The Native Born; or, the Rajah's People Part 38

Nehal Singh turned and went to the door. There he stopped and looked back at her and the little group of which she formed the central figure. Then he made a gesture--one single gesture. He raised his hand high above his head and brought it down, palm downward. In that movement there was a contempt, a scorn, a bitterness so profound that it seemed to mingle with a terrible pity; but above all there was a final severing, a breaking of the last link which bound them. The next minute the door closed behind him.

How long the silence that followed lasted no one knew. It was broken by Mrs. Cary, who flung herself face downward on the table, and burst into wild, uncontrollable sobs.

"Oh, Beaty!" she moaned. "Our reputations--our good name! How could you have told such wicked stories about yourself and poor Mr. Travers!

How could you!"

Colonel Carmichael shook his head. He was overwhelmed by a cross-current of conflicting emotions to which he could give no name.

"True or not true, your--eh--statement has got us into a pretty mess, Miss Cary," he said. "You have played with fire. Pray Heaven that it has not set light to Marut!"

She turned and looked at him. In that pale face upon which had sunk the light of a sudden peace the Colonel read something which sent his blunt instinct searching wildly for a solution.

"I did what I had to do, Colonel Carmichael," she said. "Come, mother, we must go home."

CHAPTER III

A FAREWELL

John Stafford sat at his table by the open door which looked on to the garden. The room behind him was bare of all graceful or even tasteful ornament--a few native weapons, captured probably during small frontier wars, hung on the wall, but nothing else relieved its blank, whitewashed monotony. The one photograph of his father which had once been fastened above the mantelpiece had been taken down months before and the hole made by the nail carefully and methodically filled and painted over. The room typified the man in its painful order, its painful whitewashed cleanliness, its rigid plainness. But the garden was the symbol of the hidden possibility in him, the corner of warm, impulsive feeling which the world had never seen. The roses grew up to the very steps of the verandah; they had been trained to clamber over the trellis-work as though seeking to gain entrance to his room; they spread themselves in rich, glowing variety over the little patch of ground, and one of their number, the most lovely and fullest blown, hung her heavy head in splendid isolation from the vase upon his table.

He looked at the rose and he looked at the garden, on which lay the first clear rays of the rising sun. In him stirred a rare wistfulness, a rare melancholy. For to him all the gentler, softer forms of sorrow were rare.

In the last year he had suffered, but in his own way--rigidly, coldly, unbendingly. His lips, even in the loneliness of his own room, had always been tight closed over the smothered exclamation of pain. He had gone on steadily and conscientiously with his work. He had never for one moment "given way to himself," as he expressed it. But this morning he was in the power of that strange "atmosphere"--call it what you will--which we feel when still only half awake, and which, independent of all outward circ.u.mstances, destines our day's mood of cheerfulness or depression.

Strangely enough, he had made no struggle against it--he had yielded to it with a sense of inevitableness.

The inevitable compa.s.sed him about and numbed his stern, merciless system of self-repression. Fate, irresistible and unchangeable, obscured the clear path of duty which he had marked out for himself, and held him for the moment her pa.s.sive victim. It was no idle fancy.

He was not a man in whose thought-world fancy played any part. Nor was it the gloomy impression which a lonely twilight might have stamped upon a mind already burdened with a heavy weight of trouble. The young day spread her halo of pure sunshine over a world of color; the red rose upon his table bowed her head toward him in the perfection of a mature beauty which as yet hid no warning of decay. But in the sunshine he saw the shadow; the daylight foretold the night; his eyes saw the withered petals of the rose strewn before him. In vain he had striven to see beyond the night to the as inevitable to-morrow; in vain he had pictured the rose which his careful hand would bring to replace her dead sister. The future was a blank dead wall whose heights his foresight could not scale.

Before him on the table lay a closed and sealed envelope. It contained his will, which half an hour before he had signed in the presence of two comrades. He wondered what the world would say when it was opened--and when it would be opened.

Presently the curtains behind him were pushed quietly on one side. He did not turn around. He supposed it was his native servant with the cup of coffee which formed his early morning refreshment; but the soft step across the uncarpeted floor, the rustle of a woman's dress startled him from his illusion. He turned and sprang to his feet.

"Beatrice!" he exclaimed.

She came toward him with outstretched hand.

"May I speak with you for a few minutes, John?" she asked.

His first impulse to protest against her reckless disregard of propriety died away on his lips. Something on her white earnest face touched him--all the more perhaps because it linked itself with his own mood. He brought a chair--his own, for the room boasted of but one.

"Are you angry?" she asked again, looking up at him.

"At your coming? No. At another time I might have warned you that it was not wise, but I feel sure you would not have run so much risk without a serious and adequate reason."

She nodded.

"Yes, I have a very serious reason," she said. "Have you time to spare?"

"All the morning."

"Were you on duty last night?"

"For the best part."

"Is that why you look so tired and ill?"

He smiled faintly.

"I might reply with a _tu quoque_. But that doesn't matter. You have some trouble to tell me. What has happened?"

"You have heard nothing?"

"Nothing whatever." He drew a stool toward him and seated himself at her side. "You know, I am not a person to whom gossip drifts quickly."

"It's not gossip--it's truth. The Marut Diamond Company is closed--for good and all."

"You mean--it has gone smash?"

"Completely--and we with it."

He sat silent for a moment, his head resting thoughtfully on his hand.

"I suppose it had to come," he said at last. "Somehow, it always seemed to me that the concern was doomed. The foundations weren't honest. The Rajah was more or less beguiled into it--" He broke off, turning crimson with vexation. "I beg your pardon, Beatrice. I forgot that that was one of your--escapades."

She looked at him steadily, and he was struck and again strangely moved by her pale beauty. He had never seen her so gentle, so free from her cold and mocking gaiety.

"You must not apologize. And do not smooth over a mean, low trick with the name of an escapade. It was not an escapade, for an escapade is the overflow of high and reckless spirits, and what I did was done in cold blood and with a purpose. I have come to tell you about that purpose."

He could not repress a movement of surprise.

"Surely you have something more serious on your mind than that? If, as you say, your--your financial position has been rendered precarious by this failure of the Marut Company, would it not be advisable to hurry on our marriage at once? Of course, in the meanwhile, if I can do anything to help your mother--"

She touched him gently on the arm.

"I told you I had come on a serious matter," she said. "Won't you let me tell you what it is?"

"Of course, Beatrice, of course. Only I thought that was the serious matter."

"It is perhaps for my mother, but not for me. Things have changed their value in my life. Just now I feel there is only one thing that has any value at all, and that is freedom."

"From what? I do not understand. Do you mean from debt?"

She smiled sadly.

"Yes, from debt. John, I want to ask you an honest question honestly.