The Project Gutenberg eBook ofThe TigressThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: The TigressAuthor: Anne WarnerIllustrator: R. F. SchabelitzRelease date: August 28, 2011 [eBook #37236]Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (Thisfile was produced from images generously made availableby The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TIGRESS ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: The TigressAuthor: Anne WarnerIllustrator: R. F. SchabelitzRelease date: August 28, 2011 [eBook #37236]Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (Thisfile was produced from images generously made availableby The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
Title: The Tigress
Author: Anne WarnerIllustrator: R. F. Schabelitz
Author: Anne Warner
Illustrator: R. F. Schabelitz
Release date: August 28, 2011 [eBook #37236]
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (Thisfile was produced from images generously made availableby The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TIGRESS ***
Frontispiece byR. F. SCHABELITZ
New YorkW. J. Watt & CompanyPUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1916, BYW. J. WATT & COMPANY
PRESS OFBRAUNWORTH & CO.BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERSBROOKLYN, N. Y.
"I do hope you are not going to weep!" said Nina.
She and he sat on a far-sheltered corner of the terrace in the gray shadow, and she had just told him that "everything was over."
As "everything" had been going on for the best part of three months, it was, perhaps, only natural that she should experience some concern as to how he meant to take it.
He was slow to reassure her, and she was impatient. "Because," she explained, "I never know just what to say or do when they weep. I'm never at a loss at other times; but—"
"Of course I shall not weep," he protested at length, with something of indignation in his tone. "Whatever gave you such an idea?"
"It isn't unusual," she explained. "Sometimes they storm. I've known them to swear most awfully. But when they are young, as you are, they so often just melt; and it is very trying, you know. Perhaps you'll swear. I'd much rather have it so. There was Emborough, for instance. He—"
"If you don't mind," he cut in, "I'd prefer not to hear."
"Ah, I see!" she exclaimed quickly. "You are neither going to weep nor storm. You are going to be just plain disagreeable. And if there is anything I hate it is a man who mopes."
He was thinking very hard, and for the moment he had failed to follow her. Disaster had dropped upon him like a bolt from the blue at the moment of his greatest confidence.
It was at Simla where, Kipling says, "all things begin and many come to an evil end;" and something, it seemed, had come to an end—evil or otherwise—as well as the season and the last of the dances at Viceregal Lodge.
Ten minutes ago he had been so convinced that the end was to be "otherwise" that even now he couldn't believe it was to be evil.
"Why," he managed to say after a brief pause, "I don't understand you at all. I—"
"No one ever has understood me," she assured him. "Even when I've gone to the trouble of explaining they manage somehow to get the explanation all upside down. It's very tiresome—very."
"I really thought you loved me! You—"
"They all think I love them. That's the odd part of it. I'm sure I never told any one. And yet they are so conceited—Oh, why can't you men appreciate being petted and amused, without imagining that it must be inspired by adoration and coupled with a desire for life-long attachment?"
"You promised to bolt with me," he asserted boldly.
Nina's chair jumped back three inches, impelled by the reflexes of a slim but sturdy pair of long legs. Hers, not the chair's.
"I abominate a liar!" she announced firmly.
"So do I," he came back. "You did promise me. It was during that last waltz."
"I am never responsible for what I say when waltzing."
"You admit it, then?"
"I admit nothing. I neither confirm nor deny. I don't know."
"But we came out here to arrange it. Or don't you remember that, either?"
"I fancied it was because you wished to smoke."
"God!" he exclaimed suddenly. "How can you be so bitterly cruel!"
She may have been a reincarnated tigress—in after years there was a man who always declared so—and then again she may not. It is quite possible that circumstance and environment made her what she was.
Certainly at heart Nina Darling was not a bad woman. There were times when she tried very hard to be a very good woman according to her lights. And yet, somehow, somewhere within her she seemed to possess a faculty for making men wretched.
The world—or a very large part of it—regarded it as an insatiable craving, an unappeasable appetite—a sort of lust for personal aggrandizement, growing out of personal vanity. But then the world knew nothing of Nina Darling's secret—which made all the difference.
For right judgment a few facts will not serve. Unless we have them all we are likely to fall into error. To argue from effect back to cause is a very risky undertaking. And that was what most people did in Nina Darling's case.
Young Gerald Andrews, of the civil service, the most recent victim, whom she had had in leading strings ever since he came to Simla, fancied her from the very first the most beautiful creature he had ever seen.
Now, stung by the lash of her scorn, the sheer fact of her unattainableness seemed to redouble her charm.
There was something wraithlike about her. She appeared to hold kinship with the moonlight, which in its loveliness overspread lawns and flowerbeds near at hand and turned to opal the mists that hung and swayed over the valley beneath them, where the lovely Annandale roses were blowing.
Until now he had always thought that her big eyes were violet-blue. But suddenly he saw opal lights in them and opal flame. And her gown was not white and silver, as he had fancied, but spun of moonbeams and studded with opals.
Her long, sinuous figure, more revealed than hidden by its gauzy investure, suggested to him Lilith, and the medieval conception of an angel as well.
He hardly expected an answer to the exclamatory question wrung from him by the torture of her words, but she had it ready.
"Because I eminently prefer my matrimonial frying-pan to the blistering coals of the illicit," she said coolly.
The boy—for he was scarcely more, big and handsome and strong though he appeared—looked terribly wobegone. But on the comparison floated a straw, and like the proverbial drowning man, he clutched at it.
"You admit it's a frying-pan," he reminded her.
"Sizzling hot," she told him. "I'm scorched through and through. My heart's a cinder."
The straw went under, carrying him with it, but he still clung on. "Let me take you out of it," he pleaded desperately.
But her shapely shoulders rose in a discouraging shrug.
"Into the fire?" she asked calmly.
"Into Elysium."
