Voices in the Night Part 22

She blushed at her own inane words when she heard them, but Grace Arbuthnot as she moved on, gave a little hard laugh. 'Never, my dear!

So long as there are men and women in the world, it will be as Stephen Hargraves said, "all a muddle."'

She broke off abruptly to look round; for, through the closed doors of the secretary's room came the imperative ring of an electric bell, making more than one keen face follow her example. But at the open door where the private secretary was holding up the _portiere_ on one side, while Nevill Lloyd as A.D.C. held up the other, the former shrugged his shoulders.

'Bother that bell!' he said to little Mrs. Carruthers who was pa.s.sing.

'There's my evening gone! They might spare us Sunday--especially when _you_ are dining here. I've a great mind to keep them ringing till you've gone.'

'Don't,' she laughed. 'Supposing it were a mutiny!' She made the suggestion out of pure wickedness, because her rival, who owned to never sleeping a wink if the bazaar near her house was noisy and let off fireworks, was within hearing.

'Surely you don't think'--began the timorous lady.

'Certainly not,' consoled the secretary. 'And if it was, Mrs.

Carruthers, that's no reason for breaking the Sabbath.'

'They don't,' retorted the gay little lady. 'Sunday is over with them ages ago. They are six hours before----'

'Behind, you mean! The West is absolutely, hopelessly behind.'

Mrs. Carruthers nodded airily. 'How do you know? you never can be certain, can you? which is before and which is behind in a circle! It all depends on where _you_ are.'

With which piece of wisdom, the last Paris frock but one trailed off into the drawing-room, and deposited itself comfortably and becomingly by the side of a dowdy black one, for the sake of contrast and monopoly, by-and-by, when the men should return to their allegiance.

They lingered over their wine, however, that evening. So long that Grace Arbuthnot grew pale over the strain of waiting to know what that electric bell had meant. She was given to worrying herself quite needlessly. Lesley under similar conditions would have taken the situation in more manly fashion, but then she was far more a.s.sured of her position, curiously enough, than Grace Arbuthnot was of hers. For the simple reason that the latter had won it, in her generation, by her personal and exceptional capability, while Lesley took hers by right of the ordinary woman's new claim to be heard as well as seen.

And then Grace Arbuthnot was at another disadvantage. Her sentiment was a heavier weight to carry than Lesley's lack of it; and Jack Raymond's words had set her nerves jarring. So, at last, on the mother's excuse of going to see if Jerry were comfortably asleep, she left the drawing-room, and on her way upstairs, paused to listen at the dining-room door. As she stood there in her diamonds, her sea-green garments, trying to catch anything definite in the m.u.f.fled voices within, she felt a sudden vast impatience at her s.e.x; felt, as Lesley would not have felt, that it was a disadvantage. For the old revolt of womanhood used to be against nature; now it is against the custom which shackles nature.

As she pa.s.sed on up the wide stairs, the strange silence and solitude of an Indian house in which all service comes from outside, lay about her; but in Jerry's room the open window let in a sound. The most restless sound in the world, the rhythmic yet hurried beat of the little hour-gla.s.s drum used by the natives in their amus.e.m.e.nts.

Rhythmic yet hurried, like the quickened throb of a heart. It came faintly, indefinitely, from the distance and darkness of the city; but Grace had been too long in India not to be able to picture for herself the environment whence it rose. She could see the murk of smoke and shadow, the light of flicker and flare on the circling faces round the shrilling voice or posturing figure of a woman. Was it a wedding? Or was it--the other thing? It might be either; for that intermittent noise of fireworks, which echoed at intervals like the report of guns, belonged to both.

This time it was a fear of her own self that came to Grace Arbuthnot as she listened--a fear of her own s.e.x--a fear of the hundreds of thousands of hearts beating away in the darkness around her; beating perhaps in rhythm to that restless sound.

And so little might bring the restlessness to a heart! Her own gave quick a.s.sent as she looked down on the sleeping childish face, seen dimly by the rushlight set on the floor beside the m.u.f.fled, sleeping figure of the child's bearer.

For the sight brought back, in a second, that other sleeping face she had seen a few days before. Not that the two were outwardly alike; the likeness lay within. She took a step nearer, and then stood looking curiously, almost fearfully, at the child she had borne. She was one of the ninety and nine out of every hundred good women who pa.s.s through wifehood and motherhood thinking it their duty to ignore its problems--the problems which only good women can solve--and so it gave her a certain shock to realise that she had pa.s.sed on that old love of hers to this child of another man. Yet, when one came to think of it, what else was heredity--if there was such a thing in the mind--but the pa.s.sing on of one's admirations, one's ideals? The pa.s.sing on from generation to generation of one's own affinity for good or evil; the slow evolution of the spirit of a race.

The spirit of a race! She stooped suddenly and kissed the little sleeping face. And the kiss had in it the thought of another sleeping face, and an almost fierce pride of possession. But the child's face frowned, and a little white nightgowned arm curved itself to shield the cheek from further caresses.

'Don't bov'ver, mum; I'm all 'wight,' came a sleepy protest.

Grace stood straight again, feeling baffled, helpless; for that dislike to any display of affection had never been to her liking. It had been, in fact, partly responsible for her refusal to fulfil her engagement when Jack Raymond had lost his temper and threatened to throw up his career. She had dared him to do it, and, being high-spirited, he had done it. And then, with bitter regret, infinite pain, and a vast amount of conventional virtue, she had withdrawn her promise to marry him because----?

