The veranda of which Miss Anderson’s little sitting-room claimed its section hung over the road, and it seemed to her that she heard the sound of Mrs. Innes’s arrival about ten minutes after breakfast.
On the contrary, she had spent two whole hours contemplating, with very fixed attention, first the domestic circumstances of Colonel Horace Innes and their possible development, and then, with a pang of profoundest acknowledgment, the moral qualities which he would bring to bear upon them. She was further from knowing what course she personally intended to pursue than ever, when she heard the wheels roll up underneath; and she had worked herself into a state of sufficient detachment from the whole problem to reflect upon the absurdity of a bigamist rattling forth to discuss her probable ruin in the fanciful gaiety of a rickshaw. The circumstances had its value though; it lightened all responsibility for the lady concerned. As Madeline heard her jump out and give pronounced orders for the securing of an accompanying dachshund, it did not seem to matter so particularly what became of Violet Prendergast.
Mrs. Innes’s footsteps came briskly along the veranda. Madeline noted that there was no lagging. ‘Number seven,’ she said aloud; as she passed other doors, ‘Number eight—number nine! Ah! there you are.’ The door was open. ‘I wouldn’t let them bring up my card for fear of some mistake. How do you do? Now please don’t get up—you look so comfortable with your book. What is it? Oh, yes, of course, THAT. People were talking about it a good deal when I left London, but I haven’t read it. Is it good?’
‘I like it,’ said Madeline. She half rose as Mrs. Innes entered; but as the lady did not seem to miss the ceremony of greeting, she was glad to sink back in her chair.
‘And how do you like Simla? Charming in many ways, isn’t it? A little too flippant, I always say—rather TOO much champagne and silliness. But awfully bracing.’
‘The Snows are magnificent,’ Madeline said, ‘when you can see them. And there’s a lot of good work done here.’
‘Aren’t they divine? I did nothing, absolutely nothing, my first season but paint them. And the shops—they’re not bad, are they, for the size of the place? Though today, upon my soul, there doesn’t seem to be a yard of white spotted veiling among them.’
‘That is annoying,’ said Madeline, ‘if you want spotted veiling.’
‘Isn’t it? Well’—Mrs. Innes take a deep breath—‘you DIDN’T tell him last night?’
‘N—no,’ said Madeline, with deliberation.
‘I WAS grateful. I knew I could rely upon you not to. It would have been too cruel when we have only just been reunited—dear Horace would have had to sleep in the—’
‘Pray—’
‘Well, Horace is the soul of honour. Is your ayah in there?’ Mrs. Innes nodded towards the bedroom door. ‘You can not imagine what long ears she has.’
‘I have no ayah. There is only Brookes;’ and as that excellent woman passed through the room with a towel over her arm, Madeline said, ‘You can go now, Brookes, and see about that alpaca. Take the rickshaw; it looks very threatening.’
‘Maid! You ARE a swell! There are only four genuine maids in Simla that I know of—the rest are really nurse-girls. What a comfort she must be! THE luxury of all others that I long for; but alas! army pay, you know. I did once bring a dear thing out with me from Nice—you should have seen Horace’s face.’
‘I couldn’t very well go about quite alone; it would be uncomfortable.’
‘Except that you Americans are so perfectly independent.’
‘On the contrary. If I could order about a servant the way an Englishwoman does—’
‘Say you are not going to tell him! I’ve got such a lot of other calls to make,’ exclaimed Mrs. Innes. ‘Dear Lady Bloomfield won’t understand it if I don’t call today, especially after the baby. What people in that position want with more babies I can not comprehend. Of course you haven’t noticed it, but a baby is such a shock to Simla.’
‘Don’t let me keep you,’ Madeline said, rising.
‘But you haven’t promised. Do promise, Miss Anderson. You gain nothing by telling him, except your revenge; and I should think by this time you would have forgiven me for taking Frederick away from you. He didn’t turn out so well! You can’t still bear me malice over that convict in Sing Sing.’
‘For his sake, poor fellow, I might.’
‘Coming along I said to myself, “She CAN score off me badly, but surely she doesn’t want to so much as all that.” Besides, I really only took your leavings, you know. You threw poor Fred Prendergast over.’
‘I am not prepared to discuss that,’ Madeline said, at no pains to smooth the curve out of her lip.
‘Then I thought, “Perhaps—you never can tell with people—she will think it her DUTY to make a fuss.”’
‘That is a possible point of view.’
‘I know. You think I’m an imposter on society and I ought to be exposed, and I suppose you could shut every door in Simla against me if you liked. But you are a friend of my husband’s, Miss Anderson. You would not turn his whole married life into a scandal and ruin his career?’
‘Ruin his career?’