She laughed at that. "Worse," she said with a touch of cynicism. "The home of the blessed dead! I'm not blessed and I'm not dead—and I don't want to be!"
"You know I didn't mean that," he objected.
"The only other Elysium I know is Elysium Hill, with its doleful deodars. A most distressing—"
Young Andrews interrupted her by springing up. "Oh, don't be so frightfully literal!" he cried, annoyed to a point of misery. "You know very well what I meant."
"If you're going to be rude—" she began threateningly. And on the instant he was in his chair again, leaning forward, groping for her bare hand.
"No, you mustn't!" she warned, drawing both hands out of reach. "You'll only declare that I encouraged you."
At that he gasped audibly. "Encouraged me!" he exclaimed when he breathed normally again. "Aren't you a little late with your caution? I suppose I never have been encouraged."
"There! I knew you'd say it."
"Well, I've held your hands dozens of times, haven't I? More than that, I've held you in my arms, and I've kissed your lips and your eyes and your hair. Isn't that encouragement?"
She smiled calmly and whimsically.
"Yes. Encouragement for me. I couldn't resist you."
"Your heart isn't a cinder at all," he growled, frowning. "It's a stone! How many other men have you treated like this?"
"None," she answered boldly. "I never treat two alike. I have too much imagination for that. There are always variations."
His voice was very bitter as he said: "You'll meet your match some day. I hope to God you will!"
"I've met him already," she returned. "He's the only man I care a straw about."
"Your husband?" he hazarded.
"Good Heavens! No! Poor Darling! He doesn't deserve the life I lead him. I'm charitable enough to wish him a better fate."
"What happened to your match then?"
"Now you are asking riddles," she said. "That question has never been satisfactorily answered."
"You mean you don't wish to tell me, I suppose."
"I'd give anything in the world if I could. He was reported dead eight years ago, but—"
"He isn't?"
"He wasn't then."
"How do you know?"
"He was heard from after."
"Then he's alive still—you know that much?"
"No," she replied languorously. "I don't know that much. He may have died since, don't you see?"
"Let me find out for you," he proposed abruptly. "I'll—"
"You're very kind, but you'd have your trouble for your pains. He doesn't want to be found, wherever he is, dead or alive, and I'll back him against the world when it comes to having his own way."
She shivered slightly and drew the filmy scarf closer over her bare shoulders. "Besides," she added, "when the message was sent he was starting for 'the world's end,' and 'the world's end' is a big place to find a man. The needle and the hayrick are child's play to it."
"I'm terribly interested," said young Andrews. "I am really. I didn't believe you'd admit any chap was your match. Do you mind telling me what he was like?"
"He was more than my match," she confessed. "He was something else, and that is why no other man ever will be able to please me after his newness has worn off."
"As mine has?"
"As yours has."
"Gad! But you're frank, Nina."
"I know it. It's my one admirable quality. I'm tired of you, Gerald. I always get tired in the same place."
"The same place?" he repeated, puzzled.
"When they're not satisfied with a day and want to make it forever. The mere thought of forever wearies me. I feel like killing a man when he so much as hints at it."
"You haven't killed your husband," he reminded her.
"Ah, but how I have been tempted!" she laughed. "Some day I may."
"I know something of what a beast Darling is," he ventured. "I've heard it at the club. They say—"
"Don't!" she begged. "I won't listen. It may all be true, but I'd rather not hear it. I'm sorry for him. I'd only kill him to put him out of his misery—to put us both out of our misery."
"Of course you don't mean that. You shouldn't say it."
She didn't contradict him, and for a little there was silence between them. His thoughts reverted to the man who was her match—and more.
"And the other man?" he queried. "You said he was something else. What else?"
"My mate," she said simply. And again the silence fell.
Presently her laugh rang out, clear and bell-like, startling her companion from gloomy reverie. It jarred awfully. It was like dance music at a funeral.
"I can fancy what else you've heard at the club," she began, the opal lights in her eyes suddenly blazing. "They say I'm an angel, don't they?"
"They wouldn't dare say anything else in my presence."
"To be sure"—bitterly—"that's condemnation enough in itself. Before you they pronounced me a good and virtuous wife, I suppose. And behind your back—Good Heavens, what must they not say behind your back!"
"Youaregood and virtuous," he defended with boyish loyalty.
"Of course I am," she agreed. "I've driven one man to drink by marrying him, and more than I can count by not. I'm an angel, truly. But it's so hard to tell just what to do. I am my brother's keeper, and yet I go through life adding each year to the army of the besotted."
It was not at all the trend that young Andrews had foreseen in bringing Nina Darling to this shadowy corner of the terrace. Every fresh lead made the situation more uncomfortable. He had been brimming over with passion and sentiment, and here they had strayed away into a field rife with some of life's hardest facts.
"Promise me," she begged, "that you won't desert the civil service for the army—this army, my army!"
"God knows what I shall do, Nina!" he flung back desperately. "I banked everything on you. I didn't think you'd fail me."
"I've failed every one that ever came into my life," was her candid rejoinder. "Every time I crave and take a little passing pleasure some one suffers, and I haven't a drop of vicious blood in my veins. I believe I was cursed in my cradle."
He started to protest, but she shook her golden head dispiritedly. The blues—rare visitors—had settled down upon her.
"If I had only met you first!" he cried. "If you had married me I would have saved you."
"Don't!" she supplicated. "Please, please don't! I hate the word—marriage. Who was it said: 'Love is a soufflé that marriage changes to a bread-and-butter pudding?' I've seen it borne out scores of times. Soggy, indigestible stuff, without spice or flavor."
The melody of the dance music which all along had seeped to them in harmonic murmur from the distant ballroom was now hushed.
In the distance, at the opposite end of the terrace, figures—single and grouped—moved in silhouette across the glare from the lighted windows. Along the garden paths there passed at intervals sentinel Ghurkas from the viceroy's guard of honor.