For the first time in twelve years of steady conviction that she had done right, the suggestion that the only justification for such refusal must lie in the inability of one or the other to perform their part of the contract, and that that, again, must depend on what the contract of marriage is essentially, came to disturb her. But she turned from it impatiently, telling herself she was a fool, at three-and-thirty, to puzzle over past problems, when the present was full of them, and far more interesting ones.

Yet, as she went downstairs again, that insistent throbbing from the dark distant heart of the city seemed to go with her, rousing a perfect pa.s.sion of reckless unrest in her own.

Was anything certain except present pleasure or pain? Was it worth while, even, to _be_ certain? Was it not better to let that heart-throb quicken or slacken as it chose?

She felt her face pale, her eyes bright, as she re-entered the drawing-room, to see instantly, first of all, that Jack Raymond was talking to Lesley.

It required quite an effort for her to remember her real anxiety, and with a certain sense of duty seek out her husband, who was standing with the commissioner in a quiet corner.

'It was nothing serious, I hope, George,' she said.

He turned to her, perplexed but kindly.

'Serious, my dear? Oh! you mean the telegram. No! nothing really important, though they seem to think it so over there. They want me to promulgate some sort of official denial of there being any secret programme in the event of a plague outbreak. It is weak, of course--in a way, a mistake; but I don't think it will do actual harm--do you, Kenyon?'

The commissioner shrugged his shoulders. He was not in the secret; but had his suspicions. 'No, sir,' he replied; 'not unless there _was_ one, and the fact were to leak out. It is difficult to prevent this with native clerks, especially when the idea of it is present, as it certainly is----'

'But the reality isn't,' put in Sir George decisively, 'in spite of what that scurrilous fellow says to-day in the _Voice of India_.'

Grace caught in her breath sharply.

'What does it say?' she asked.

'Only that such a paper does exist, and that it can be produced--which is, of course, absurd----' His glance at his wife for the comprehension she alone could give made him pause. 'My dear,' he went on concernedly, 'how pale you are! There is really nothing to be anxious about--is there, Kenyon? For myself, I'm glad of the definite lead over. For one thing, it makes it feasible for us to do what the doctors have been urging on the General for some time back--send both regiments out to a health camp at Moradki. They seem to have gone to bits altogether.

Sullivan told me to-day he had forty-eight cases of enteric alone, and that he had never known the men so reckless and hard to manage--breaking out of hospital every night.'

'I wonder why?' began Lady Arbuthnot, when the commissioner interrupted her.

'Why, it's simplicity itself! Don't you know the story? Well, this is it. The first battalion of the --th Regiment here was under home orders from Burmah, and the men, of course, saved up every penny they could.

At the last moment, however, the second battalion could only produce three hundred boys who could by any possibility pa.s.s muster as twenty-one, the age-limit for India. So the authorities wired out to draft every possible man from the first for an extra year's foreign service with the second battalion--virtually a strange regiment. The men drew out every halfpenny of their savings the day the order came, and have been spending it ever since--and teaching the three hundred boys to spend theirs too. It's the record of a big blunder.'

'Just so,' a.s.sented Sir George; 'but these mistakes will occur. It was unfortunate, however, that they sent the second battalion here; for the first was nearly decimated by cholera at Nushapore about three years ago. Sullivan says he thinks it is largely that. They hate the place, are in a bit of a funk about it; and when that is the case they will do anything for the sake of a distraction.'

Grace, listening, seemed to hear once more that restless throbbing in the air. She saw the murk of smoke and shadow, the light of flicker and flare, the shrilling voice, the posturing figure.

And the encircling faces?

She clasped her mother's hands tight, and thought of her own boy--of the spirit of the race.

CHAPTER X

THE SINEWS OF WAR

There was a strong smell of carbolic in Miss Leezie's house, for the bazaar on which it gave was being cleaned by half a dozen sweepers, a water-carrier, and the conservancy overseer in a uniform coat with a bra.s.s badge; his part being to dole out the disinfectant and survey the proceedings from various doorsteps in advance of the slimy black sludge, which was being propelled by the sweepers' brooms along the open gutters--those scientifically-sloped, saucer-shaped gutters that are the pride of every cantonment magistrate's heart.

The cleansing of them was scientific also; partly because the conservancy _darogha_ knew that the Lieutenant-Governor was due in cantonments that afternoon; mostly, however, because that particular bazaar, being a favourite lounge for the dwellers in the barracks round the corner, the orders regarding its cleanliness were strict.

It was, therefore, as clean as it is possible to keep a road between two tight-packed rows of mud houses which are guiltless of any sanitary appliances, unlimited as to inmates, and from which all refuse has to find its way into the gutter; unless, as sometimes happens, the moving of it even thus far is considered too much trouble, and it is left to fester and rot in some dark corner within, until it betrays itself, and brings raids and fines upon the injured inhabitants.

Even so, there was filth and to spare for the brooms; filth that smelt horribly beneath its veneer of carbolic. More than once, indeed, the white-trousered legs belonging to the uniform coat and the badge had, when the wearer had forgotten sewage in a pull at some shopkeeper's pipe, to withdraw themselves hastily from the oncoming of a regular bore of unutterable muck, which came sweeping along like a tidal wave, overwhelming even scientific saucers.

It happened so at the aerated-water seller's, whose shop was beneath Miss Leezie's balconied apartments. It was an excellent position for the trade, and though he only charged _two pice_ a bottle for soda and lemonade, he found no difficulty in paying a heavy licence for the privilege of selling Shahjeshanpore rum, potato brandy, and bad whisky, in addition to the waters.