‘Of course. Government is awfully particular. It mayn’t be his fault in the least, but no man is likely to get any big position with a cloud over his domestic affairs. Horace would resign, naturally.’
‘Or take long leave,’ Mrs. Innes added to herself, but she did not give Madeline this alternative. A line or two of nervous irritation marked themselves about her eyes, and her colour had faded. Her hat was less becoming than it had been, and she had pulled a button off her glove.
‘Besides,’ she went on quickly, ‘it isn’t as if you could do any good, you know. The harm was done once for all when I let him think he’d married me. I thought then—well, I had to take it or leave it—and every week I expected to hear of Frederick’s death. Then I meant to tell Horace myself, and have the ceremony over again. He couldn’t refuse. And all these years it’s been like living on a volcano, in the fear of meeting New York people. Out here there never are any, but in England I dye my hair, and alter my complexion.’
‘Why did you change your mind,’ Madeline asked, ‘about telling Colonel Innes?’
‘I haven’t! Why should I change my mind? For my own protection, I mean to get things put straight instantly—when the time comes.’
‘When the time comes,’ Madeline repeated; and her eyes, as she fixed them on Mrs. Innes, were suddenly so lightened with a new idea that she dropped the lids over them as she waited for the answer.
‘When poor Frederick does pass away,’ Mrs. Innes said, with an air of observing the proprieties. ‘When they put him in prison it was a matter of months, the doctors said. That was one reason why I went abroad. I couldn’t bear to stay there and see him dying by inches, poor fellow.’
‘Couldn’t you?’
‘Oh, I couldn’t. And the idea of the hard labour made me SICK. But it seems to have improved his health, and now—there is no telling! I sometimes believe he will live out his sentence. Should you think that possible in the case of a man with half a lung?’
‘I have no knowledge of pulmonary disease,’ Madeline said. She forced the words from her lips and carefully looked away, taking this second key to the situation mechanically, and for a moment groping with it.
‘What arrangement did you make to be informed about—about him?’ she asked, and instantly regretted having gone so perilously near provoking a direct question.
‘I subscribe to the “New York World”. I used to see lots of things in it—about the shock the news of my death gave him—’
A flash of hysterical amusement shot into Mrs. Innes’s eyes, and she questioned Madeline’s face to see whether it responded to her humour. Then she put her own features straight behind her handkerchief and went on.
‘And about his failing health, and then about his being so much better. But nothing now for ages.’
‘Did the “World” tell you,’ asked Miss Anderson, with sudden interest, ‘that Mr. Prendergast came into a considerable fortune before—about two years ago?’
Mrs. Innes’s face turned suddenly blank. ‘How much?’ she exclaimed.
‘About five hundred thousand dollars, I believe. Left him by a cousin. Then you didn’t know?’
‘That must have been Gordon Prendergast—the engineer!’ Mrs. Innes said, with excitement. ‘Fancy that! Leaving money to a relation in Sing Sing! Hadn’t altered his will, I suppose. Who could possibly,’ and her face fell visibly, ‘have foreseen such a thing?’
‘No one, I think,’ said Madeline, through a little edged smile. ‘On that point you will hardly be criticized.’
Mrs. Innes, with clasped hands, was sunk in thought. She raised her eyes with a conviction in them which she evidently felt to be pathetic.
‘After all,’ she said, ‘there is something in what the padres say about our reaping the reward of our misdeeds in this world—some of us, anyway. If I had stayed in New York—’
‘Yes?’ said Madeline. ‘I shall wake up presently,’ she reflected, ‘and find that I have been dreaming melodrama.’ But that was a fantastic underscoring of her experience. She knew very well she was making it.
Mrs. Innes, again wrapped in astonished contemplation, did not reply. Then she jumped to her feet with a gesture that cast fortunes back into the lap of fate.
‘One thing is certain,’ she said; ‘I can’t do anything NOW, can I?’
Madeline laid hold of silence and made armour with it. At all events, she must have time to think.
‘I decline to advise you,’ she said, and she spoke with a barely perceptive movement of her lips only. The rest of her face was stone.
‘How unkind and unforgiving you are! Must people would think the loss of a hundred thousand pounds about punishment enough for what I have done. You don’t seem to see it. But on top of that you won’t refuse to promise not to tell Horace?’
‘I will not bind myself in any way whatever.’
‘Not even when you know that the moment I hear of the—death I intend to—to—’
‘Make an honest man of him? Not even when I know that.’
‘Do you want me to go down on my knees to you?’
Madeline glanced at the flowered fabric involved and said, ‘I wouldn’t, I think.’
‘And this is to hang over me the whole season? I shall enjoy nothing—absolutely NOTHING.’ The blue eyes were suddenly eclipsed by angry tears, which the advent of a servant with cards checked as suddenly.