Young Andrews's thoughts were long, long thoughts. He was sorry for the woman, but he was still more sorry for himself. He had turned a little away from her. His head was bowed, and his gaze was lowered to the pavement at his feet.
Nina had risen before he was conscious of her movement. Then belatedly he sprang up.
"It is late," she said. "The Ramsays are probably looking everywhere for me. I mustn't keep them waiting."
But he scarcely heeded. He stepped very close to her and gripped her by either arm.
"Tell me," he begged, low-voiced, earnest, "is there nothing in your heart for me?"
"Oh, yes!" she answered quite casually. "Sympathy—oh, ever so much sympathy!"
"And there can never be anything else?"
"There never can be anything else—except—"
She paused, and his hopes fluttered.
"Except—" he repeated.
"Gratitude. I am grateful. I was so afraid you were going to weep. And you didn't."
Young Andrews was a sensitive soul, but he was not unmanly. He fought off the tears as long as he was conscious, but his pillow was wet in the morning.
His station was "on the Bombay side," as they say in India. To be exact, it was at Junnar. And he started down the next day, after sending Nina a bouquet of Annandale's loveliest roses. But when he alighted from the little branch railway line at Umballa, he halted.
The cantonment here was the home of the Darlings. But it was also the home of Dinghal, a deputy commissioner, who was a friend of young Andrews. So young Andrews lingered, and the deputy commissioner made him welcome.
Hitherto he had regarded Dinghal as rather a bore. And in this he was thoroughly justified. But since his two months at Simla the deputy commissioner had acquired for him a distinct interest.
Dinghal knew the Darlings intimately, and his passion for gathering and disseminating minor gossip, which had once been a fault, became now, in the changed tastes of his visitor, an enviable virtue, especially as the visitor found it the easiest thing in the world to direct the flow into the one desired channel.
As a rule there was nothing vicious about Dinghal's gossip. It was so pitifully tame and pointless that it wearied the listener to extinction; for Dinghal was a kindly man, inclined to gloss over faults and failings and to "play up" the good points of even the most unworthy.
This was another reason why young Andrews was so vastly entertained by all the little talks they had about Colonel and Mrs. Darling. He had heard enough of the other sort of thing in the club at Simla, and had relished it then, in that Nina's husband was the chief victim, and at that time his sympathies were all with Nina.
What he craved most now was unbiased truth. Which is sometimes a panacea—and sometimes not.
"They're not happy, to be sure," Dinghal admitted with evident reluctance. "But I don't know that either is to blame. Just a case of mutual inadaptability that neither discovered until it was too late. I knew Darling long before he married her, and I know people who knew little Nina Calthrop when she was crowing in swaddling clothes.
"There's not a better family in England. Good people all of them. The men have rather run to the army. You know how that goes in families. She's a grand-daughter of old General Buddicomb, who distinguished himself in Egypt in 1882.
"The general's sister, Nina's great-aunt, married the Duke of Pemberwell. Fine people, I tell you. Then there was Kneedrock; a husky young giant—viscount, you know—son of the Earl of Dumphreys, who went to South Africa and never came back."
"Never came back?" echoed young Andrews questioningly.
"Reported killed at Spion Kop, I think it was. Body never brought home, though. May have been Bloemfontein, I'm not sure. At any rate, they say he was Nina's favorite cousin. She certainly took his loss very keenly.
"After her first wild grief she developed a mania for particulars. When peace was arranged and the rank and file were coming home by the shipload she lost no chance of getting every fact she could from every officer she met.
"At the Pemberwell seat—Puddleford—she encountered Colonel Darling. It was he, they say, who identified poor Kneedrock's remains, what there was of them, and, of course, he held for her at that vital moment more interest than any other man, woman, or child in the United Kingdom.
"She annexed him—body, soul, and breeches, as the saying is. And it wasn't Darling's fault that he was flattered and fascinated, for Nina was then barely twenty, and the rarest, flowerlike slip of a girl you can imagine.
"You know what she is now. Beautiful, you think, eh? Everybody agrees that Nina is beautiful; and she is. But five years in India, and—well, let us say, the life of the mismated—haven't failed to rub some of the bloom off the peach."
Mixed metaphors had no terrors for Dinghal, who evidently inherited from somewhere a strain of Irish blood, despite his name, and treated "bulls" as if they were pets.
"Was this fellow, Kneedrock, ever heard of afterward?" his listener questioned. "Reported alive, I mean. It seems to me—"
"Oh, yes," Dinghal answered. "Every now and then a story crops up from somewhere that he's been seen. But nobody believes it. If he's alive there's no reason why he shouldn't go home, is there? The whole thing is ridiculous on its face. Besides Darling saw him. Says he was practically shot to pieces."
"I thought I'd heard it," returned young Andrews casually. And to himself he said: "Kneedrock is the man she meant. Her cousin, her match, and her mate—all in one."
"Yes," Dinghal went on, calmly filling his pipe, "Nina Calthrop was something to covet; and, naturally enough, Darling coveted her.
"Then, on her side, there was gratitude, for the colonel had given her a world of the sort of detail she wanted. She had cross-examined him like a K. C., and he had answered fully and freely out of the overflowing storehouse of his experience.
"If they could have gone on talking forever about that battle—I believe now it was Spion Kop—they might have been happy yet. But in time she pumped the cistern dry. There wasn't a crumb of fact or conjecture left in Darling's larder that hadn't been rolled over and over and stripped to its bare bones."
Young Andrews nearly howled. The mixture of figures was really superb.
"I fancy the pumping was pretty well finished before the wedding," the recital continued; "but I'm not stating that as a fact. You see that was quite six months after their meeting, and two years or more after Kneedrock's taking off. And in that six months they had seen each other, not continuously, but at intervals, for Darling was a very busy man.
