces of married life, that kind of married life. I will stay till she comes and a fortnight after. Besides, I want to see her—I want to see how far she comes short.’ She was silent for a moment, and the moonlight played upon her smile of quiet triumph. ‘He cares too,’ she said; ‘he cares too, but he doesn’t know it, and I promise you one thing, Madeline Anderson, you won’t help him to find out. And in five weeks I will go away and leave my love where I found it—on a mountaintop in the middle of Asia!’
Madeline did her best to make certain changes delicately, imperceptibly, so that Innes would not, above all things, be perplexed into seeking for their reason. The walks and rides came to a vague conclusion, and Miss Anderson no longer kept the Viceroy or anybody else waiting, while Innes finished what he had to say to her in public, since his opportunities for talking to her seemed to become gradually more and more like everybody else’s. So long as she had been mistress of herself she was indifferent to the very tolerant and good-natured gossip of the hill capital; but as soon as she found her citadel undermined, the lightest kind of comment became a contingency unbearable. In arranging to make it impossible, she was really over-considerate and over-careful. Her soldier never thought of analyzing his bad luck or searching for motive in it. To him the combinations of circumstances that seemed always to deprive him of former pleasures were simply among the things that might happen. Grieving, she left him under that impression for the sake of its expediency, and tried to make it by being more than ever agreeable on the occasions when he came and demanded a cup of tea, and would not be denied. After all, she consoled herself, no situation was improved by being turned too suddenly upside down.
She did not wholly withdraw his privilege of taking counsel with her, and he continued to go away freshened and calmed, leaving her to toss little sad reflections into the fire, and tremulously wonder whether the jewel of her love had flashed ever so little behind the eyes. They both saw it a conspicuous thing that as those three weeks went on, neither he nor she alluded even remotely to Mrs. Innes, but the fact remained, and they allowed it to remain.
Nevertheless, Madeline knew precisely when that lady was expected, and as she sauntered in the bazaar one morning, and heard Innes’s steps and voice behind her, her mind became one acute surmise as to whether he could possibly postpone the announcement any longer. But he immediately made it plain that this was his business in stopping to speak to her. ‘Good morning,’ he said, and then, ‘My wife comes tomorrow.’ He had not told her a bit of personal news, he had made her an official communication, as briefly as it could be done, and he would have raised his hat and gone on without more words if Madeline had not thwarted him. ‘What a stupidity for him to be haunted by afterward!’ was the essence of the thought that visited her; and she put out a detaining hand.
‘Really! By the Bombay mail, I suppose—no, an hour or so later; private tongas are always as much as that behind the mail.’
‘About eleven, I fancy. You—you are not inclined for a canter round Summer Hill before breakfast?’
‘I am terrified of Summer Hill. The Turk always misbehaves there. Yesterday he got one leg well over the khud—I WAS thankful he had four. Tell me, are you ready for Mrs. Innes—everything in the house? Is there anything I can do?
‘Oh, thanks very much! I don’t think so. The house isn’t ready, as a matter of fact, but two or three people have offered to put us up for a day or so until it is. I’ve left it open till my wife comes, as I dare say she has already arranged to go to somebody. What are you buying? Country tobacco, upon my word! For your men? That’s subversive of all discipline!’
The lines on his face relaxed; he looked at her with fond recognition of another delightful thing in her.
‘You give sugar-cane to your horses,’ she declared; ‘why shouldn’t I give tobacco to mine? Goodbye; I hope Mrs. Innes will like “Two Gables”. There are roses waiting for her in the garden, at all events.’
‘Are there?’ he said. ‘I didn’t notice. Goodbye, then.’
He went on to his office thinking of the roses, and that they were in his garden, and that Madeline had seen them there. He thought that if they were good roses—in fact, any kind of roses—they should be taken care of, and he asked a Deputy Assistant Inspector-General of Ordnance whether he knew of a gardener that was worth anything.
‘Most of them are mere coolies,’ said Colonel Innes, ‘and I’ve got some roses in this little place I’ve taken that I want to look after.’