‘Goodbye, then, dear,’ cried Mrs. Innes, as if in response to the advancing rustle of skirts in the veranda. ‘So glad to have found you at home. Dear me, has Trilby made her way up—and I gave such particular orders! Oh, you NAUGHTY dog!’
From the complication that surged round Miss Anderson’s waking hours one point emerged, and gave her a perch for congratulation. That was the determination she had shown in refusing to let Frederick Prendergast leave her his money, or any part of it.
It has been said that he had outlived her tenderness, if not her care, and this fact, which she never found it necessary to communicate to poor Frederick himself, naturally made his desire in the matter sharply distasteful. She was even unaware of the disposition he had made of his ironical fortune, a reflection which brought her thankfulness that there was something she did not know. ‘If I had let him do it,’ she thought, ‘I should have felt compelled to tell her everything, instantly. And think of discussing it with her!’ This was quite a fortnight later, and Mrs. Innes still occupied her remarkable position only in her own mind and Madeline’s, still knowing herself the wife of 1596 and of 1596 only, and still unaware that 1596 was in his grave. Simla had gone on with its dances and dinners and gymkhanas quite as if no crucial experience were hanging over the heads of three of the people one met ‘everywhere,’ and the three people continued to be met everywhere, although only one of them was unconscious. The women tried to avoid each other without accenting it, exchanging light words only as occasion demanded, but they were not clever enough for Mrs. Gammidge and Mrs. Mickie, who went about saying that Mrs. Innes’s treatment of Madeline Anderson was as ridiculous as it was inexplicable. ‘Did you ever know her to be jealous of anybody before?’ demanded Mrs. Mickie, to which Mrs. Gammidge responded, with her customary humour, that the Colonel had never, in the memory of the oldest inhabitant, been known to give her occasion.
‘Well,’ declared Mrs. Mickie, ‘if friendships—UNSENTIMENTAL friendships—between men and women are not understood in Simla, I’d like to be told what is understood.’
Between them they gave Madeline a noble support, for which—although she did not particularly require it, and they did not venture to offer it in so many words—she was grateful. A breath of public criticism from any point of view would have blown over the toppling structure she was defending against her conscience. The siege was severe and obstinate, with an undermining conviction ever at work that in the end she would yield; in the end she would go away, at least as far as Bombay or Calcutta, and from there send to Mrs. Innes the news of her liberation. It would not be necessary, after all, or even excusable, to tell Horace. His wife would do that quickly enough—at least, she had said she would. If she didn’t—well, if she didn’t, nothing would be possible but another letter, giving HIM the simple facts, she, Madeline, carefully out of the way of his path of duty—at all events, at Calcutta or Bombay. But there was no danger that Mrs. Innes would lose the advantage of confession, of throwing herself on his generosity—and at this point Madeline usually felt her defenses against her better nature considerably strengthened, and the date of her sacrifice grow vague again.
Meanwhile, she was astonished to observe that, in spite of her threat to the contrary, Mrs. Innes appeared to be enjoying herself particularly well. Madeline had frequent occasion for private comment on the advantages of a temperament that could find satisfaction in dancing through whole programmes at the very door, so to speak, of the criminal courts; and it can not be denied that this capacity of Mrs. Innes’s went far to increase the vacillation with which Miss Anderson considered her duty towards that lady. If she had shown traces of a single hour of genuine suffering, there would have been an end to Madeline’s hesitation. But beyond an occasional watchful glance at conversations in which she might be figuring dramatically, and upon which she instantly turned her back as soon as she was perceived, Mrs. Innes gave no sign even of preoccupation. If she had bad half-hours, they occurred between the teas and tennises, the picnics, riding-parties, luncheons, and other entertainments, at which you could always count upon meeting her; and in that case they must have been short. She looked extremely well, and her admirable frocks gave an accent even to ‘Birthday’ functions at Viceregal Lodge, which were quite hopelessly general. If any one could have compelled a revelation of her mind, I think it would have transpired that her anxieties about Capt. Valentine Drake and Mrs. Vesey gave her no leisure for lesser ones. These for a few days had been keen and indignant—Captain Drake had so far forgotten himself as to ride with Mrs. Vesey twice since Mrs. Innes’s arrival—and any display of poverty of spirit was naturally impossible under the circumstances. The moment was a critical one; Captain Drake seemed inclined to place her in the category of old, unexacting friends—ladies who looked on and smiled, content to give him tea on rainy days, and call him by his Christian name, with perhaps the privilege of a tapping finger on his shoulder, and an occasional order about a rickshaw. Mrs. Violet was not an introspective person, or she might have discovered here that the most stable part of her self-respect was her EXIGENCE with Captain Drake.