"Their honeymoon, such as it was, was spent on a P. & O. steamer. I have been told that they each discovered their wretched mistake before they got to the Gulf of Aden. Take it for what it's worth.
"Conditions weren't all they might have been when they reached Umballa. That is certain. Darling did his best to hide the rift in the lute; but Nina never seemed to care a hang what people thought or said.
"Mind you, I'm not blaming her. I like the frankness of it. Not that she complained or whimpered. Not she. But she just went wild. Flirted like the very devil with anything and everything that came along.
"That was five years ago, mind you; and she hasn't mended her ways since. There are some who say she is possessed of the seven devils that the Lord cast out of Mary of Magdala, but—"
"It's a lie!" broke in young Andrews furiously. "She's—"
"Of course," Dinghal came back heartily. "I know that. She's not a bad woman. But I've heard her painted blacker than the Black Knight of the Black Lands.
"There is no question that more than one young fellow has gone straight to perdition because of her—and some old fellows, too, for that matter. But they were weaker sisters, who hadn't wit enough to save their skins from Hades."
His listener writhed. The deputy commissioner's rhetoric was certainly most trying.
"I don't suppose," he pursued, "that in the history of the world there has ever been a married pair more lied about than the Darlings. Nothing has been too bad for the victims of her charms to say about her; and for years the gossips from here to Singapore have been telling wild tales of the colonel's cruelty, wreaked in vengeance on his waywardmem-sahib.
"They've had her drawn and quartered, cut, bruised, and dislocated. To believe the hundredth part of these stories she must, long ere this, if she managed to survive, have been resolved into a more helpless, unsightly cripple than the most distortedSadhuthat makes hideous the twice-yearly festivals at Tirupankundram. Yet I know there's not a scintilla of truth in any one of them."
"I heard something of that sort at Simla," said Andrews, frowning.
"You can hear it anywhere. Whenever conversation flags in Anglo-India some ass or knave will introduce the Darlings, and rehearse the latest invention of the prolific and never-failing scandal-makers."
"But he's cruel to her, isn't he?"
"He's only cruel to himself," answered Dinghal. "He's killing his body and soul with strong drink, and he's risking his temporal and eternal future as an officer in his majesty's service and as a Christian gentleman.
"I give you my word, Andrews, he's never spoken a harsh word to her nor laid a heavy hand on her fair person. And yet he suffers the torments of the damned because of her. It's a very painful situation."
Andrews said he didn't pretend to understand the thing, and would like to have the key.
Dinghal hesitated a moment. Then he looked very impressive, and when he spoke it was with lowered voice.
"I can give you the key in three words," he said.
He paused again, and Andrews waited.
"It is this," Dinghal divulged gravely: "He loves her."
The young man from the Bombay side was thoughtfully silent for a space. Then, as the revelation sank in, he murmured, half to himself and out of the abundance of his own recent experience:
"God pity him!"
"That's what I say," agreed Dinghal.
At the time of this conversation Andrews had not seen Darling. He met him a night or two later at the Umballa Club, and a strange emotional mix-up resulted. The young man's sentimental side was oddly stirred. Darling appealed not only to his sympathy, but to his admiration.
It was true that he had been prepared for something of this kind by Dinghal; but he never suspected that he could entertain more than a sort of passive pity for Nina's husband. He had an innate dislike for weak men, physically and morally.
In that respect—and in that only—Andrews was to a degree feminine. Strength appealed to him as it appeals to women. And the fact that Darling had given way to a dulling, deadening indulgence in alcoholic excesses argued for a sort of moral cowardice.
But when he met the colonel he was surprised. It may have been that he pictured him in advance as habitually maudlin, or sodden or morose. Certainly he was no one of these. He had the look of a hard drinker, it was true; but he carried his liquor well. More than that, he gave the unmistakable impression of inherent strength and courage.
Darling was not a large man. He appeared to measure barely five feet nine, and his weight could not have exceeded ten stone—apparently all bone and sinew, with no sign of bloating.
Sandy-haired, pale blue of eye, his firm chin a trifle long, he was not ill-looking. But his age must have doubled Nina's on their wedding day.
Before he and Andrews had chatted for five minutes a mutual liking was established. They were both passionately fond of sport, and the fact developed and was exchanged in that brief period of intercourse.
"If you've nothing better to do to-morrow," Darling suggested, "I'd be glad to show you some of my trophies. What do you say to tiffin with me? My wife is still in the hills, and we can talk big game without fear of boring the other sex. Shall I expect you?"
Andrews knew that he should say he had met Mrs. Darling at Simla, but he was so eager to answer "yes" that the opportunity got away from him at the moment; and as it didn't again present itself, his failure to make the truth clear was a harassing worry from that time on.
Moreover, though he could not repent, he reproached and upbraided himself for having fallen in love with Nina. All that he had learned since arriving at Umballa appeared only to add to her desirability. Absence had indeed, in this instance, made the heart grow fonder.
That he had broken his journey here, not so much for the sake of pumping Dinghal as for the chance of getting one more look at her—possibly one more word with her—he had candidly to admit to his better self. But he wished with all his heart that she was maid or widow, or—if there must be a husband, that he was some other—almost any other than Darling. He would have felt less a brute had it even been Dinghal.
It was a psychological contretemps of the rarest sort, and distinctly uncomfortable. He had found the colonel as infatuating in his way as his wife was in hers, and, naturally, there were no means by which he could reconcile the liking and the loving.
Even when he appeared at the Darling bungalow, the next day, the thing got him by the throat, as it were, at every turn. For the trophies of the sportsman and the all-too-feminine evidences of the chatelaine clashed side by side; every clash echoing in young Andrews's soul.
Again and again he found his attention straying, for instance, from an especially fine tiger-skin or the mounted head of a curiously horned markhor to a dainty writing-desk that he knew at a glance must be Nina's, or to a framed photograph of a group on an English lawn, in which, instinctively, he detected Nina in the tall, girlish figure in the white frock.