Next day Madeline took Brookes, and ‘The Amazing Marriage’, and a lunch-basket, and went out to Mashobra, where the deodars shadow hardly any scandal at all, and the Snows come, with perceptible confidence, a little nearer.
‘They almost step,’ she said to Brookes, looking at them, ‘out of the realm of the imagination.’
Brookes said that they did indeed, and hoped that she hadn’t by any chance forgotten the mustard.
‘The wind is keen off the glaciers over there—anybody would think of a condiment,’ Miss Anderson remarked in deprecation, and to this Brookes made no response. It was a liberty she often felt compelled to take.
The Snows appealed to Madeline even more than did Carintha, Countess of Fleetwood, to whose fortunes she gave long pauses while she looked across their summits at renunciation, and fancied her spirit made strong and equal to its task. She was glad of their sanctuary; she did not know where she should find such another. Perhaps the spectacle was more than ever sublime in its alternative to the one she had come away to postpone the sight of; at all events it drove the reunion of the Inneses from her mind several times for five minutes together, during which she thought of Horace by himself, and went over, by way of preparation for her departure, all that had come and gone between them. There had been luminous moments, especially as they irradiated him, and she dwelt on these. There was no reason why she should not preserve in London or in New York a careful memory of them.
So the lights were twinkling all up and down and round about Simla when she cantered back to it and it was late when she started for the Worsleys, where she was dining. One little lighted house looked much like another perched on the mountainside, and the wooden board painted ‘Branksome Hall, Maj.-Gen. T.P. Worsley, R.E.,’ nailed to the most conspicuous tree from the main road, was invisible in the darkness. Madeline arrived in consequence at the wrong dinner-party, and was acclaimed and redirected with much gaiety, which gave her a further agreeable impression of the insouciance of Simla, but made her later still at the Worsleys. So that half the people were already seated when she at last appeared, and her hostess had just time to cry, ‘My dear, we thought the langurs must have eaten you! Captain Gordon, you are not abandoned after all. You know Miss Anderson?’ when she found herself before her soup.
Captain Gordon heard her account of herself with complacence, and declared, wiping his moustache, that a similar experience had befallen him only a fortnight before.
‘Did you ever hear the story of that absent-minded chap, Sir James Jackson, who went to the RIGHT dinner-party by mistake?’ he asked, ‘and apologized like mad, by Jove! and insisted he couldn’t stay. The people nearly had to tie him down in his—’ Captain Gordon stopped, arrested by his companion’s sudden and complete inattention.
‘I see a lady,’ interrupted Madeline, with odd distinctness, ‘curiously like somebody I have known before.’ Her eyes convinced themselves, and then refused to be convinced of the inconceivable fact that they were resting on Violet Prendergast. It was at first too amazing, too amazing only. Then an old forgotten feeling rose in her bosom; the hand on the stem of her wine-glass grew tense. The sensation fell away; she remembered her emancipation, the years arose and reassured her during which Violet Prendergast, living or dead, had been to her of absolutely no importance. Yet there was a little aroused tremour in her voice as she went on, ‘She is on the General’s right—he must have taken her in. Can you see from where you are sitting?’
‘These narrow oval tables are a nuisance that way, aren’t they? You don’t know who you’re dining with till the end of the function. Oh! I see—that’s Mrs. Innes, just out, and fresh as paint, isn’t she? The Colonel’—Captain Gordon craned his head again—‘is sitting fourth from me on this side.’
‘Mrs. Innes! Really!’ said Madeline. ‘Then—then of course I must be mistaken.’
