Voices in the Night Part 30

He stooped to unclasp her hands with an almost tender look.

'Thy like has more to give mine than thou dost think, sister,' he said; 'G.o.d knows even Lateef----' He broke off with a half-impatient gesture.

'But this is past hoping for. If Jehan wishes----' He paused again, and shook his head. 'Tell her thou hast put it by for safety--she will be too full of grief to prove thy words--that will give time, see you----'

Khojee, still on her knees, looked up doubtfully. 'Time,' she echoed, and then her face lit up with hope. 'Time--then thou wilt try! thou wilt speak to Jehan! thou wilt bring it back if thou canst! Yea, I will tell her--I will tell the lie if thou wilt promise. Lateef! this much thou _wilt_ do, promise to try. On the Koran, on thy head, thou wilt swear, if thou _canst_ do this thing.'--Her old lips were on his feet, kissing them pa.s.sionately, and he gave an uneasy, almost bitter laugh.

'Not on the Koran, sister,' he said evasively, 'nor on my head. Those be G.o.d's work. Lateef had naught to do with the making of either. He hath no hold on them, or their vagaries, and I swear by naught that is not sure.'

'Then swear by what thou likest,' she put in swiftly. 'Lo! it is not much I ask--not even that thou wilt bring it back, but that thou wilt try--for me who cannot try, for helpless Khojee shut in these four walls. Promise, Lateef, that if thou _hast_ the chance--nay! I will not let thee go till thou dost promise.'

There was a pause, and then he laughed--his own contemptuous, musical laugh. 'If the chance comes! Yea! I will promise that. On my kites I promise, since they be my creatures to fly or fail as I choose. Let be, good Khojee. If I am to do aught, thou must let me go.'

She rose reluctantly. 'On thy kites, Lateef? That is a light oath.' She spoke in vague wonder.

'Heavy for me, sister,' he replied gaily, 'since they be all Lateef has for children--all of his own fashioning to leave behind him when he dies!'

So, with a nod towards the dead child, he pa.s.sed out of the courtyard where the shadows were lengthening for sunset.

But there would be no _naubat_ to sound that evening, so Khojee crouched down between the two beds where the mother and the child lay both silent, both unheeding, and covering her face with her veil, thought how best to tell the lie when Noormahal should rouse to ask the question.

CHAPTER XIII

A VALSE a DEUX TEMPS

'What am I? Why, a mutiny lady, of course. Don't you see my crinoline; I suppose I am the first to arrive, but there are a lot of us coming in the dress. We are going to have a sixteen mutiny Lancers; perhaps two, and all sorts of fun. Rather a jolly idea, isn't it?'

The speaker was Mrs. Chris Davenant as she stood b.u.t.toning her white gloves in the anteroom of the club which was all decorated and illuminated for the Service ball. She was daintiness itself in a widespread pink tarlatane frilled to the very waist. A wreath of full-blown pink roses headed the fall of white lace that lay low down on the white sloping shoulders, which seemed as if, at the least movement, they would slip up from their nest of flowers to meet the fair shining hair that slipped downwards in a loose coil from the wreath of pink roses round her head.

The steward who had been told off to record the costumes, and see that no one evaded the rule of fancy dress without permission, raised his eyebrows slightly as he bowed.

'And admirably carried out in your case,' he replied politely, ere turning to Chris, who stood beside the pink tarlatane in the garments of civilisation which had been rescued from Sri Hunuman. He was looking, for him, moody, ill-humoured.

'And you, I suppose, have permission,' began the steward, when Mrs.

Chris with a hasty look-half of appeal--at her husband, interrupted gaily--

'Oh, he is mutiny too. The fashion in dress-clothes has not changed.'

'Excuse me,' said Chris in a loud voice. 'I come as an English gentleman of the nineteenth century. It is fancy dress for me, sir. Are you ready, Viva?'

The white shoulders did slip from the lace and the roses with the half-petulant, half-tolerant shrug they gave, and which expressed, as plain as words could have done, the owner's mental position. If Chris chose to take that line and make a fool of himself, it did not concern her. She meant to enjoy herself.

'Execrable taste!' remarked the steward at the other door whose business was with the ball programmes.

'Which?' asked his neighbour pointedly.

'Oh, both. But the mutiny idea is the worst. Who the deuce started it?'

'Lucanaster's lot, I believe. We couldn't exactly stop it, if they chose.'

'Well, I hope to goodness Filthy Lucre won't come as John Ellison, or I shall feel it my duty to knock him down.'

'Oh, we barred that sort of thing, of course. And it is really rather a jolly dress'--the speaker gave a glance after the pink tarlatane--'at least, she looks ripping in it.'

She certainly looked her best; and had caught the sweetly feminine suggestion of the style better than any other of the score or so of women belonging to the smart set, who, by degrees, came to make up the mutiny Lancers. A fact which the men belonging to it were not slow to recognise, so that a group of stiff-stocked uniforms soon gathered round her, while Mr. Lucanaster--who looked his best, also, in the gorgeous array which Hodson of Hodson's Horse in the middle of all the strain and stress of the mutiny, evolved from his inner consciousness for his 'Ring-tailed Roarers'--could not take his eyes off her gleaming pink and white. He even risked the resentment of more important ladies by rearranging the whole set so as to secure her being next to him in it.

But that gleam of pink and white was responsible for more than the setting of Mr. Lucanaster's blood on fire. It made Chris, for the first time, fiercely jealous. Ever since he had allowed himself, for that minute on the bridge, to compare his wife with his ideal, and his ideal with the little cousin whose familiar beauty had so disturbed him, he had been far more exigeant as a husband than he had ever been before.