She found out quickly enough, however, that she did not mean to discard it. She threw herself, therefore—her fine shoulders and arms, her pretty clothes, her hilarity, her complexion, her eyelashes, and all that appertained to her—into the critical task of making other men believe, at Captain Drake’s expense, that they were quite as fond of her as he was. Mrs. Vesey took opposite measures, and the Club laid bets on the result.
The Club was not prepossessed by Captain Drake. He said too little and he implied too much. He had magnificent shoulders, which he bent a great deal over secluded sofas, and a very languid interest in matters over which ordinary men were enthusiastic. He seemed to believe that if he smiled all the way across his face, he would damage a conventionality. His clothes were unexceptionable, and he always did the right thing, though bored by the necessity. He was good-looking in an ugly way, which gave him an air of restrained capacity for melodrama, and made women think him interesting. Somebody with a knack of disparagement said that he was too much expressed. It rather added to his unpopularity that he was a man whom women usually took with preposterous seriousness—all but Kitty Vesey, who charmed and held him by her outrageous liberties. When Mrs. Vesey chaffed him, he felt picturesque. He was also aware of inspiring entertainment for the lookers-on, with the feeling at such times that he, too, was an amused spectator. This was, of course, their public attitude. In private there was sentiment, and they talked about the tyranny of society, or delivered themselves of ideas suggested by works of fiction which everybody simply HAD to read.
For a week Mrs. Innes looked on, apparently indifferent, rather apparently not observing; and an Assistant Secretary in the Home Department began to fancy that his patience in teaching the three dachshund puppies tricks was really appreciated. He was an on-coming Assistant Secretary, with other conspicuous parts, and hitherto his time had been too valuable to spend upon ladies’ dachshunds. Mrs. Innes had selected him well. There came an evening when, at a dance at the Lieutenant-Governor’s, Mrs. Innes was so absorbed in what the Assistant Secretary was saying to her, as she passed on his arm, that she did not see Captain Drake in the corridor at all, although he had carefully broken an engagement to walk with Kitty Vesey that very afternoon, as the beginning of gradual and painless reform in her direction. His unrewarded virtue rose up and surprised him with the distinctness of its resentment; and while his expression was successfully amused, his shoulders and the back of his neck, as well as the hand on his moustache, spoke of discipline which promised to be efficient. Reflection assured him that discipline was after all deserved, and a quarter of an hour later found him wagging his tail, so to speak, over Mrs. Innes’s programme in a corner pleasantly isolated. The other chair was occupied by the Assistant Secretary. Captain Drake represented an interruption, and was obliged to take a step towards the nearest lamp to read the card. Three dances were rather ostentatiously left, and Drake initialled them all. He brought back the card with a bow, which spoke of dignity under bitter usage, together with the inflexible intention of courteous self-control, and turned away.
‘Oh, if you please, Captain Drake—let me see what you’ve done. All those? But—’
‘Isn’t it after eleven, Mrs. Innes?’ asked the Assistant Secretary, with a timid smile. He was enjoying himself, but he had a respect for vested interests, and those of Captain Drake were so well known that he felt a little like a buccaneer.
‘Dear me, so it is!’ Mrs. Innes glanced at one of her bracelets. ‘Then, Captain Drake, I’m sorry’—she carefully crossed out the three ‘V.D.‘s’—‘I promised all the dances I had left after ten to Mr. Holmcroft. Most of the others I gave away at the gymkhana—really. Why weren’t you there? That Persian tutor again! I’m afraid you are working too hard. And what did the Rani do, Mr. Holmcroft? It’s like the Arabian Nights, only with real jewels—’
‘Oh, I say, Holmcroft, this is too much luck, you know. Regular sweepstakes, by Jove!’ And Captain Drake lingered on the fringe of the situation.
‘Perhaps I have been greedy,’ said the Assistant Secretary, deprecatingly. ‘I’ll—’
‘Not in the very least! That is,’ exclaimed Mrs. Violet, pouting, ‘if I’M to be considered. We’ll sit out all but the waltzes, and you shall tell me official secrets about the Rani. She put us up once, she’s a delicious old thing. Gave us string beds to sleep on and gold plate to eat from, and swore about every other word. She had been investing in Government paper, and it had dropped three points. “Just my damn luck!” she said. Wasn’t it exquisite? Captain Drake—’
‘Mrs. Innes—’
‘I don’t want to be rude, but you’re a dreadful embarrassment. Mr. Holmcroft won’t tell you official secrets!’
‘If she would only behave!’ thought Madeline, looking on, ‘I would tell her—indeed I would—at once.’
Colonel Innes detached himself from a group of men in mess dress as she appeared with the Worsleys, and let himself drift with the tide that brought them always together.