Indeed, the drawing-room seemed to be all Nina. He saw her everywhere—in every chair, on every window-seat, and on every couch. The dining-room was more divided; but the gun-room, of course, was all Darling.
They lingered there the greater part of the afternoon. Every rifle, every fowling-piece had its story, and there were many of them; for Darling boasted a veritable armory.
It was here, too, that Andrews got some comprehension of the extent of the officer's unbridled indulgence. He drank and smoked practically continuously. One peg followed another with but the briefest intermissions; and the civil-service man made no attempt to keep pace with him.
If any effect was observable it was merely in a readier flow of narrative, in a more extended and richer vocabulary. But, strangely enough, from first to last, there was no mention of Mrs. Darling. And his visitor, taking this in the nature of a warning, knowing what he did, deemed it not only wiser but safer, now, to guard the fact of his acquaintanceship.
In his closer study of Darling he had made a discovery which accounted, he believed, in a measure, at least, for his strange appeal. Even in his gayest moments there was a certain pathos in his expression.
Andrews had noted this the previous evening at the club, but had failed to trace it. He found it now in a very perceptible droop, at intervals, of the corners of his mouth. And it was as though he knew this and struggled to avoid it which gave the impression of bearing up against odds that were too great for him.
The afternoon was well spent before Darling would listen to his guest's going. They were still in the gun-room when, at length, he rose for departure. And then the colonel delayed it further by a proposal that he consider joining Major Cumnock and himself on a hunting trip they were planning.
"I'd love to, of all things," Andrews returned heartily. "But the fact is my leave ends in another week, and I've got to report at Junnar by the twenty-fifth. Otherwise, I shouldn't hesitate a second. I—"
And there he suddenly paused.
It was something in Darling's expression that arrested him first; something that he couldn't just interpret. Afterward he told himself that it was a most singular combination of rapture and pain.
Then he, too, caught the echo of voices—women's voices—and, the next instant, one woman's voice rose clear above the chorus. It was Nina's.
"My wife!" said Colonel Darling. And the way he said it was almost reverential.
The tone struck young Andrews dumb. His chance had come again. He should have said: "Yes? I had the pleasure of meeting her at Simla." But he said nothing at all.
In dead silence he followed his host to the front veranda, where he came plump upon Nina Darling and the Ramsays. That is to say, upon Mrs. Ramsay, who was an American devotée of Kipling on a pilgrimage to the shrines, and her daughter, Jane.
Mr. Ramsay, busy in Chicago or Milwaukee, or some other place in the States, was not in evidence, and had not been.
It was clear to Andrews that Colonel Darling was about to greet his wife with a kiss; but she forestalled it. She nodded to him perfunctorily; said: "Oh, there you are, Jack!" in the most matter-of-fact fashion; and turned away to stoop and caress the Irish terrier that was frantically pawing at her skirt.
A lump rose in Andrews's throat at sight of the rebuff. His hope was that the Ramsays hadn't noticed, for their eyes were on him at the moment, and their surprise at seeing him there was manifest.
Darling made to cover up the awkward moment by presenting him all around. Nina, whose astonishment at the meeting must have exceeded even that of her friends, took refuge in the chilliest civility.
From nothing that she said could her husband possibly gather that she and Andrews had so much as ever touched fingers before. And the Ramsays were quick to follow her lead.
Nevertheless, the situation was far from comfortable, and the young man got away at the very earliest opportunity.
Before he had reached the gate of the compound, however, the voice of the colonel caught him up.
"I say, Andrews," he called, "don't forget to bring over that new automatic pistol you were speaking of. I should like to have a look at it if you don't mind."
And this eleventh-hour reminder gave him the excuse which later, in his superconscientiousness, he deemed a necessity. More than ever now honor and duty bade him flee; but a more insistent impulse urged another and final talk with Nina.
For forty-eight hours he fought it, only to yield at the forty-ninth. Having made sure that Darling was safely housed at the club, he rode over to the bungalow with the excuse spoiling the set of his coat.
Nina saw it almost at once and spoke of it. For, the devil being good to him, he had found her at home and alone.
"I knew your nose was out of joint," she said, "but what under the sun has happened to your hip?"
"Oh, yes," he replied, taking the excuse from his hip-pocket and placing it on a table close at hand. "I brought it over for the colonel. He's rather keen about the new safety device and wanted to see it." And he looked a trifle sheepish as he asked: "Does he happen by any chance to be at home?"
"You may thank Heaven he isn't," she answered with a light laugh. "I'm never at my best when he is within hailing distance. And you didn't come to see him. I know that."
Then he looked more sheepish still.
"I dare say you've learned his habits in the last week, and you could have found him at the club, you know," she added.
His laugh was rather mirthless as he said:
"Of course. What's the use of pretending? I saw him go in before I started."
"Then you've forgiven me, I suppose. That is sweet of you."
"It's harder to forgive myself. I feel like a cur."
"I've known some very nice curs."
"But I don't feel like that sort," he insisted. "No, it's the sneaking, thieving mongrel that I—" He broke off suddenly.
She had sat down and he dropped into a chair facing her.
"I'll tell you," he went on. "I've been persuading myself that I owed you an explanation of my continued presence in Umballa and the narrowly averted embarrassment of two days ago. I've been trying to make myself believe that in that and that only lay my reason for wishing to see you again."
"And there was another reason?"
"There was another reason," he admitted. "I wasn't honest with myself. Gad! When a chap isn't honest with himself—"
"All men are like that," she told him. "The higher their ideals the less frankly honest they are with themselves. They just won't admit the old Adam in them."
"I haven't any will," he declared. "I haven't any pride."
She lay back in her chair, pleasantly amused.