She removed her eyes almost stealthily from the other woman’s face and fixed them on the pattern of the table-cloth. Her brain guided her clearly through the tumult of her perception, and no emotion could be observed in the smiling attention which she gave to Captain Gordon’s account of the afternoon’s tandem racing; but there was a furious beating in her breast, and she thought she could never draw a breath long enough to control it. It helped her that there was food to swallow, wine to drink, and Captain Gordon to listen to; and under cover of these things she gradually, consciously, prepared herself for the shock of encounter which should be conclusive. Presently she leaned a little forward and let her glance, in which no outsider could see the steady recognition, rest upon the lady on the General’s right, until that person’s agreeable blue eyes wandered down the table and met it. Perhaps Madeline’s own eyelids fluttered a little as she saw the sudden stricture in the face that received her message, and the grimace with which it uttered, pallid with apprehension, its response to a pleasantry of General Worsley’s. She was not consummate in her self-control, but she was able at all events to send the glance travelling prettily on with a casual smile for an intervening friend, and bring it back to her dinner-roll without mischief. It did not adventure again; she knew, and she set herself to hold her knowledge, to look at it and understand it, while the mechanical part of her made up its mind about the entrees, and sympathized with Captain Gordon on his hard luck in having three ponies laid up at once. She did not look again, although she felt the watching of the other woman, and was quite aware of the moment at which Mrs. Innes allowed herself the reprieve of believing that at the Worsley’s dinner-party at least there would be no scandal. The belief had its reflex action, doing something to calm her. How could there be—scandal—she asked herself, and dismissed with relief the denunciations which crowded vague but insistent in her brain. Even then she had not grasped the salient points of the situation; she was too much occupied with its irony as it affected her personally; her impressions circled steadily round the word ‘twice’ and the unimaginable coincidence. Her resentment filled her, and her indignation was like a clear flame behind her smiling face. Robbed twice, once in New York and—oh! preposterous—the second time in Simla! Robbed of the same things by the same hand! She perceived in the shock of it only a monstrous fatality, a ludicrously wicked chance. This may have been due to the necessity of listening to Captain Gordon.
At all events it was only as she passed Colonel Innes on her way to the drawing-room and saw ahead of her the very modish receding back of Mrs. Innes that she realized other things—crime and freedom.
It was the reversion of power; it brought her a great exultation. She sat down under it in a corner, hoping to be left alone, with a white face and shining eyes. Power and opportunity and purpose—righteous purpose!
The circumstances had come to her in a flash; she brought them up again steadily and scrutinized them. The case was absolutely clear. Frank Prendergast had been dead just seven months. Colonel Innes imagined himself married four years. Violet Prendergast was a bigamist, and Horace Innes had no wife.
That was the marvellous transcendent fact; that was what lifted her and carried her on great pulsing waves that rolled beyond the walls of the little fripperied drawing-room and its collection of low-necked women, out into her life, which had not these boundaries. She lived again in a possible world. There was no stone wall between herself and joy.
The old Mussulman butler who offered her coffee looked at her with aroused curiosity—here was certainly a memsahib under the favour of God—and as she stirred it, the shadow that Violet Prendergast had thrown upon her life faded out of her mind in the light that was there. Then she looked up and met that lady’s vivid blue eyes. Mrs. Innes’s colour had not returned, but there was a recklessness in the lines of her mouth. In the way she held her chin, expressing that she had been reflecting on old scores, and anticipated the worst. Meeting this vigilance Miss Anderson experienced a slight recoil. Her happiness, she realized, had been brought to her in the hands of ugly circumstance.
‘And so melodramatic,’ she told herself. ‘It is really almost vulgar. In a story I should have no patience with it.’ But she went on stirring her coffee with a little uncontrollable smile.
A moment later she had to contemplate the circumstance that her hostess was addressing her. Mrs. Innes wished to be introduced. Mrs. Innes, incarnate, conscious sensation, was smiling at her, saying that she must know so great a friend of her husband’s. He made so few friends, and she was so grateful to anybody who was good to him. Eyes and voice tolerably in rein, aware of the situation at every point, she had a meretricious daring; and it occurred to Madeline, looking at her, that she was after all a fairly competent second-class adventuress. She would not refuse the cue. It would make so little difference.
‘On the contrary, I am tremendously indebted to Colonel Innes. He has been so very kind about ponies and jhampanies and things. Simla is full of pitfalls for a stranger, don’t you think?’ And Miss Anderson, unclosing her fan, turned her reposeful head a little in the direction of three married schoolgirls voluble on her left.
‘Not when you get to know the language. You must learn the language; it’s indispensable. But of course it depends on how long you mean to stay.’
‘I think I will learn the language,’ said Madeline.
‘But General Worsley told me you were leaving Simla in a fortnight.’