‘You are looking tired—ill,’ she said, seriously, as they sought the unconfessed solace of each other’s eyes. ‘Last night it was the Commander-in-Chief’s, and the night before the dance at Peliti’s. And again tonight. And you are not like those of us who can rest next morning—you have always your heavy office work!’ She spoke with indignant, tender reproach, and he gave himself up to hearing it. ‘You will have to take leave and go away,’ she insisted, foolishly.
‘Leave! Good heavens, no! I wish all our fellows were as fit as I am. And—’
‘Yes?’ she said.
‘Don’t pity me, dear friend. I don’t think it’s good for me. The world really uses me very well.’
‘Then it’s all right, I suppose,’ Madeline said, with sudden depression.
‘Of course it is. You are dining with us on the eighth?’
‘I’m afraid not, I’m engaged.’
‘Engaged again? Don’t you WANT to break bread in my house, Miss Anderson?’ She was silent, and he insisted, ‘Tell me,’ he said.
She gave him instead a kind, mysterious smile.
‘I will explain to you what I feel about that some day,’ she said; ‘some day soon. I can’t accept Mrs. Innes’s invitation for the eighth, but—Brookes and I are going to take tea with the fakir’s monkeys on the top of Jakko tomorrow afternoon.’
‘Anybody else, or only Brookes?’
‘Only Brookes.’ And she thought she had abandoned coquetry!
‘Then may I come?’
‘Indeed you may.’
‘I really don’t know,’ reflected Madeline, as she caught another glimpse of Mrs. Innes vigorously dancing the reel opposite little Lord Billy in his Highland uniform, with her hands on her flowered-satin hips, ‘that I am behaving very well myself.’
Horace Innes looked round his wife’s drawing-room as if he were making an inventory of it, carefully giving each article its value, which happened, however, to have nothing to do with rupees. Madeline Anderson had been saying something the day before about the intimacy and accuracy with which people’s walls expressed them, and though the commonplace was not new to him, this was the first time it had ever led him to scan his wife’s. What he saw may be imagined, but his only distinct reflection was that he had no idea that she had been photographed so variously or had so many friends who wore resplendent Staff uniforms. The relation of cheapness in porcelain ornaments to the lady’s individuality was beyond him, and he could not analyze his feelings of sitting in the midst of her poverty of spirit. Indeed, thinking of his ordinary unsusceptibility to such things, he told himself sharply that he was adding an affectation of discomfort to the others that he had to bear; and that if Madeline had not given him the idea it would never have entered his mind. The less, he mused, that one had to do with finicking feelings in this world the better. They were well enough for people who were tolerably conditioned in essentials—he preferred this vagueness, even with himself, in connection with his marriage—otherwise they added pricks. Besides he had that other matter to think of.
He thought of the other matter with such obvious irritation that the butler coming in to say that the ‘English water’ was finished, and how many dozen should he order, put a chair in its place instead, closed the door softly again, and went away. It was not good for the dignity of butlers to ask questions of any sort with a look of that kind under the eyebrows of the sahib. The matter was not serious, Colonel Innes told himself, but he would prefer by comparison to deal with matters that were serious. He knew Simla well enough to attach no overwhelming importance to things said about women at the Club, where the broadest charity prevailed underneath, and the idle comment of the moment had an intrinsic value as a distraction rather than a reflective one as a criticism. This consideration, however, was more philosophical in connection with other men’s wives. He found very little in it to palliate what he had overheard, submerged in the ‘Times of India’, that afternoon. And to put an edge on it, the thing had been said by one of his own juniors. Luckily the boy had left the room without discovering who was behind the ‘Times of India’. Innes felt that he should be grateful for having been spared the exigency of defending his wife against a flippant word to which she had very probably laid herself open. He was very angry, and it is perhaps not surprising that he did not pause to consider how far his anger was due to the humiliating necessity of speaking to her about it. She was coming at last though; she was in the hall. He would get it over quickly.
‘Goodbye!’ said Mrs. Innes at the door. ‘No, I can’t possibly let you come in to tea. I don’t know how you have the conscience after drinking three cups at Mrs. Mickie’s, where I had no business to take you! Tomorrow? Oh, all right if you want to VERY badly. But I won’t promise you strawberries—they’re nearly all gone.’
There was the sound of a departing pony’s trot, and Mrs. Innes came into the drawing-room.
‘Good heavens, Horace! what are you sitting there for like a—like a ghost? Why didn’t you make a noise or something, and why aren’t you at office? I can’t tell you how you startled me.’
‘It is early,’ Colonel Innes said. ‘We are neither of us in the house, as a rule, at this hour.’
‘Coincidence!’ Violet turned a cool, searching glance on her husband, and held herself ready. ‘I came home early because I want to alter the lace on my yellow bodice for tonight. It’s too disgusting as it is. But I was rather glad to get away from Mrs. Mickie’s lot. So rowdy!’