And now, as he watched his wife's success, it was with clouded eyes that followed her wherever she went; even when, just before supper--the night being marvellously warm for the time of year--some one's suggestion that it would be infinitely jollier to have the mutiny Lancers outside in the gardens, sent the whole party of dancing feet trooping out, amid laughter and chatter, to the lawns and flower-beds which forty years ago had lain bare and bloodstained under the weary feet of those defenders of the flag.

The verdict of execrable taste given by the steward had been endorsed by many; by none more fully than by the Government House party which had come over late. But even Lesley felt bound to admit that, taste or no taste, there was a certain uncanniness in the look of these men and women who might indeed be ghosts from that gay Nushapore life of forty years back.

So, many a one might have been dressed, so they might have danced, and flirted, and chattered, on the very night when John Ellison ended that gay life and called them to death, with a brief order to close in on the Garden Mound and defend the flag that floated from its central tower. And Grace, more imaginative, more fanciful than Lesley, found her thoughts wandering more than once in a wonder whether some call to show themselves worthy of that past might not come again, come there in the midst of the lights and the laughter. There is always an atmosphere of unreality in a fancy dress ball when the masqueraders mean to enjoy themselves; but it was more marked that night than Grace Arbuthnot had ever seen it.

There was a fascination in it--in the uncertainty of it.

But there was one small soul for whom the sight had fascination, not from its unreality, but its reality. This was Jerry, who in consequence of a special invitation from the ball committee of which Jack Raymond was secretary, that the little lad might be allowed to see the show till supper-time, had been brought over for an hour or two.

'He isn't weally Hodson of Hodson's Horse, is he, mum?' he said, squeezing his mother's hand tight, as, in his little Eton suit, his wide white collar seeming to stare like his wide grey eyes, he watched the couples pa.s.sing out into the garden, 'cos _he_ was bigger. It's only pwetence, weally, isn't it?'

'Of course, it is pretence, Jerry,' she answered almost carelessly; then something in the child's expression made her stoop to smooth his hair, and look in his freckled face with a smile. 'You would like to go and see them in the garden, wouldn't you? Well, wait a bit, and Lesley, when she comes back from her dance, shall take you, and then you must be off to bed. It is getting late.'

'Let me take him, Lady Arbuthnot,' said Jack Raymond's voice. 'I am engaged to Miss Drummond for these Lancers, and I am sure she would prefer not to dance them with me, even if she hasn't forgotten the fact.'

He had come up behind her from the supper-room where he had been busy, and Grace, who had not seen him before that evening, felt a sudden pang at the sight of him. For he was dressed in the political uniform which, except on such frivolous occasions as these, had not seen the light for ten years. She told herself that he looked well in it, _as he had always done_; and then the reminiscence annoyed her, for she had been taking herself to task somewhat for the persistency of such recollections.

'Thanks so much,' she replied. 'I can see her coming back now, so you can combine the two. That will do nicely.'

It would, in fact, fit in very nicely with her plans; for in consequence of that taking to task she _had_ been making plans, as women of her sort do when they feel an interest in a man which they cannot cla.s.sify. And Grace Arbuthnot could not cla.s.sify hers for Jack Raymond; though she went so far as to acknowledge that she could not, even now, treat him as she treated all other men with the exception of her husband.

He made her feel moody and restless. This was intolerable, even though the cause was, clearly, nothing more than a regret at his wasted life.

It could, indeed, be nothing else. Had she not at the very beginning sought him out solely in the hope of rousing him to better things? He had repulsed her by saying that hers was not the hand to win his back to the plough; and she had resented this at first--had refused to believe that the past could interfere with the present. But she had been reasoning the matter out with herself during the last few days.

There had been many links and also many _lacunae_ in the chain of that reasoning; yet she had been quite satisfied with the result of it, namely--a conviction that Lesley Drummond would be the very person to compa.s.s regeneration! For women like Grace Arbuthnot are never more inconsequent than they are in regard to Love with a big L; since in one breath they call it Heaven-sent, and the next set springes to catch it as if it were a woodc.o.c.k or a hedge-sparrow!

Having arrived at this conviction with a curious mixture of shrewdness and sentiment, Grace had gone on to be practical. She herself was debarred by her position from any more becoming dress than the latest Paris fashion, but that was no reason why Lesley should not have the advantage of clever wits and clever fingers. For the girl herself was of that large modern type which, without in the least despising dress, being, in fact, curiously sensitive to its charm, are personally quite helpless concerning it.

The result of this being, that as Lesley approached, Jack Raymond stared at the transformation, took in its details, and finally gave in to the perfection of the dress by saying, with a laugh-=

'G.o.d prosper thee, my Lady Greensleeves!'

'My Lady Greensleeves!' echoed Lesley. 'Yes, of course it is! How stupid of me, Lady Arbuthnot, not to have guessed before. Oh! I'm sorry; I promised not to tell who made my dress, didn't I?'

The cat was out of the bag, and Grace flushed up with vexation. She had not thought any one would recognise the source whence she had taken Lesley's 'smock o' silk' and 'gown of gra.s.sy green,' her 'pearl and gold girdle' and 'gay gilt knives,' the 'crimson stockings all o'

silk,' and 'pumps as white as was the milk.' She had not even told the girl herself, partly from the love of such fanciful little mysteries which is inherent in such as she; partly because she feared to injure the unconscious indifference which made Lesley look the character to perfection.

'Greensleeves was my heart of gold, And yet she would not love me.'