‘Oh no. My plans are very indefinite; but I shall stay much longer than that.’
‘It is Miss Anderson, isn’t it?—Miss Madeline Anderson, of New York—no, Brooklyn?’
Madeline looked at her. ‘Did not the General say so?’ she asked.
‘Yes, he did. But one looks to make quite sure.’
‘I can understand that.’
Mrs. Innes leaned forward with one elbow on her knee.
It was not a graceful attitude, but it gave the casual air to the conversation which was desirable.
‘What are you going to do?’ she said.
‘My plans are as indefinite as possible, really,’ Madeline returned. ‘I may spend the cold weather in Calcutta, or go into camp with the Dovedells—I should like that.’
‘Mrs. Innes,’ cried the nearest schoolgirl, ‘we are coming tomorrow to see all the lovely things in your boxes, may we?’
‘Do, duckies. But mind, no copying of them by durzies in the veranda. They’re all Paris things—Coulter’s—and you know he doesn’t copy well, does he? Oh, dear! here are the men—they always come too soon, don’t they? So glad to have had even a little chat, Miss Anderson. I’ll come and see you tomorrow. You know newcomers in India always make the first calls. I shall find you at home, sha’n’t I?’
‘By all means,’ Madeline said.
Mrs. Innes crossed the room, crying out that the heat was perfectly absurd for Simla, it must be cooler outside; and as Captain Valentine Drake followed her into the semi-darkness of the veranda, the three married schoolgirls looked at each other and smiled.
‘Don’t be naughty,’ said Captain Gordon, leaning over the sofa from behind. ‘They’re very dear friends, and they’ve been separated for two years.’
Madeline heard this as plainly as they did. She noted disdainfully how it all fell in.
‘How absent you are tonight!’ Horace Innes exclaimed, when Miss Anderson had asked him a trivial question for the third time.
‘Hush!’ she said. ‘Mrs. Scallepa is going to sing;’ and as Mrs. Scallepa sang she let her eyes play over him with a light in them so tender, that once catching it the felt a sudden answering throb, and looked again; but after that her eyes were on the floor.
‘We are staying here,’ he said a quarter of an hour later, as he saw her into her rickshaw; ‘and I think I must see you to your quarters. It’s very dark, and there is an ugly little slip half-way between this and the Mall.
He ran upstairs to get his coat and stick, and a white face like an apparition suddenly hung itself on the edge of Madeline’s rickshaw-hood.
‘Don’t tell him tonight,’ it said, hoarsely.
‘Are you ready, Colonel Innes? Then good night, everybody,’ cried Madeline.
She was not at all sure that she would not tell Horace Innes ‘tonight’.
‘She seems so, indeed,’ Madeline replied.
‘She is delighted with “Two Gables”. Likes it better, she says, than any other house we could have got.’
‘What a good thing!’
‘It was a record trip for the Caledonia, thirteen days from Brindisi to Bombay. Was she telling you about the voyage?’
‘No,’ said Madeline impatiently, ‘she didn’t mention it. How shall I tell the men to put down the hood, please? A rickshaw is detestable with the hood up—stifling! Thanks. I beg your pardon. The Caledonia made a good run?’
‘Thirteen days. Wonderful weather, of course, which was luck for Violet. She is an atrocious sailor.’
Madeline fancied she heard repose and reassurance in his voice. Her thought cried, ‘It is not so bad as he expected!’ We can not be surprised that she failed to see in herself the alleviation of that first evening.
‘She has brought quantities of things for the house with her,’ Innes went on, ‘as well as three dachshund puppies,’ and he laughed. ‘Wouldn’t you like one? What can we do with three—and the terrier, and Brutus?’
‘Oh, thank you, no.’
How could he laugh? How could he speak pleasantly of these intimate details of his bondage? How could he conceive that she would accept—
‘Already she has arranged four dinner-parties! It will be a relief not to have to think of that sort of thing—to be able to leave it to her.’
‘Mrs. Innes must have great energy. To drive all the way up from Kalka by noon and appear at a dinner-party at night—wonderful!’
‘Oh, great energy,’ Horace said.
‘She will take you everywhere—to all the functions. She will insist on your duty to society.’