‘And I came because I had a special reason for wanting to speak to you.’
Mrs. Violet’s lips parted, and her breath, in spite of herself, came a little faster.
‘As we are dining out tonight, I thought that if I didn’t catch you now I might not have another opportunity—till tomorrow morning.’
‘And it’s always a pity to spoil one’s breakfast. I can tell from your manner, mon ami, it’s something disagreeable. What have I been and gone and done?’
She was dancing, poor thing, in her little vulgar way, on hot iron. But her eyes kept their inconsistent coolness.
‘I heard something today which you are not in the way of hearing. You have—probably—no conception that it could be said.’
‘Then she has been telling other people. ABSOLUTELY the worst thing she could do!’ Mrs. Innes exclaimed privately, sitting unmoved, her face a little too expectant.
‘You won’t be prepared for it—you may be shocked and hurt by it. Indeed, I think there is no need to repeat it to you. But I must put you on your guard. Men are coarser, you know, than women; they are apt to put their own interpretation—’
‘What is it?’
There was a physical gasp, a sharpness in her voice that brought Innes’s eyes from the floor to her face.
‘I am sorry,’ he said, ‘but—don’t overestimate it, don’t let it worry you. It was simply a very impertinent—a very disagreeable reference to you and Mr. Holmcroft, I think, in connection with the Dovedell’s picnic. It was a particularly silly thing as well, and I am sure no one would attach any importance to it, but it was said openly at the Club, and—’
‘Who said it?’ Mrs. Innes demanded.
A flood of colour rushed over her face. Horace marked that she blushed.
‘I don’t know whether I ought to tell you, Violet. It certainly was not meant for your ears.’
‘If I’m not to know who said it, I don’t see why I should pay any attention to it. Mere idle rumour—’
Innes bit his lip.
‘Captain Gordon said it,’ he replied.
‘Bobby Gordon! DO tell me what he said! I’m dying to know. Was he very disagreeable? I DID give his dance away on Thursday night.’
Innes looked at her with the curious distrust which she often inspired in him. He had a feeling that he would like to put her out of the room into a place by herself, and keep her there.
‘I won’t repeat what he said.’ Colonel Innes took up the ‘Saturday Review’.
‘Oh, do, Horace! I particularly want to know.’
Innes said nothing.
‘Horace! Was it—was it anything about Mr. Holmcroft being my Secretariat baa-lamb?’
‘If you adorn your guess with a little profanity,’ said Innes, acidly, ‘you won’t be far wrong.’
Mrs. Violet burst into a peal of laughter.
‘Why, you old goose!’ she articulated, behind her handkerchief; ‘he said that to ME.’
Innes laid down the ‘Saturday Review’.
‘To you!’ he repeated; ‘Gordon said it to you!’
‘Rather!’ Mrs. Violet was still mirthful. ‘I’m not sure that he didn’t call poor little Homie something worse than that. It’s the purest jealousy on his part—nothing to make a fuss about.’
The fourth skin which enables so many of us to be callous to all but the relative meaning of careless phrases had not been given to Innes, and her words fell upon his bare sense of propriety.
‘Jealous,’ he said, ‘of a married woman? I find that difficult to understand.’
Violet’s face straightened out.
‘Don’t be absurd, Horace. These boys are always jealous of somebody or other—it’s the occupation of their lives! I really don’t see how one can prevent it.’
‘It seems to me that a self-respecting woman should see how. Your point of view in these matters is incomprehensible.’
‘Perhaps,’ Violet was driven by righteous anger to say, ‘you find Miss Anderson’s easier to understand.’
Colonel Innes’s face took its regimental disciplinary look, and, though his eyes were aroused, his words were quiet with repression.
‘I see no reason to discuss Miss Anderson with you,’ he said. ‘She has nothing to do with what we are talking about.’
‘Oh, don’t you, really! Hasn’t she, indeed! I take it you are trying to make me believe that compromising things are said about Mr. Holmcroft and me at the Club. Well, I advise you to keep your ears open a little more, and listen to the things said about you and Madeline Anderson there. But I don’t suppose you would be in such a hurry to repeat them to HER.’
Innes turned very white, and the rigidity of his face gave place to heavy dismay. His look was that of a man upon whom misfortune had fallen out of a clear sky. For an instant he stared at his wife. When he spoke his voice was altered.
‘For God’s sake!’ he said, ‘let us have done with this pitiful wrangling. I dare say you can take care of yourself; at all events, I only meant to warn you. But now you must tell me exactly what you mean by this that you have said—this—about—’
‘The fat’s in the fire,’ was Mrs. Innes’s reflection.
‘Certainly, I’ll tell you—’
‘Don’t shout, please!’
