Miss Stuart's Legacy Part 5

"Insult!" echoed d.i.c.k drearily, letting her hands slip from his.

"There you go again; but fellows do kiss their cousins sometimes."

Had there been any grown-up spectators to this scene they must have laughed at the full-blown tragedy of both faces, and the alternate bathos and pathos of the pleas. They were so young, so very young, this girl and boy, and neither of them really meant what they said, Belle especially, with her vicious retort: "I am not your cousin, and I'm glad of it. I'm glad that I have nothing to do with you."

As before her harshness overreached itself, and made a man of him.

"You want to put me out of your life altogether, Belle," he said more steadily, "because I have made you angry. You have a right to be angry, and I will go. But not for always. You don't wish that yourself, I think, for you are kind. Oh Belle! be like yourself! say one kind word before I go."

Again the consciousness of power made her merciless, and she stood silent, yet tingling all over with a half-fearful curiosity as to what he would say next.

"One kind word," he pleaded; "only one."

He waited a minute, then, with a curse on his own folly in expecting pity, flung out of the room. So it was all over! A genuine regret came into the girl's heart and she crept away miserably to her own room, and cried.

"I wonder d.i.c.k isn't home to dinner," remarked Mrs. Stuart when that meal came round. "I do hope he isn't going back to his old habit of staying out. He heard to-day that his application for a post in the Salt Department was refused, and he has no patience like my own boys.

I do hope he will come to no harm."

The empty chair renewed Belle's remorseful regret.

"Well! I can't have him kicking his heels in my office much longer,"

remarked the Colonel crossly. "The head-clerk complains of him.

Confound his impudence! he actually interfered in the accounts the other day, and showed regular distrust. I must have good feeling in the office; that's a _sine qua non_."

"Oh, d.i.c.k's got a splendid opinion of himself," broke in Stanley. "He had the cheek to tell Raby yesterday that he played too much _ecarte_ with--" The speaker remembered his audience too late.

Colonel Stuart grew purple and breathless. "Do you mean to say that the boy,--that _boy_--presumed to speak to Raby,--to _my friend_ Raby--about his private actions? Lucilla! What is the world coming to?"

This was a problem never propounded to his wife save under dire provocation, and the answer invariably warned him not to expect his own high standard from the world. This time she ventured upon a timid addition to the effect that rumour did accuse Mr. Raby of playing high.

"And if he does," retorted the Colonel, "he can afford to pay. Raby, my dear, is a fine young fellow, with good principles,--deuced good principles, let me tell you."

"I am very glad to hear it, Charles, I'm sure; for it would be a pity if a nice, clever, young man, who would make any girl a good husband, were to get into bad habits."

"Raby is a man any girl might be proud to marry. He is a good fellow."

He looked at Belle, who smiled at him absently; she was wondering where d.i.c.k could be.

"Raby isn't a Christian," remarked Mabel. "He told us yesterday he was something else. What was it, Maud?"

"An erotic Buddhist."

"Esoteric," suggested Belle.

"It's all the same. He said we were the three Thibetan sisters and he worshipped us all. But we know who it is, don't we?"

"How you giggle, girls!" complained Colonel Stuart fretfully. "Belle never giggles. Dear child, I will teach you _ecarte_ this evening. It will amuse you."

It amused him, which was more to the purpose; in addition it prevented him from falling asleep after dinner, which he was particularly anxious not to do that evening. So they played until, just as the clock was striking ten, a step was heard outside, and Colonel Stuart rose with a relieved remark that it must be John Raby at last. The opening door, however, only admitted truant d.i.c.k with rather a flushed face. "From Raby," he said handing a note to his uncle. "I met the man outside."

The scowl, which the sight of the culprit had raised on Colonel Stuart's face, deepened as he read a palpable excuse for not coming over to play _ecarte_. It seemed inconceivable that d.i.c.k's remonstrance could have wrought this disappointment; yet even the suggestion was unpleasant. He turned on his nephew only too anxious to find cause of quarrel. It was not hard to find, for d.i.c.k was manifestly excited. "At your old tricks again, sir?" said his uncle sternly. "You've been drinking in the bazaar."

Now d.i.c.k, ever since the day on which Belle had come to him in distress over Charlie's abandonment to "pegs," had forsworn liquor, as he had forsworn many another bad habit. Even when driven to despair, he had not flown to the old anodyne. But his very virtue had been his undoing, and a single stiff tumbler of whisky and water, forced on him by a friend who was startled by his looks as he returned f.a.gged from a wander into the wilderness, had gone to his unaccustomed head in a most unlooked-for degree. The injustice of the accusation maddened him, and he retorted fiercely: "I haven't had so much to drink as you have, sir."

"Don't speak to your uncle like that, d.i.c.k," cried Mrs. Stuart alarmed. "You had better go to bed, dear; it is the best place for you."

"Leave the room, you dissipated young meddler," thundered the Colonel breaking in on his wife's attempt to avert a collision. It was the first time Belle had witnessed her father's pa.s.sion, and the sight made her cling to him as if her touch might soothe his anger.

d.i.c.k, seeing her thus, felt himself an outcast indeed. "I've not been drinking," he burst out, beside himself with jealousy and rage. "The man who says I have is a liar."

"Go to bed, sir," bawled his uncle, "or I'll kick you out of the room.

I'll have no drunkards here."

Luckless d.i.c.k's evil genius prompted an easy retort. "Then you'd better go first, sir; for I've seen you drunk oftener than you've seen me!"

