The Pool in the Desert Part 16

'She wouldn't get it,' Mrs. Mickie dimpled candidly. 'Frank always loses his heart and his conscience at the same time. But you don't suppose there's anything serious in this affair? Pure pretty platonics, I should call it.'

Mrs. Gammidge lifted her eyebrows. 'I dare say that is what they imagine it. Well, they're never in the same room for two minutes without being aware of it, and their absorption when they get in a corner--I saw her keep the Viceroy waiting, the other night after dinner, while Colonel Innes finished a sentence. And then she was annoyed at the interruption.

Here's Kitty Vesey, lookin' SUCH a dog! h.e.l.lo, Kitty! where did you get that hat, where did you get that tile? But that wasn't the colour of your hair last week, Kitty!'

'Don't feel any kind of a dog'--Mrs. Vesey's pout, though becoming, was genuine. 'I'm in a perfectly furious rage, my dears, and I'm coming home to cry, just as soon as I've had an ice. What do you think--they won't let me have Val for Captain Wynne's part in 'The Outcast Pearl'--they say he's been tried before, and he's a stick. Did you ever hear of such brutes? They want me to act with Major Dalton, and he's MUCH too old for the part.'

'Kitten,' said Mrs. Mickie, with conviction, 'Valentine Drake on the stage would be fatal to your affection for him.'

'I don't care, I won't act with anybody else--I'll throw up the part.

Haven't I got to make love to the man? How am I to play up to such an unkissable-looking animal as Major Dalton? I shall CERTAINLY throw up the part.'

'Don't do anything rash, Kitty. If you do, they'll probably offer it to me, and I warn you I won't give it back to you.'

'Oh, refuse it, like a dear! I am dying to put them in a hole. It's jealousy, that's what it is. Goodbye, Mrs. Jack, I've had a lovely time.

Val and I have been explaining our affection to the Archdeacon, and he says it's perfectly innocent. We're going to get him to put it on paper to produce when Jimmy sues for a divorce, aren't we, Val?'

'You're not going?' said Mrs. Jack Owen.

'Oh, yes, I must. But I've enjoyed myself awfully, and so has everybody I've been talking to. I say, Mickie, dear--about tomorrow afternoon--I suppose I may bring Val?'

'Oh, dear, yes,' Mrs. Mickie replied. 'But you must let me hold his hand.'

'I don't know which of you is the most ridiculous,' Mrs. Owen remarked; 'I shall write to both your husbands this very night,' but as the group shifted and left her alone with Mrs. Gammidge, she said she didn't know whether Mrs. Vesey would be quite so chirpy three weeks hence. 'When Mrs. Innes comes out,' she added in explanation. 'Oh, yes, Valentine Drake is quite her property. My own idea is that Kitty won't be in it.'

Where the road past Peliti's dips to the Mall Madeline met Horace Innes.

When she appeared in her rickshaw he dismounted, and gave the reins to his syce. She saw in his eyes the look of a person who has been all day lapsing into meditation and rousing himself from it. 'You are very late,' she said as he came up.

'Oh, I'm not going; at least, you are just coming away, aren't you? I think it is too late. I'll turn back with you.'

'Do,' she said, and looked at his capable, sensitive hand as he laid it on the side of her little carriage. Miss Anderson had not the accomplishment of palm-reading, but she took general manual impressions.

She had observed Colonel Innes's hand before, but it had never offered itself so intimately to her inspection. That, perhaps, was why the conviction seemed new to her, as she thought 'He is admirable--and it is all there.'

When they got to the level Mall he kept his hold, which was a perfectly natural and proper thing for him to do, walking alongside; but she still looked at it.

'I have heard your good news,' she said, smiling congratulation at him.

'My good news? Oh, about my wife, of course. Yes, she ought to be here by the end of the month. I thought of writing to tell you when the telegram came, and then I--didn't. The files drove it out of my head, I fancy.'

'Heavy day?'

'Yes,' he said, absently. They went along together in an intimacy of silence, and Madeline was quite aware of the effort with which she said:

'I shall look forward to meeting Mrs. Innes.'

It was plain that his smile was perfunctory, but he put it on with creditable alacrity.

'She will be delighted. My wife is a clever woman,' he went on, 'very bright and attractive. She keeps people well amused.'

'She must be a great success in India, then.'

'I think she is liked. She has a tremendous fund of humour and spirits.

A fellow feels terribly dull beside her sometimes.'

Madeline cast a quick glance at him, but he was only occupied to find other matters with which he might commend his wife.

'She is very fond of animals,' he said, 'and she sings and plays well--really extremely well.'

'That must be charming,' murmured Madeline, privately iterating, 'He doesn't mean to d.a.m.n her--he doesn't mean to d.a.m.n her.' 'Have you a photograph of her?'

'Quant.i.ties of them,' he said, with simplicity.