‘I mean simply that all Simla is talking about your affair with Miss Anderson. You may imagine that because you are fifteen years older than she is things won’t be thought of, but they are, and I hear it’s been spoken about at Viceregal Lodge. I KNOW Lady Bloomfield has noticed it, for she herself mentioned it to me. I told her I hadn’t the slightest objection, and neither have I, but there’s an old proverb about people in glass houses. What are you going to do?’
Colonel Innes’s expression was certainly alarming, and he had made a step toward her that had menace in it.
‘I am going out,’ he said, and turned and left her to her triumph.
She—Violet—had unspeakably vulgarized it, but it must be true—it must be, to some extent, true. She may even have lied about it, but the truth was there, fundamentally, in the mere fact that it had been suggested to her imagination. Madeline’s name, which had come to be for him an epitome of what was finest and most valuable, most to be lived for, was dropping from men’s lips into a kind of an abyss of dishonourable suggestion. There was no way out of it or around it. It was a cloud which encompassed them, suddenly blackening down.
There was nothing that he could do—nothing. Except, yes, of course—that was obvious, as obvious as any other plain duty. Through his selfishness it had a beginning; in spite of his selfishness it should have an end. That went without saying. No more walks or rides. In a conventional way, perhaps—but nothing deliberate, designed—and never alone together. Gossip about flippant married women was bad enough, but that it should concern itself with an unprotected creature like Madeline was monstrous, incredible. He strode fiercely into the road round Jakko, and no little harmless snake, if it had crawled across his path, would have failed to suffer a quick fate under the guidance of his imagination. But there was nothing for him to kill, and he turned upon himself.
The sun went down into the Punjab and left great blue-and-purple hill worlds barring the passage behind him. The deodars sank waist deep into filmy shadow, and the yellow afterlight lay silently among the branches. A pink-haunched monkey lopading across the road with a great show of prudence seemed to have strayed into an unfamiliar country, and the rustling twigs behind him made an episode of sound. The road in perpetual curve between its little stone parapet and the broad flank of the hill rose and fell under the deodars; Innes took its slopes and its steepnesses with even, unslackened stride, aware of no difference, aware of little indeed except the physical necessity of movement, spurred on by a futile instinct that the end of his walk would be the end of his trouble—his amazing, black, menacing trouble. A pony’s trot behind him struck through the silence like percussion-caps; all Jakko seemed to echo with it; and it came nearer—insistent, purposeful—but he was hardly aware of it until the creature pulled up beside him, and Madeline, slipping quickly off, said—
‘I’m coming too.’
He took off his hat and stared at her. She seemed to represent a climax.
‘I’m coming too,’ she said. ‘I’m tired of picking flies off the Turk, and he’s really unbearable about them tonight. Here, syce.’ She threw the reins to the man and turned to Innes with a smile of relief. ‘I would much rather do a walk. Why—you want me to come too, don’t you?’
His face was all one negative, and under the unexpectedness of it and the amazement of it her questioning eyes slowly filled with sudden, uncontrollable tears, so that she had to lower them, and look steadily at the hoof-marks in the road while she waited for his answer.
‘You know how I feel about seeing you—how glad I always am,’ he stammered. ‘But there are reasons—’
‘Reasons?’ she repeated, half audibly.
‘I don’t know how to tell you. I will write. But let me put you up again—’
‘I will not,’ Madeline said, with a sob, ‘I won’t be sent home like a child. I am going to walk, but—but I can quite well go alone.’ She started forward, and her foot caught in her habit so that she made an awkward stumble and came down on her knee. In rising she stumbled again, and his quick arm was necessary. Looking down at her, he saw that she was crying bitterly. The tension had lasted long, and the snap had come when she least expected it.
‘Stop,’ Innes said, firmly, hardly daring to turn his head and ascertain the blessed fact that they were still alone. ‘Stop instantly. You shall not go by yourself.’ He flicked the dust off her habit with his pocket-handkerchief. ‘Come, please; we will go on together.’ Her distress seemed to make things simple again. It was as if the cloud that hung over them had melted as she wept, and lifted, and drifted a little further on. For the moment, naturally, nothing mattered except that she should be comforted. As she walked by his side shaken with her effort at self-control, he had to resist the impulse to touch her. His hand tingled to do its part in soothing her, his arm ached to protect her, while he vaguely felt an element of right, of justice, in her tears; they were in a manner his own. What he did was to turn and ask the syce following if he had loosened the Turk’s saddle-girths.
‘I shall be better—in a moment,’ Madeline said, and he answered, ‘Of course’; but they walked on and said nothing more until the road ran out from under the last deodar and round the first bare boulder that marked the beginning of the Ladies’ Mile. It lay rolled out before them, the Ladies’ Mile, sinuous and grey and empty, along the face of the cliff; they could see from one end of it to the other. It was the bleak side of Jakko; even tonight there was a fresh springing coldness in it blowing over from the hidden snows behind the rims of the nearer hills. Madeline held up her face to it, and gave herself a moment of its grateful discipline.
