Captain Desmond, V.C. Part 38

In the dining-room he found Honor ready equipped for the start. She looked paler than usual, and there were blue shadows under her eyes; but she answered his greeting cheerfully enough, and busied herself with pouring out his tea.

"Ladybird is changing into a morning gown," he explained. "She never went to bed last night poor child!"

"Oh, I wish I had known that! I did my best to comfort her."

"So she told me: and you succeeded. You generally do."

He glanced at her thoughtfully, a shade of anxiety in his eyes.

"You're not looking as fit yourself as you did a fortnight ago," he said.

"Don't talk nonsense," she answered with a touch of impatience.

"Well, I hope it may be nonsense. But I feel responsible for you. Take good care of yourself, please, while I am away; and--take care of my Ladybird as well.... Hullo, there's Paul!"

Wyndham entered as he spoke, wearing the undress uniform of station life: and Honor had seldom been so glad to see him as at that moment.

The two men stood facing one another for quite a long time. Then they smiled, and sat down to breakfast. Both knew that in that long look they had said all that need ever be said between them and it sufficed.

Evelyn came in a few minutes later, pale and subdued, but not uncheerful. Her real sorrow, and no less real determination to control it, gave a rare touch of dignity to the grace and simplicity that were hers by nature;--a fact which her husband was quick to perceive and admire. Both men, by a natural instinct, were a trifle more attentive to her than usual, without the least hint of intrusion upon the privacy of her grief; and it is in just such acts of un.o.btrusive chivalry that Englishmen, of the best type, stand unrivalled throughout the world.

The meal over, Evelyn accompanied them into the verandah, and stood smiling and waving her hand to them as they rode away, with a composure born of a stunned sense of the unreality of it all. Theo was just going down to the Lines, and he would be back to tiffin as a matter of course. Nevertheless, half an hour later the rims of her eyes were again reddened with weeping: and donning a sun-hat, she hurried out to a point where she could watch the little force move across the s.p.a.ce of open country between the cantonment and the bastioned fort that stands at the entrance to the hills.

By the time Evelyn reached her coign of vantage, the cavalcade was already nearing the prescribed mile where the final parting would take place, to the strains of "Auld Lang Syne"; a piece of gratuitous torment, honoured by custom, which many would have willingly foregone.

The slowly retreating ma.s.s, half enveloped in dust, showed a few shades darker than the desert itself. A patch of vermilion indicated the Pioneer band, now blaring forth, with placid unconcern, "The Girl I Left Behind Me!" Lesser specks denoted officers, riding out, like the rest of the station, to speed the parting troops.

The cavalry riding in the van were a mere moving dust-cloud, followed by artillery, infantry, ambulance doolies, borne by half-naked Kahars; while a jumble of men and animals, camp-followers and transport, formed, as it were, a disorderly tail to the more compact body.

Camels, groaning under tent-poles and heavy baggage, shuffled and swayed on the outskirts, with leisurely contempt; gra.s.s-cutters bobbed cheerfully along on ponies of no birth or breeding, that appeared oddly misshapen under vast loads of gra.s.s: and at the last came miniature transport carts, closely followed by the rear-guard, a mixed body of all arms.

While Evelyn still watched, the halt was called, and the disturbing strains of parting reached her where she stood. Hill, plain, and nearer objects lost their crispness of outline; and she went back to the silent house awaiting her,--the lively strains of the return march already sounding in her ears.

As she stood still for a moment, fighting against her emotion, Owen Kresney rode past. She barely acknowledged his greeting; and he had the tact to pa.s.s on without speech. For the man saw plainly that the coveted opportunity for striking a blow at Desmond, behind his back, was very near at hand; and he could afford to bide his time.

CHAPTER XX.

THE DEVIL'S PECULIARITY?

"This is the devil's peculiarity, he attacks us through our softest places."

--SUDERMANN.

After the departure of the troops, life settled down gradually into its normal groove.

Frank Olliver had moved into the blue bungalow, at Desmond's request, an arrangement more satisfying to Honor than to his wife; and the Pioneer Regiment from Pindi had added a couple of ladies to the station. These were made welcome with the prompt friendliness which is India's distinctive charm; and the bachelors, in due course, made the circuit of Kohat's handful of bungalows. The station was a few degrees less cheerful, owing to the absence of its own particular men; but in India spirits must be kept up at all costs, if only as an antidote to the moral microbes of the land; and the usual small sociabilities flourished accordingly.

Evelyn took part in these at first with a chastened air. Not that she a.s.sumed what she did not feel; but that her grief, when it reached a less acute stage, gave her a soothing sense of importance; a kind of dismal distinction, such as a child feels in the possession of a badly cut finger or a loose tooth. The wind bloweth where it listeth; and such thistledown natures are entirely at its mercy. They cannot take deep root, even where they would. For them the near triumphs over the far. Like Esau, they will sell their birthright cheerfully for a mess of pottage; and they are the raw material of half the tragedies in the world.

Thus, with the pa.s.sing of uneventful days, Evelyn began to find it rather uninteresting to be quietly and comfortably unhappy; and the aspect of subdued plaintiveness which she half consciously adopted was, in truth, singularly becoming. She was one of those favoured women who have the good fortune to do most things becomingly. Her very tears became her, as dewdrops do a rose.

Frank commented on the fact to Honor, in characteristic fashion.

"Sure, 'tis a thousand pities we can't all of us look so pretty when we put on a melancholy face! It makes me look such a scarecrow meself, that I'm bound to keep on smiling, out o' sheer vanity, even if me heart's in two!"

"That's one way of putting it," Honor answered, with a very soft light in her eyes. She had begun to understand lately that this brave woman was by no means so inured to the hardship and danger of the men she loved as she would fain have them and the world believe: and the two drew very near to one another in these weeks of eager looking for news from the hills.