Madeline felt that she must get him somehow back into his slough of despond. His freedom paralyzed her. And he returned with a pathetic change of tone.
‘I suppose there is no alternative. Violet is very good about being willing to go alone, or with somebody else; but I never think it quite fair on one’s wife to impose on her the necessity of going about with other men.’
‘Mrs. Worsley introduced us after dinner,’ said Madeline.
She kept disparagement out of her mind, but he could not help perceiving aloofness.
‘Yes?’
The monosyllable told her sensitive ear that while he admitted her consideration in going on with the subject, he was willing to recognize that there was no more to say, and have done with it. She gathered up her scruples and repugnances in a firm grasp. She would not let him throw his own shadow, as an effectual obstacle, between himself and liberty.
‘I am going to ask you something,’ she said; it might come naturally enough from another man with whom your friendship was as candid as it is with me; but there is an awkwardness in it from a woman. You must believe I have a good reason. Will you tell me about your first meeting with Mrs. Innes, when—when you became engaged?’
She knew she was daring a good deal; but when a man’s prison is to be brought down about his ears, one might as well begin, she thought, at the foundation.
For a moment Innes did not speak, and then his words came slowly.
I find it difficult,’ he said, ‘to answer you. How can it matter—it is impossible. I suppose you have heard some story, and it is like you to want to be in a position to negative it. Ignore it instead. She has very successfully championed herself. Believe nothing to her disadvantage that may be said about that—that time. I was pleased to marry her, and she was pleased to marry me. But for God’s sake don’t let us talk about it!’
As he spoke Madeline saw the vivid clearness of the situation grow blurred and confused. It was as if her point of view had suddenly changed and her eyes failed her. Her eager impulse had beat less and less strongly from the Worsley’s door; now it seemed to shrink away in fetters. Her eyes filled with vaguely resentful tears, which sprang, if she could have traced them, from the fact that the man she loved was loyal to his own mistake, and the formless premonition that he might continue to be. She contorted her lip to keep her emotion back, and deliberately turned away from a matter in which she was not mistress, and which contained ugly possibilities of buffeting. She would wait a little, and though consideration for Violet Prendergast had nothing to do with it, she would not tell him tonight.
‘I am sorry,’ she said; and, after a moment, ‘Did I tell you that I have changed my plans?’
‘You are not going so soon?’ she took all the comfort there was in his eagerness.
‘I am not going at all for the present. I have abandoned my intentions and my dates. I mean to drift for a little while. I have been too—too conscientious.’
‘Are you quite serious—do you mean it?’
‘Indeed I do.’
‘And in less than a fortnight you will not go out of one’s life. You will stay on—you summer day! It’s hard to believe in luck like that. I sent a poor devil of a sepoy a reprieve last week—one knows now how he must have felt about it.’
‘Does it make all that difference?’ Madeline asked, softly.
‘It makes a difference,’ he answered, controlling his words, ‘that I am glad you can not conceive, since that would mean that your life has been as barren as mine.’ He seemed to refrain from saying more, and then he added, ‘You must be careful when you plant your friendship that you mean it to stay, and blossom. It will not come easily up by the roots, and it will leave an ugly hole.’
He was helping her out of her rickshaw, and as they followed the servant who carried her wraps the few yards to the door, she left her hand lightly on his arm. It was the seal, he thought, of her unwritten bond that there should be no uprooting of the single flower he cherished; and he went back almost buoyantly because of it to the woman who had been sitting in the sackcloth and ashes of misfortune, turning over the expedients for which his step might make occasion.
By the time the monkeys began to scramble about the roof in the early creeping of the dawn among the deodars, Madeline had groped her way to a tolerably clear conception of what might happen. The impeding circumstance everywhere, it must be acknowledged, was Frederick Prendergast’s coffin. The case, had convict No. 1596 been still alive and working out his debt to society, would have been transcendentally simple, she told herself. Even a convict has a right—a prospective right—to his wife, and no honest man should be compelled to retain a criminal’s property. This was an odd reflection, perhaps, to be made by Madeline Anderson, but the situation as a whole might be described as curious. And there was no doubt about the coffin.