'You have never shown me one. But how could you?' she added in haste; 'a photograph is always about the size of a door nowadays. It is simply impossible to keep one's friends and relations in a pocketbook as one used to do.'

They might have stopped there, but some demon of persistence drove Madeline on. She besought help from her imagination; she was not for the moment honest. It was an impulse--an equivocal impulse--born doubtless of the equivocal situation, and it ended badly.

'She will bring something of the spring out to you,' said Madeline--'the spring in England. How many years is it since you have seen it? There will be a breath of the cowslips about her, and in her eyes the soft wet of the English sky. Oh, you will be very glad to see her.' The girl was well aware of her insincerity, but only dimly of her cruelty. She was drawn on by something stronger than her sense of honesty and humanity, a determination to see, to know, that swept these things away.

Innes's hand tightened on the rickshaw, and he made at first no answer.

Then he said:

'She has been staying in town, you know.'

There was just a quiver of Madeline's eyelid; it said nothing of the natural rapacity behind. This man's testimony was coming out in throes, and yet--it must be said--again she probed.

'Then she will put you in touch again,' she cried; 'you will remember when you see her all the vigour of great issues and the fascination of great personalities. For a little while, anyway, after she comes, you will be in a world--far away from here--where people talk and think and live.'

He looked at her in wonder, not understanding, as indeed how could he?

'Why,' he said, 'you speak of what YOU have done'; and before the truth of this she cast down her eyes and turned a hot, deep red, and had nothing to say.

'No,' he said, 'my wife is not like that.'

He walked along in absorption, from which he roused himself with resentment in his voice.

'I can not leave such a fabric of illusion in your mind. It irritates me that it should be there--about anybody belonging to me. My wife is not in the least what you imagine her. She has her virtues, but she is--like the rest. I can not hope that you will take to her, and she won't like you either--we never care about the same people. And we shall see nothing of you--nothing. I can hardly believe that I am saying this of my own wife, but--I wish that she had stayed in England.'

'Mrs. Mickie!' cried Madeline to a pa.s.sing rickshaw, 'what are you rushing on like that for? Just go quietly and peaceably along with us, please, and tell us what Mrs. Vesey decided to do about her part in 'The Outcast Pearl'. I'm dining out tonight--I must know.' And Mrs. Mickie was kind enough to accompany them all the rest of the way.

Miss Anderson dined out, and preferred to suppose that she had no time to think until she was on her way home along the empty road round Jakko at eleven o'clock that night. Then it pleased her to get out of her rickshaw and walk. There was an opulent moon, the vast hills curving down to the plains were all grey and silvery, and the deodars overhead fretted the road with dramatic shadows. About her hung the great stillness in a mighty loneliness in which little Simla is set, and it freed her from what had happened, so that she could look at it and cry out. She actually did speak, pausing in the little pavilion on the road where the nursemaids gather in the daytime, but very low, so that her words fell round her even in that silence, and hardly a deodar was aware. 'I will not go now,' she said. 'I will stay and realize that he is another woman's husband. That should cure me if anything will--to see him surrounded by the commonplaces of married life, that kind of married life. I will stay till she comes and a fortnight after. Besides, I want to see her--I want to see how far she comes short.' She was silent for a moment, and the moonlight played upon her smile of quiet triumph.

'He cares too,' she said; 'he cares too, but he doesn't know it, and I promise you one thing, Madeline Anderson, you won't help him to find out. And in five weeks I will go away and leave my love where I found it--on a mountaintop in the middle of Asia!'

Chapter 3.IV.

Madeline did her best to make certain changes delicately, imperceptibly, so that Innes would not, above all things, be perplexed into seeking for their reason. The walks and rides came to a vague conclusion, and Miss Anderson no longer kept the Viceroy or anybody else waiting, while Innes finished what he had to say to her in public, since his opportunities for talking to her seemed to become gradually more and more like everybody else's. So long as she had been mistress of herself she was indifferent to the very tolerant and good-natured gossip of the hill capital; but as soon as she found her citadel undermined, the lightest kind of comment became a contingency unbearable. In arranging to make it impossible, she was really over-considerate and over-careful. Her soldier never thought of a.n.a.lyzing his bad luck or searching for motive in it. To him the combinations of circ.u.mstances that seemed always to deprive him of former pleasures were simply among the things that might happen. Grieving, she left him under that impression for the sake of its expediency, and tried to make it by being more than ever agreeable on the occasions when he came and demanded a cup of tea, and would not be denied. After all, she consoled herself, no situation was improved by being turned too suddenly upside down.

She did not wholly withdraw his privilege of taking counsel with her, and he continued to go away freshened and calmed, leaving her to toss little sad reflections into the fire, and tremulously wonder whether the jewel of her love had flashed ever so little behind the eyes. They both saw it a conspicuous thing that as those three weeks went on, neither he nor she alluded even remotely to Mrs. Innes, but the fact remained, and they allowed it to remain.