Captain Desmond, V.C. Part 57

"Theo," she said softly, with an eloquent gesture of appeal, "you don't know how it hurts me to seem hard and unfeeling about Ladybird, when I understand so much too well the spirit that is prompting you to do this thing. I frankly confess you are right from your point of view. But there remains my point of view; and so long as I have the right to prevent it, you shall not spoil your life and hers."

Desmond would have been more, or less, than man if he could have heard her unmoved; and as he lay looking up at her he was tempted beyond measure to take possession of those appealing hands, to draw her down to him, and thank her from his heart for her brave words. But he merely shifted uneasily.

"I don't quite understand you, Honor," he said slowly. "It is strange that you should--care so much about what I do with my life."

The words startled her, yet she met them without flinching.

"Is it? I think it would be far more strange if I had lived with you for a year without learning--to care. That is why I can never say 'Yes' to your request."

"And I am determined that you shall say 'Yes' to it in the end."

The note of immobility in his low voice made her feel powerless to resist him; but she steeled herself against the sensation by main force of will.

"At least I can forbid any further mention of it till you are fitter to cope with such a disturbing subject. Are you aware that it's only two o'clock? And you need sleep more than anything else just now. I'll give you some beef-jelly, and sit in my own room for an hour, or I believe you will never go off again at all."

But when she returned at the end of an hour she found him still awake.

"Honor,"--he began; but she checked him with smiling decision. "Not another word to-night, Theo, or I must go altogether."

The threat was more compelling than she knew; and sitting down by the table, she took up her vigil as before.

CHAPTER x.x.x.

SHE SHALL UNDERSTAND.

"The light of every soul burns upward; but we are all candles in a wind; and due allowance must be made for atmospheric disturbances."

--GEO. MEREDITH.

Certain souls, like certain bodies, cannot breathe for long at a stretch the rarefied atmosphere of the heights; and towards the end of the second week Evelyn's zeal began to wear thin. Dr Mackay had at last spoken hopefully as to the fate of Desmond's eyes. Night-nursing was no longer a necessity; and with the relief from anxiety, from the effort to meet the demands upon her small stock of strength, came the inevitable drop to the comfortable commonplaces of everyday life.

Nor was she alone in her sensations. In varying degrees they affected every inmate of the blue bungalow during that last week of Desmond's imprisonment; and it is probable that Honor unconsciously relaxed her mental concentration upon Evelyn which had been responsible for more than either knew. Her midnight talk with Desmond, and the knowledge that a second contest lay before her, gave her food for much troubled reflection; while the comparative lightness of sick-room duties left her free to grapple with arrears of letters, work, and household accounts. Thus, being only human, and very much absorbed in matters practical, she made the fatal mistake of relaxing her vigilance at the very moment when Evelyn needed it most. But it is written that "no man may redeem his brother"; and, soon or late the relapse must have come.

Honor could not hope to lay permanent hold upon the volatile spirit of her friend.

Desmond himself, whose patience under the burden of illness and of a nerve-shattering fear had amazed even those who knew him best, was approaching the irritable stage of convalescence,--the strong man's rebellion against Nature's unhurried methods; against enforced restriction and imprisonment, when renewed life is pulsing through every artery, renewed vigour stirring the reawakened brain.

Nor were matters enlivened by Mackay's decree that, if risk were to be avoided, the detested shade must be worn for three full weeks or a month. Thus to imprisonment was added the gall and wormwood of total dependence upon others; the unthinkable prospect of parting with Paul, with the Border itself--with everything that had hitherto made life worth living; and, worse than all, the undercurrent of striving to ignore that veiled danger, which he refused to name, even in his thoughts, and which lay like a millstone upon his heart.

Thus there were inevitable moments when his spirit kicked against the p.r.i.c.ks; when his return to life and health seemed a parody of a blessing, a husk emptied of the life-giving grain. In these moods Evelyn found herself powerless to cope with him; and was not a little aggrieved when she discovered that his unvarying need, on black days, was the companionship of Paul Wyndham, whose insight detected some hidden trouble, and who, as a matter of course, devoted every spare moment to his friend.

One thing Desmond missed beyond all else--the sound of music in the house. Since the terrible evening of his home-coming, the piano had not been opened; and his recent experience of the effect Honor's music could produce on him made him chary of asking her to play.

He saw very little of her in these days. Now and then she would come and read to him; but their former open-hearted intercourse seemed irrevocably a thing of the past. With the return of the troops, however, interests multiplied. Desmond's hold on the hearts of all who knew him had seldom been so practically proven; and the man was moved beyond measure at that which he could not fail to perceive. His small study was rarely empty, and often overcrowded with men--Sikhs, Gunners, Sappers, and, above all, his own brother officers, who filled the place with tobacco-smoke, the cheerful clink of ice against long tumblers, and frequent explosions of deep-chested laughter; while Desmond threw himself whole-heartedly into the good minute and enjoyed it to the full.

To Evelyn this new state of things was a little disconcerting. During Theo's illness she, as his wife, had enjoyed special attention and consideration; and since her incomprehensible refusal of his offer to throw up the Frontier, had even regarded herself as something of a heroine, if an unwilling one. Now, all of a sudden, she felt deserted, unimportant, and more or less "out of it all." The past fortnight seemed an uplifted dream, from which she had awakened to find herself sitting among the dust and stones of prose and hard facts. Yet she could not complain definitely of anything or any one. Honor and Theo were kind and tender, as always; but the one was temporarily busy, and the other very naturally enjoying a reversion to masculine society.

n.o.body seemed to want her. There seemed no particular use for her any more.