The next instant he was at Belle's side pleading for disbelief. "No, no, Belle! it's a lie! I am mad--drunk--anything--only it is not true!" His denial struck home to the girl's heart when the angry a.s.sertion might have glanced by. A flash of intelligence lit up the past: she recollected a thousand incidents, she remembered a thousand doubts which had made no impression at the time; and before Colonel Stuart's inarticulate splutterings of wrath found words, her eyes met d.i.c.k's so truthfully, so steadily, that he turned away in despair, in blank, hopeless despair.

"Why to-morrow?" he cried bitterly in answer to his uncle's order to leave the room instantly and the house to-morrow. "There's no time like the present, and I deserve it. Good-bye, Aunt Lucilla; you've been very kind, always; but I can't stand it any longer. Good-bye, all of you!"

He never even looked at Belle again; the door closed and he was gone.

"Poor, dear d.i.c.k!" remarked Mrs. Stuart in her high complaining voice. "He always had a violent temper, even as a baby. Don't fret about it, my dear,"--for large tears were slowly rolling down Belle's cheeks--"He will be all right to-morrow, you'll see; and he has really been steadiness itself of late."

"He wasn't anything to speak of either," urged Mildred with her usual good-nature. "Only a little bit on, and I expect he had no dinner."

"Dinner or no dinner, I say he was drunk," growled Colonel Stuart sulkily. "No one lies like that unless he is,--that's my experience."

But Belle scarcely realised what they said. Her heart was full of fear, and though sleep came with almost unwelcome readiness to drive thought away, she dreamt all night long that some one was saying, "One kind word, Belle, only one kind word," and she could not speak.

CHAPTER V.

Outside the parallelograms of white roads centred by brown stretches of stubbly gra.s.s, and bordered by red and blue houses wherein the European residents of Faizapore dwelt after their kind, and our poor Belle lay dreaming, a very different world had been going on its way placidly indifferent, not to her only, but to the whole colony of strangers within its gates. The great plains, sweeping like a sea to the horizon, had been ploughed, sown, watered, harvested: children had been born, strong men had died, crimes been committed, n.o.ble acts done; and of all this not one word had reached the alien ears. Only the District Officer and his subaltern, John Raby, bridged the gulf by driving down every day to the court-house, which lay just beyond the boundaries of the cantonment and close to the native city; there, for eight weary hours, to come in contact with the most ign.o.ble attributes of the Indian, and thence to drive at evening heartily glad of escape.

In the lines of the native regiment Philip Marsden went in and out among his men, knowing them by name, and sympathising with their lives. But they too were a race apart from the tillers of soil, the hewers of wood and drawers of water, who pay the bills for the great Empire.

Even old Mahomed Lateef came but seldom to see the Major _sahib_ since he had been forced to send his Benjamin to Delhi, there, in a hotbed of vice and corruption, to gain a livelihood by his penmanship. The lad was employed on the staff of a red-hot Mahometan newspaper ent.i.tled "The Light of Islam," and spent his days in copying blatant leaders on to the lithographic stones. Nothing could exceed the lofty tone of "The Light of Islam." No trace of the old Adam peeped through its exalted sentiments save when it spoke of the Government, or of its Hindu rival "The Patriot." Then the editor took down his dictionary of synonyms, and, looking out all the bad epithets from "abandoned" to "zymotic," used them with more copiousness than accuracy. Sometimes, however, it would join issue with one adversary against another, and blaze out into fiery paragraphs of the following order:

We are glad to see that yet once more "The Patriot," forgetting its nonsensical race-prejudice for the nonce, has, to use a colloquialism, followed our lead in pertinently calling on Government for some worthy explanation of the dastardly outrage perpetrated by its minions on a virtuous Mahometan widow, &c, &c.

And lovers of the dreadful, after wading through a column of abuse, would discover that the ancestral dirt of an old lady's cowhouse had been removed by order of the Deputy Commissioner! Yet the paper did good: it could hardly do otherwise, considering its exalted sentiments; but for all that the occupation was an unwholesome one for an excitable lad like Murghub Ahmed. While his fingers inked themselves hopelessly over the fine words, his mind also became clouded by them. The abuse of language intoxicated him, until moderation seemed to him indifference, and tolerance sympathy. He took to sitting up of nights composing still more turgid denunciations; and the first time "The Light of Islam" went forth, bearing not only his hand-writing, but his heart's belief on its pages, he felt that he had found his mission. To think that but four months ago he had wept with disappointment because he was refused the post of statistical writer in a Government office! Between striking averages, and evolving Utopias, what a glorious difference! He thanked Providence for the change, though his heart ached cruelly at times when he could spare nothing from his modest wage for the dear ones at home. He had a wife waiting there for him; ere long there might be a child, and he knew her to be worse fed than many a street-beggar. It seemed to him part of the general injustice which set his brain on fire.

"Words! Nothing but words," muttered old Mahomed Lateef as he lay under the solitary _nim_ tree in his courtyard and spelt out "The Light of Islam" with the aid of a huge horn-rimmed pair of spectacles.

"Pish! '_The pen is mightier than the sword!_' What white-livered fool said that? The boy should not have such water in his veins unless his mother played me false. G.o.d knows! women are deceitful, and full of guile."

This was only his habit of thought; he had no intention of casting aspersions on his much respected wife Fatma Bibi, who just then appeared with a hookah full of the rankest tobacco. "I shall send for the boy, oh Fatma Bi!" said the stern old domestic tyrant. "He is learning to say more than he dare do, and that I will not have. He shall come home and do more than he says--ha! ha!" Fatma Bi laughed too, and clapped her wrinkled hands, while the shy girl, dutifully doing the daughter-in-law's part of cooking, turned her head away to smile lest any one should accuse her of joy because _he_ was coming back.