Banked Fires Part 51

"Is it really your wish that I should do this thing? Remember, she is hateful to me--and she can never, in any sense, be my wife again!"

"I am--glad!" she could not help exclaiming. "Then the sacrifice will not be so terrible, after all!"

"Perhaps not," he answered, his eyes full on hers with a pa.s.sion of longing. "Will you let me think it over?"

"Decide quickly!" she begged him.

"There is nothing I would not do for you," he repeated.

Honor rose with her gracious smile of grat.i.tude and trust, and they parted without touching hands. When she returned home, the reaction from the strain of their meeting prostrated her for hours. Her parents feared that the climate of Muktiarbad was, at last, telling on her healthy const.i.tution as it had told on Ray Meredith's.

"Perhaps we shall have to send you home!" her mother sighed anxiously.

"Not a bit of it!" Honor a.s.serted. "The cold weather will put me to rights very soon."

"Perhaps you have something on your mind, darling?"

"I have. I am worrying badly for Joyce Meredith."

"Joyce will get nothing more than she deserves. Why should you suffer?

It is n.o.body's business to meddle between husband and wife."

"Somebody is already meddling, so it may need counter-meddling to put it right."

"I shouldn't bother my head. We have enough to do without trying to act Providence in the case of fools."

"We are not trying to act Providence, but Providence needs to use us. It seems we are just so many p.a.w.ns in the great Game."

"It has often puzzled me what Captain Dalton has been after," said Mrs.

Bright, eyeing her daughter rather narrowly. Fear had preyed considerably on her mind, that the doctor had been playing fast and loose with her child, to her sorrow. "You and he have been fast friends.

Once you told me there was an 'understanding'; but nothing seems to have come of it, though you have corresponded very regularly."

"I showed you some of his letters, darling," Honor temporised, faithful to her intention of bearing her own burdens alone, if possible.

"Nice, manly letters they were, and most interesting of his work and things in general. But I am none the wiser."

"What did you understand of our friendship?"

"That there was an 'understanding,'" her mother repeated.

"I do dislike that word in the sense you are applying it!" said Honor with a forced laugh. "We are not going to get married, anyway, for Captain Dalton is a married man."

"Honey!" Mrs. Bright was dumbfounded. "Since when have you known this?"

"For quite a long time; since early summer, in fact. You have met his wife--Mrs. Dalton, the nurse. Everyone here fancied her name was a coincidence. She worked to come here that she might see her husband and get him to take her back." Having said so much, Honor went on to explain further the cause of the breach between husband and wife and the irrevocable nature of it. "I am telling you this, dear, as you have a right to know the truth, being my mother. It is, however, a personal confidence, which no one else need share," Honor concluded.

"Why did you not mention it to me before?" Mrs. Bright asked while a light dawned on her mind.

"Because I have been very sorry for him, and, somehow, I felt I ought to respect his confidence. But it will, inevitably, be known in time, and then you will be able to say you were not uninformed."

"Honor, are you in love with Captain Dalton?" Mrs. Bright asked pointedly.

Honor winced. "Yes, Mother. And he loves me."

Mrs. Bright looked faint. "_You_, my child, in love with a married man!"

This was, indeed, a blow! It accounted, fully, for Honor's discouragement of eligible suitors in Mussoorie, which had greatly vexed her mother at the time. "This is dreadful!"

"Not at all, except for the fact that it is naturally a grief to me,--to us both; for, as you see, we can never marry."

Mrs. Bright was entirely astray. When other girls were convicted of being in love with married men, it had always sounded so immoral! But no one could think of Honor as such. She was plainly an upright and honourable girl.

"Yet you encouraged his writing, and answered his letters! You meet, to all appearances, as if nothing is wrong. What am I to make of it?"

"That we are very much to be pitied. Writing and meeting openly are all that are left to us."

"He should have gone away--severed his connection with Muktiarbad. Not have stayed to fan the flame!"

"Life is too short for needless sacrifices, Mother darling. Having made the greatest, we refuse to suffer more than we need. Sometimes, if you are starving for food, a bare crust will keep you alive. We are subsisting on bare crusts and are grateful."

"I consider Captain Dalton has not behaved at all well. He knew his position and went out of his way to make you care!"

"Ah, no!--it just happened!" said Honor, her eyes suddenly flooded with tears.

Mrs. Bright looked at her daughter's white and sorrowful face, and away again. She could not bear to see the suffering there. All the traditions of her life caused her to stand aghast at the idea of dalliance with a sin so subtle and alluring as this. It should be the root-and-branch method. Nothing else would suffice to save her child! Yet her own eyes overflowed in sympathy.

"Oh, my poor little Honey!" She held out her arms and Honor took refuge in them to weep unrestrainedly. "We are trying to be so good!" she cried.

After kissing her daughter tenderly, Mrs. Bright said: "You cannot temporise with forbidden fruit, Honey. Eve did, you know. You are but human, therefore fallible, however good you are trying to be. The time will come when the heart, torn with longing, becomes too weak to resist.

Specious arguments are insidious and irresistible, and you will go down.

_Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall!_ That is why we pray, _Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil_. Our Lord understood human nature better than we ever shall, that is why there is only one thing to do, and that is, to fly from temptation. We pray to be 'delivered,' but praying alone doesn't suffice if we are to be honest with ourselves and G.o.d. There is nothing that will save us, but _doing right_."

"We are doing nothing wrong!" Honor pleaded.

"The wrong lies in the lack of moral courage to deal drastically with the wound. If poison remains, it is bound to fester. Captain Dalton should go away."

"We were obliged to let ourselves down gently. It has been so miserable!" Down went Honor's head on her mother's shoulder, and the tears fell fast.

Tears also fell on her dark head. Mrs. Bright's heart was wrung with pity. She had said enough for the present, so now devoted herself to soothing her beloved child's sorrow with her never-failing sympathy.

Honor was a good girl, and to be trusted entirely to look her trouble squarely in the face and conquer it; and the mother's heart was lifted in prayer that she might be enabled to aid and strengthen her child.

It was very shortly after this that war broke out, and there was so much to think of and talk about in the Station, that private affairs were temporarily set aside. The newspapers were read eagerly in detail; correspondence with dear ones over the seas was quickened with new interest; and everyone, even in such a little place as Muktiarbad, found plenty to do to help in the common cause. War-work parties were organised, at which the ladies engaged in knitting woollen comforts for the troops, and in making up parcels to be dispatched to the front and to prisoners in Germany; and every member had some bit of war news to discuss with the others at the Club as they rested from their games under the waving _punkha_.

"It will drive me silly," Tommy had said from the first, "if I have to loaf about in a place like this when all my pals and school contemporaries have volunteered, or are in the thick of it, doing their bit."

"You are doing your bit, just as any one who is killing Germans," said Mrs. Ironsides who had returned from Darjeeling. "What is to become of us all, if all medically fit civil officers are sent to fight? Why, we should be murdered in our beds, if it were not for the Police!"

Tommy thought he would cheerfully risk Mrs. Ironsides being murdered in her bed, if the Government would only allow him to serve "for the duration"; and he continued to send in applications for leave to join up, with a persistency worthy of the Great Cause, in the hopes that constant dripping would wear away the stony indifference with which they were treated.