It is not to be supposed that Kresney failed to observe the gradual change in Evelyn's bearing. The man displayed remarkable tact and skill in detecting the psychological moment for advance. He contented himself at first with conversations in the Club Gardens and an air of deferential sympathy, which was in itself a subtle form of flattery.

But on a certain afternoon of regimental sports, when Evelyn appeared, radiant and smiling, in one of her most irresistible Simla frocks, with an obviously appreciative Pioneer subaltern in attendance, Kresney perceived that the time to a.s.sert himself had arrived.

After a short but decisive engagement, he routed that indignant subaltern; and with a quiet a.s.surance which by no means displeased her, took and kept possession of Mrs Desmond for the remainder of the afternoon.

That evening he enjoyed his after-dinner cigar as he had not enjoyed it for many weeks. Mrs Desmond was obviously tired of her pretty pathetic pose; and he intended to avail himself to the utmost of her rebound towards lightheartedness. He flattered himself that he read her like an open book; that she would be as wax in his hands if he chose to push his advantage. But for all his acuteness, he failed to detect the one good grain hid in a bushel of chaff; or to perceive that it was not indifference, but the very burden of her anxiety, that drove Evelyn to seek distraction in the form of any amus.e.m.e.nt lying near to her hand.

Letters from the Samana were few and brief. The last ones had brought news that the expedition seemed likely to prove a more serious affair than had been antic.i.p.ated. Unknown to Honor, Evelyn cried herself to sleep that night, and awoke to the decision that she would not be so foolishly unhappy any more. She would shut her eyes to the haunting horrors, and forget. Theo had forbidden her to make herself too miserable. Why should she not obey him? And she proceeded to do so in her own equivocal fashion.

After the first effort it was fatally easy to slip back into the old habit of accepting Kresney's companionship, and his frequent invitations to the house;--fatally easy to slip even a few degrees farther without the smallest suspicion of his hand on the reins. She took to riding with him--sometimes in the early mornings, sometimes in the evenings; and these leisurely rides--for Evelyn was no horsewoman--suited Kresney's taste infinitely better than tennis. By cautious degrees they increased in frequency and duration; till it became evident to the least observant that little Mrs Desmond was consoling herself to good purpose.

Honor watched the new trend of events with suppressed wrath and disgust. That a woman who had won the love of Theo Desmond should descend, even for pa.s.sing amus.e.m.e.nt, upon such a travesty of manhood, roused in her a bitterness of rebellion which she had no right to feel; but which, being only human, she could not altogether banish from her heart. Nor were matters made easier by Frank Olliver's periodical outbursts on the subject. The hot-headed Irishwoman had a large share of the unreasoning prejudice of her race. She hated as she loved, wholesale, and without reason. She could make no shadow of excuse for Evelyn Desmond; and was only restrained from speaking out her mind by a wholesome fear of her own temper, and a desire to avoid a serious breach with Theo Desmond's wife. But with Honor it was otherwise. Honor, she maintained, had a right to speak, and no right to be silent; and goaded thus, the girl did at length make a tentative effort at remonstrance.

But upon her first words Evelyn flushed hotly.

"For goodness' sake, Honor, don't start interfering again!" she said, in a tone which effectually quenched further discussion.

Thus, without definite intention, they drifted a little apart. Honor, haunted by a sense of having failed Theo at a time of need, found what consolation she might in her growing intimacy with Paul Wyndham; while Evelyn went on her way unchallenged, blind to every consideration but the need of escape from the haunting dread that she would never see her husband again. The dissonance between her feelings and her actions troubled her no whit. Her notions of loyalty were peculiar and inconsistent, like herself; and it is probable that she never gave a thought to Kresney's interpretation of her conduct, or to the dangerous nature of the game she was playing.

The man himself was well content, and increasingly self-satisfied. He could be an intelligent and mildly amusing companion, when it served his turn; and he was beginning to lose sight of Desmond in keen enjoyment of the oldest pastime in the world. They fell into occasional spells of silence now as they rode--silence such as familiarity breeds, and which is not without a degree of danger at a certain stage of intimacy between a man and a woman.

They had been riding thus, for some time, on an afternoon of early March. Their horses' heads had been turned homeward; for the sun was near to setting, and on the Frontier it is unsafe to be out after dusk. Evelyn's reins lay loose upon the grey mare's neck and her long lashes shadowed her cheek. She seemed to have forgotten her companion's presence. Kresney's eyes rested speculatively on her finely chiselled profile. He found her, on close acquaintance, more charming than he had expected. She possessed an elusiveness that captivates more surely than beauty. A man could never feel quite certain of her. She had not been in a very "coming-on disposition"

that afternoon. His interest was piqued in consequence, and he was in the mood to dare a good deal.

He would have given much to know what she was thinking of; and the knowledge would have administered a wholesome shock to his vanity. He decided to surprise her with the question, and read the answer in her too expressive face.

"What _is_ the absorbing subject?" he demanded suddenly. His tone was a sufficient index of his progress during the past fortnight.

She flushed and laughed softly, without looking up; and he drew his own conclusions.

"I don't tell my thoughts! But I'm sorry if I was rude. I was thinking, for one thing," she added lightly and mendaciously, "that I wish it was nearer time to go up to the Hills."

"I don't wonder at that. You're wasted in a place like Kohat."

"That's rubbish!" she rebuked him. But her pleasure in the words was self-evident.

"And that's modesty!" he capped her promptly, enjoying the deepening carnation of the cheek turned towards him. "Will it be Murree again this year?"

"Yes; I suppose so." She spoke without enthusiasm.