To make matters worse, the whole station wore a subdued air. The Club compound was practically deserted; and Evelyn's first outing in that direction left her with no desire to repeat the experiment for the present. The Sikhs had lost a popular captain; while a Gunner subaltern, who had returned seriously wounded, was being nursed by Mrs Conolly and the only woman in the battery.

This sort of thing was, as Theo had said, "part and parcel" of life on the Frontier; it was to this that she had condemned herself for the next twenty years at least; by which time she supposed she would be far too old to care for the frivolities of life at all! If only Theo would be generous and give her a second chance, she would not let it slip this time--she would not indeed!

Altogether the aspect of things in general was sufficiently depressing. Then one afternoon she met Owen Kresney; and all at once life seemed to take on a new complexion. Here, at least, was some one who wanted her, when every one else seemed only to want Theo; some one who was really glad to see her--rather too emphatically glad, perhaps; but the eagerness of his greeting flattered her, and she had overlooked the rest. She had been returning in her jhampan from her melancholy outing to the Club, when he had caught sight of her in the distance, and cantering up to her side, had dismounted, and shaken hands as though they had not met for a year.

"How awfully white and pulled down you look!" he had said with low-toned sympathy. "They must have been working you too hard. They forget that you are not a strapping woman like Miss Meredith."

"No one has worked me too hard," she answered, flushing at the veiled implication against her husband. "I wanted to do as much as the others."

"Of course you did. But you are too delicate to work like that, and it isn't fair to take advantage of your unselfishness. I hope you're going off to the Hills very soon, now that Desmond is better?"

"Yes, I hope so too."

Her voice had an unconscious weariness, and he bent a little closer, scanning her face with a concern that bordered on tenderness. "We have thought of you a great deal these two weeks, Mrs Desmond," he said.

"We hardly cared to go out to tennis, or anything, while you were in such trouble. But now it has all come out right, you must be dreadfully in want of cheering up. Won't you come home with me and have a talk, like old times? Linda would be awfully pleased to see you again."

The temptation was irresistible. It emphasised her vague sense of loneliness, of being left out in the cold. The longing to be comforted and made much of was strong upon her.

"It is very nice of you to want me," she had said, as simply as a child. To which he had replied with prompt, if somewhat cheap, gallantry that no one could possibly help wanting her; and his reward had been a flush, as delicate in tint as the inner surface of a sh.e.l.l.

This man had one strong point in his favour--he invariably talked to her about herself; a trick Desmond had never learnt, nor ever would.

She had spent more than an hour in Miss Kresney's stuffy, dusty drawing-room, and had left it with a pleasantly revived sense of her own importance; had left Kresney himself in a state of carefully repressed triumph; for she had promised him an early morning ride in two days' time.

It was all harmless enough so far as she was concerned--merely a case of flattered vanity and idle hands. But the strong nature, the large purpose, lies eternally at the mercy of life's little things.

She said nothing to Honor or Theo of her meeting with Kresney, or of the coming ride. A fortnight of submission to the former had evoked a pa.s.sing gleam of independence. They would probably make a fuss; and since they neither of them needed her, she was surely at liberty to amuse herself as she pleased.

On her return a buzz of deep voices greeted her from the study, and it transpired that Honor had gone over to Mrs Conolly's. Thus she had leisure before dinner to argue the matter out in her mind to her own complete justification. If Mr Kresney chose to be polite to her, why should she rebuff him and hurt his feelings, just because Theo had some stupid prejudice against him? On the other hand, where was the use of vexing Theo, when every one was doing their best to shield him from needless irritation? As soon as his eyes were right they would go to the Hills together. She would have him all to herself; and Kresney sank into immediate insignificance at the thought.

Meanwhile the man's a.s.siduity and thinly veiled admiration formed a welcome relief in a desert of dulness. Besides, one was bound to be pleasant to a man when one practically owed him two hundred rupees.

Unwittingly she shelved the fact that Kresney was beginning to exercise a disturbing fascination over her; that the insistence underlying his humility alternately pleased and frightened her; the lurking fear of what he might say next gave a distinct flavour of excitement to their every meeting.

The slippery path that lies between truth and direct falsehood had always been fatally easy for her to follow; and she followed it now more from natural instinct, and from the child's dread of making people "cross," than from any deliberate intent to deceive. It was so much easier to say nothing. Therefore she said nothing; and left the future to look after itself.

On returning from her first ride with Kresney, she found Honor in the verandah giving orders to a sais. The girl lifted her out of the saddle, and kissed her on both cheeks.

"Such a very early Ladybird!" she said, laughing. "You might have let me come too."

Accordingly they went out together the next morning, but on future occasions Evelyn returned more cautiously, and changed her habit before appearing at the breakfast-table. She went out once or twice in the afternoons also, and Honor's thoughts flew to the Kresneys as a matter of course; but remembering a certain incident at Murree, she held her peace. She was disheartened, and very far from satisfied, nevertheless.

In this fashion ten days slipped uneventfully past. Then, on a certain afternoon, Kresney again met Evelyn by chance,--and begged her to come back with him to tea before going home. Her consent was a foregone conclusion; and as they neared Kresney's whitewashed gate-posts, Captain Olliver trotted past. He had already met Miss Kresney jogging out to tea on a long-tailed pony of uncertain age; and glancing casually back over his shoulder, he saw Mrs Desmond's jhampan entering the gateway. Whereat he swore vigorously under his breath, and urged his pony to a brisker pace.

But of these facts Evelyn was blissfully unaware. Her uppermost thought was a happy consciousness of looking her best. From the forget-me-nots in her hat to the last frill of her India muslin gown all was blue--the fragile blue of the far horizon at dawn. And Kresney had an eye for such things.

She started slightly on discovering that the drawing-room was empty.