"Of course you haven't," she said confidently. "I've taken them from you. It was very wicked of me, wasn't it?"
"Do you do that to—to all of us?" he asked seriously.
"I'm afraid I do," she admitted. "But quite unconsciously. I don't mean to. Oh, I never mean to."
"I've been trying to put you out of my mind, out of my heart. I've been trying to kill my infatuation for you; but I haven't even stunned it. When I thought I had my foot on its neck it went on binding me with stronger chains."
And at that she laughed aloud.
"You're too funny," she said. "When did you think you had the horrid thing down?"
"When I met your husband—and—and liked him."
"You did like him, then?"
"Very much indeed."
"What an odd taste! Those pale eyes of his have an uncanny effect on me. It's something that goes through walls and floors; and it makes me quite vicious. It brings out all the cat in me. I have an irresistible desire to claw and rend."
"It must have followed you all the way to Simla, that last night," said Andrews, dropping into a chair that faced her.
But Nina shook her golden head and her violet eyes slowly narrowed. He observed that in the dusk, for the room was in the semi-gloom of a single, red-shaded lamp in a far corner.
"No"—her voice was very low and purring—"I wasn't in the least catty then. I was sorry for you. I was, really; but it couldn't go on. You can see now that it couldn't go on."
"It might have gone on," he qualified, "if I hadn't met Colonel Darling."
"You seem to forget that I had met him already—am married to him."
"Yes," he said; "but with you it's different. You joy in hurting him; whereas I—why, I'd never have a moment's peace if I did anything that would give him pain. I know I shouldn't."
She pretended to be surprised; though, for some reason, she was not in the least.
"You're an odd boy," she drawled. "You mean that if I were to tell you now that I had changed my mind, and was quite ready to go away with you, you'd beg to be excused?"
He didn't answer at once. Candor bulked large in his character. Now that she put it that way he wished to be very sure. It was not a matter to be decided offhand, with Darling absent and Nina there before him, temptingly precious in the magic witchery of the tinted half-light.
"No, I—I couldn't. I couldn't do him that injury," he declared at length.
"And you swore you loved me?"
"I did. I do. I swear it still," he cried with sudden vehemence.
Nina laughed at his protestation.
"'Not that I loved Cæsar less, but that I loved Rome more,'" she quoted. "Is that it?"
"No, that isn't it," he denied earnestly. "I—"
"You love me a great deal, but you are so fond of Darling that you would not pain him to make us both happy," she interrupted. And the sneer with which she did it cut him to the quick.
"I don't think you've any right to put it that way," he returned.
"I am putting it your way, really," she came back. "It is as plain as the nose on your face. You made the choice between us, and you took a minute or so to make it. You didn't answer on impulse; you answered after calm deliberation. I really don't see, Gerald, how you can argue it otherwise."
"But it wouldn't makeyouhappy," he caught her up. "You've said it wouldn't."
"Did I?" she asked indifferently. "I don't remember."
"You said it would make you miserable; that you'd never care a straw in your life except for one man. You said that you'd married a man you did not love, and that—"
She lifted a slim white hand as if to ward off a blow.
"Don't! Don't!" she cried. "No matter what I said. That was then, and this is now. Besides, I don't always tell the truth. I am not as deliberate as you are, you see. Sometimes I say things on impulse; sometimes I lie with a direct purpose. And then, that night, I was not quite myself, you know. I had had a silly dream and I allowed it to affect me."
He drew his chair nearer and bent forward. He was by no means so sure of himself as he had been a moment before. It was wonderful—those tones in Nina's voice. They swayed his feelings against his better impulses. Her voice had always been her most effective weapon. Even her beauty was secondary to it.
He was conscious that his heart was pounding. It seemed to rise up chokingly with every bound. And so he stammered:
"You—you mean—you—would reconsider?"
"Ah!" she murmured. "I don't know what I mean. Only—"
"Yes, yes," he hurried her. "Only—only—"
She turned her head aside and covered her face with the hand that had checked his arraignment.
"I am so wretched!" It was little more than a whisper.
"No, no," he pleaded. "Nina, I beg of you."
His emotion swept him away, overriding all law, vaulting honor, trampling scruples. The possibility of possession revived, and the pathetic figure of Darling was forgotten.
He reached out for her, clasped her in his long, hungry arms; and, yielding, she let him draw her close to him, her head nestling against his shoulder.
"There, there," he murmured, smoothing her cheek with a hand nearly as soft as a woman's. "I did not mean it—I swear I didn't mean it. I—I love you more than anything in life."
Her arms wound about his neck, and he drew her up again until her gaze was level with his own. But, even at that moment, he saw her eyes stray across her shoulder and then suddenly grow wide as with alarm.
He felt, too, her whole figure tense, and instinctively there was conveyed to him a contagious sense of lurking danger. He was about to speak, to question, when, between lips barely parted, breathed rather than whispered even, came:
"A cobra—in the corner—where I'm looking! The pistol—quick—and don't miss!"
The pistol lay at his left hand, and he must needs swing quite around to aim after getting it. But she slipped swiftly away from him to give him free play, and he managed it very well indeed.
In the dim light he marked the cobra instantly, for a ray had been caught by its glistening brown, upreared body, and its spread hood stood out fairly distinct against the glazed panes of the long casement which stood partly ajar.
Andrews fired, and the report echoed sharply against the dead silence of the room. But there echoed, too, two other sounds, both puzzling and disconcerting. One was a metallic ring, as of a struck gong, only sharper and shorter, and the other was a hoarse, but muffled and evidently restrained, cry of pain.
Man and woman were on their feet instantly. Three strides took Andrews to the spot, and there he halted in amaze with a little exclamation of astonishment. For the cobra had toppled over, not limp and outlying, but stiffly; its coils intact, facing him, disklike.
It was an admirably modeled bronze.