‘I have been as foolish as possible,’ she said, ‘as foolish as possible. I have distressed you. Well, I couldn’t help it—that is all there is to be said. Now if you will tell me—what is in your mind—what you spoke of writing—I will mount again and go home. It doesn’t matter—I know you didn’t mean to be unkind.’ Her lip was trembling again, and he knew it, and dared not look at it.
‘How can you ask me to tell you—miserable things!’ he exclaimed. ‘How can I find the words? And I have only just been told—I can hardly myself conceive it—’
‘I am not a child in her teens that my ears should be guarded from miserable things. I have come of age, I have entered into my inheritance of the world’s bitterness with the rest. I can listen,’ Madeline said. ‘Why not?’
He looked to her with grave tenderness. ‘You think yourself very old, and very wise about the world,’ he said; ‘but you are a woman, and you will be hurt. And when I think that a little ordinary forethought on my part would have protected you, I feel like the criminal I am.’
‘Don’t make too much of it,’ she said, simply. ‘I have a presentiment—’
‘I’ll tell you,’ Innes said, slowly; ‘I won’t niggle about it. The people of this place—idiots!—are unable to believe that a man and a woman can be to each other what we are.’
‘Yes?’ said Madeline. She paused beside the parapet and looked down at the indistinct little fields below, and the blurred masses of white wild roses waving midway against the precipice.
‘They can not understand that there can be any higher plane of intercourse between us than the one they know. They won’t see—they can’t see—that the satisfaction we find in being together is of a different nature.’
‘I see,’ said Madeline. She had raised her eyes, and they sought the solemn lines of the horizon. She looked as if she saw something infinitely lifted above the pettiness he retailed to her.
‘So they say—good God, why should I tell you what they say!’ It suddenly flashed upon him that the embodiment of it in words would be at once, from him, sacrilegious and ludicrous. It flashed upon him that her natural anger would bring him pain, and that if she laughed—it was so hard to tell when she would laugh—it would be as if she struck him. He cast about him dumb and helpless while she kept her invincibly quiet gaze upon the farther hills. She was thinking that this breath of gossip, now that it had blown, was a very slight affair compared with Horace Innes’s misery—which he did not seem to understand. Then her soul rose up in her, brushing everything aside, and forgetting, alas! the vow it had once made to her.
‘I think I know,’ she said. ‘They are indeed foolish. They say that we—love each other. Is not that what they say?’
He looked in amazement into her tender eyes and caught at the little mocking smile about her lips. Suddenly the world grew light about him, the shadows fled away. Somewhere down in the valley, he remembered afterward, a hill-flute made music. When he spoke it was almost in a whisper, lest he should disturb some newly perceived lovely thing that had wings, and might leave him. ‘Oh, Madeline,’ he said, ‘is it true?’ She only smiled on in gladness that took no heed of any apprehension, any fear or scruple, and he himself keeping his eyes upon her face, said, ‘It is true.’
So they stood for a little time in silence while she resisted her great opportunity. She resisted it to the end, and presently beckoned to the syce, who came up leading the pony. Innes mounted her mechanically and said, ‘Is that all right?’ as she put her foot in the stirrup, without knowing that he had spoken.
‘Goodbye,’ she said; ‘I am going away—immediately. It will be better. And listen—I have known this for weeks—and I have gone on seeing you. And I hope I am not any more wicked than I feel. Goodbye.’
‘Goodbye,’ he said, taking his hand from the pony’s neck, and she rode buoyantly away. He, turning to breast the road again, saw darkness gathering over the end of it, and drawing nearer.
At eleven o’clock next morning Brookes rose from her packing to take a note addressed to her mistress from the hand of a messenger in the Imperial red and gold. It ran:
‘Dear Miss Anderson—I write to tell you that I have obtained three weeks’ leave, and I am going into the interior to shoot, starting this afternoon. You spoke yesterday of leaving Simla almost immediately. I trust you will not do this, as it would be extremely risky to venture down to the Plains just now. In ten days the rains will have broken, when it will be safe. Pray wait till then.
‘Yours sincerely,
‘Horace Innes.’
Involuntarily the letter found its way to Madeline’s lips, and remained there until she saw the maid observing her with intelligence.
‘Brookes,’ she said, ‘I am strongly advised not to start until the rains break. I think, on the whole, that we won’t.’
‘Indeed, miss,’ returned Brookes, ‘Mrs. Sergeant Simmons told me that it was courting cholera to go—and nothing short of it. I must say I’m thankful.’