In the perplexity following the discovery he turned questioningly to Nina, who was close behind him. But she only lifted a warning finger and made a sibilant sound with her lips, adjuring silence. And he noticed, strangely enough, that the look of alarm which he had detected was—in a lesser degree perhaps—still present.
She passed him, stepping over the bronze reptile; and, spreading wider the casement, went out onto the veranda.
In the act of following, the fact of the muffled cry recurred to him. Was it possible that the bullet, ricochetting from the metal casting, had found a mark beyond the window?
With one foot across the sill a scream seemed to stop his heart from beating. Certainly it held him motionless for a second or more. Yet he recovered himself in time—just in time—to catch Nina in his arms as she staggered backward, stunned and half-fainting. Nor was it any wonder that she screamed and was stunned and half-fainted.
For fate chose that moment for making her "silly dream" come true. She had seen a ghost on the veranda.
The native servants, startled by the pistol-shot, flocked in haste to the veranda. In the lead was Jowar, the Darlings'khitmatgar, whom Nina hated. And he saw her in Andrews's arms.
It was only for an instant, however. The presence of Jowar revived her like a cold shower, and she stood on her own feet with her chin in the air.
"I saw a man running," she explained. "It must have been he that shot through the window. Oh, how frightened I was!"
Thekhitmatgarinquired as to which way the miscreant had run, and Nina pointed in exactly the opposite direction from that in which she had been facing when she staggered back into young Andrews's embrace.
Jowar set off in pursuit instantly, and the others followed. All, that is, save Nina'sayah, who opportunely produced a bottle of smelling-salts and passed it to themem-sahib.
Sniffing at it, Mrs. Darling dismissed her.
When Nina and Andrews were back in the drawing-room and again quite alone he saw that she was still trembling. Moreover, in spite of the ruddy glow from the single lamp in the corner, she was as pallid as ashes.
"Dearest," he murmured, hastily encircling her slim waist with a supporting arm, "you are wonderful! Any other woman would be in hysterics."
Very gently she extricated herself from his embrace.
"I haven't lived five years in India for nothing," she said.
"But what was it?" he asked. "Why did you want me to shoot? Why—"
"I fancied that devilishkhitmatgarwas spying again," she hastened to answer, slipping into a chair. "I saw something move—out there."
"And so you made me shoot at the bronze?"
"It's a very realistic bronze, isn't it?" she asked.
But he didn't answer. "Was it thekhitmatgar?" he pressed.
And now she didn't answer.
"The bronze was a present," she went on instead. "Do you mind setting it upright again?"
He did so. "Odd I never saw it before," was his comment. "I thought I'd seen everything in this room. When I was here two days ago it seemed to me that every object spoke of you. I missed nothing. And yet—"
"That came this morning," she told him. "A gift without a card."
Young Andrews frowned.
"It's a horrid thing," he said. "I don't like it."
"It's beautiful!"
"It's ill-omened. I feel it is."
He saw her shiver again, but she tried to smile. Her pallor had grown no less.
"Tell me," he insisted, "wasit thekhitmatgar, do you think?"
"Who else could it have been? He will tell Jack Darling he saw me in your arms. And then—Hadn't you better be going? Aren't you overdue in Junnar?"
"And leave you? Never!"
"But you must," she said calmly.
"When I go you go with me. Now that I know you love me—"
"I never said I loved you. I don't. I can't. I love but one man. I know it now as never before. For just a moment I thought—" And there she stopped.
"You thought?" he questioned, suddenly agitated.
"I thought I might forget. I thought perhaps you could make me forget. I was, you see, so utterly weary of everything."
"You were right," he cried earnestly. "I can make you forget. I'll give my whole life to it. I'll—"
He bent over her, but she drew away quickly with a gesture of repulsion, which Andrews was quick to note. It cut him cruelly, and he stepped back, pained and crestfallen.
In the instant of silence that ensued he swept her with a devouring gaze from head to foot. Was he to lose her again—now, when for a second time he had been so sure?
One dainty, white-shod foot was stretched out from beneath her skirt, and as his eyes reached it a dark, smearlike stain across the toe arrested his attention and awoke a question. Impulsively he dropped to one knee and swept a finger across it.
"Nina!" he cried, springing up again, a note of alarm in his voice. "Look! There is blood on your slipper. It couldn't have been thekhitmatgar. The bullet ricochetted and wounded some one. Who was it?"
She leaned forward, her heart pounding with sudden horror, and saw it for herself.
"But how—" she queried, her breath short and quick.
"From the shrubbery at the side of the veranda. Your foot must have touched the leaves. If it had been thekhitmatgarwho was bleeding like that he couldn't have hidden it."
She was up in an instant, crying: "What have I done? Oh, what have I done?"
"Between us," said Andrews, "we've managed to wing some prowling beggar of a native, I fancy. That's all." He said it in an effort to pacify her, but he knew in his heart that it was no native.
He had known from the first that Nina's scream, emotion, and pallor were results of the unexpected. Now he was more certain than ever that he was right.
For quite a minute she paced the floor, wringing her hands. Then there was a rap on the glass of the long window, and the tall, dusky, white-clad Jowar stepped into the room. His expression was unusually grave.
"Themem-sahibis mistaken," he said. "The fleeingsahibgoes the other way. He is wounded. We follow thesahibuntil we see him enter the compound of the hotel. All the way thesahibleave trail of blood behind."
Nina had halted, her hand clutching a curtain as if to stay herself. At the words of thekhitmatgarshe swayed, and but for Andrews would have fallen, for the curtain stuff broke from its rings under her weight.
It was her companion who signed to Jowar that he might go. Then he supported her to a settee and eased her down upon it.
The cantonment at Umballa, which is four miles from the native town, boasts several hotels.
In a large upper room in one of these, not far from the bungalow of the Darlings, a burly, bearded gentleman—who had registered a few hours before as Henry Scripps, of Bombay—was at that moment impatiently and in no little pain awaiting the appearance of the English surgeon who lived nearest.
Around Mr. Scripps's left wrist was an improvised tourniquet, and the water which filled the basin on the wash-stand was claret-colored.
Mr. Scripps had just succeeded in filling a brier pipe with his right hand unaided, and was in the act of striking a match when his room door was swung hurriedly ajar to admit Mayhan, of the Buff Hussars, with his kit of surgical instruments.
"You've taken the devil's own time it appears to me," growled Mr. Scripps. "Now you're here, for God's sake, make haste!"
The greeting took the young surgeon somewhat aback.
"Sorry you think so," he returned, leisurely opening his bag and pretending that the catch had caught by way of retaliation. "As a matter of fact, I came on the instant."
Scripps rumbled under his breath and emitted a volume of gray smoke.
"Shot in the hand, I understand," Mayhan went on, wrenching the bag open at length with considerable fuss and feather.
Scripps grunted an affirmative.
"How did it happen?" the surgeon inquired, taking out a probe.
But the wounded man didn't answer. He dropped into a chair under the light and said: "Come now, make haste."
Mayhan emptied the blood-stained water from the basin, poured some fresh, and mixed an antiseptic in solution. Then he began cleaning the wound.
"Rather nasty, that," he commented. "The bullet has dug in here between the two outer metacarpal bones, and I'm not sure it hasn't shattered the trapezium."
"Get it out," cried Scripps impatiently, "and talk about it afterward. I'll grant you know the anatomy of the hand and the name of every bone in it. That's about the first thing you're taught."
Mayhan gritted his teeth. The man was certainly a boor. Still there was perhaps provocation in the pain he was suffering. Nevertheless, the surgeon rather enjoyed the probing. He knew how he was hurting, yet his victim wouldn't give him the satisfaction of wincing.
He drew it out at last and held it up to the light.
"I know that," he said, inspecting it. "A forty-five of the sort they use in those new American automatics. Has yours the new safety device?"
Scripps's teeth let go his lip long enough to growl: "No! That was the devil of it!"
As the young surgeon proceeded with his work of cleansing he continued to chatter:
"I was hoping it had. I wanted to see it. Colonel Darling was speaking of it last night at the club. There's a friend of his here—a young fellow named Andrews, from over on the Bombay side—who has one. He's promised Darling to show it him."
Scripps was pale from pain, but his grit was indomitable. He choked back a groan and said:
"Darling? Colonel Darling? I think I know him."
"I dare say."
Scripps relapsed into silence again. The wound still hurt abominably.
"Darling distinguished himself at Spion Kop, you know," Mayhan gave tribute as he unwound some iodoform gauze. "Fine chap, the colonel."
But his patient only grunted.
"Same man you know?" the other pressed.
Scripps nodded.
"I'll mention you're here."
There was no reply.
"Know him well?" inquired the surgeon guardedly.
Scripps had his lip in his teeth again, and it was bleeding; but he let it go.
"Better than he knows me, apparently," he said with a grim smile.
"He'll remember your name, I suppose?"
"I'm sure he won't. He won't know who Scripps is from Adam."
Mayhan, mollified now in a measure by the man's fortitude, used the cocain that he had denied him at first and proceeded with the dressing.
"If you're so keen on telling the colonel, just say you've seen Nibbetts," the brusk one suggested.
"Nibbetts?"
"Yes. He'll know then."
"I'll remember. I'll probably see him to-night at the club. He may look you up at once, if you don't mind. Fine fellow, the colonel."
The relief from the cocain was instantaneous, but Scripps's manner showed no change.
"That's twice you said that," he rumbled. "There are some that don't agree with you."
"I know," returned Mayhan. "Some never agree with any one. That's where the word disagreeable comes from."
Scripps made no retort, and the dressing continued in silence. When it was finished and Mayhan was repacking his kit, he ventured: "Nibbetts, you said, didn't you?"
The merest movement of the tawny, leonine head gave assent.
"I'll tell him." And then the surgeon took a closer look. Scripps's bearded chin was on his breast. His face, in spite of its tan, was deathly white. "By the way," he added, "you'd better have a brandy peg. You've lost some blood, you know, and—"
"That's my business," the other interrupted roughly. "You're a sawbones, not a medical man. And a sawbonessans merci, at that. Otherwise you'd have begun with the cocain, instead of ending with it."
Mayhan turned away without another word and made a wry face behind the savage's back. Two minutes later he was down the stairs and in the hotel porch, where he was confronted by young Andrews.
"I saw you go in," lied the latter nervously. "And I've been waiting for you. What happened? I've a reason for asking."
The young surgeon, whose faculty for putting two and two together was as acute as the next man's, sensed the reason at once.
"He won't die," he answered—"if that's what you want to know."
"Who won't die?" Andrews came back evasively. He had volunteered to get what information he could for Mrs. Darling, and he was distinctly uncomfortable under the attitude taken by this man whom he had started to question.
"The boor upstairs who got in the way of someone's forty-five-caliber automatic. It wasn't by any chance yours, I suppose?"
The blood rushed to Andrews's face, but in the dim light of the porch it is probable that Mayhan failed to observe it.
"I don't indulge in indiscriminate pistol practice," he defended weakly. "I heard a man had been wounded and came in here, and I strolled over to inquire out of idle curiosity."
"He won't die," said Mayhan again, and prepared to move away.
"But who is he?" asked Andrews, following a step.
"The most insufferable beast I've met in years—name of Scripps."
"Army man?"
"No; civilian. Or uncivilian, rather."
"Badly hurt?"
"Hand torn up a bit. Anything else you'd like to know?"
Andrews hesitated. Then: "Say how it happened?"
Mayhan grinned toward the shadows.
"Oh, yes," he answered wickedly, "of course! Naturally, I asked him."