Voices in the Night Part 9

'Yes!' she a.s.sented softly, and paused. 'But it is not the pearls,' she went on. 'I will tell you what it is, and why I am anxious.'

He sat listening to her story with rather a bored look.

'It is most unlikely the letter will turn up,' he said at last. 'An Indian thief would throw it away, even though, as you say, it was in a sealed official envelope; he knows nothing of the value of doc.u.ments.

But it is a pity you kept it; for that matter, had it. That sort of thing is a mistake.'

Something in his tone made her say quickly, 'You blame father--why? You know how he trusted me-how you----' She felt inclined to remind him of his own confidence in her, but she refrained. 'Remember I have always----'

'Been in the swim,' he suggested.

'Could I help that?' she asked, feeling him unfair. 'What I mean is, that every one, even my husband----'

'I have always heard you do a great deal for Sir George,' he said nastily, regretting his unfairness even as he spoke. He need not have done so, save for his own sake, since her defence annihilated him.

'As I would have done for you, Mr. Raymond.'

'I--I beg your pardon,' he said limply, feeling himself a brute. 'This paper or letter, then, as I understand it, would have been a sort of safe-conduct to prevent the authorities rounding on Sir George after the event, as they are apt to do. As--a thought seemed to strike him, and he looked at her sharply--'as they did on me. Your experience has been useful to you, Lady Arbuthnot!'

She flushed up again. 'How could I prevent its being so? I am not a fool. But you know quite well I do not come to you on his account. It is because I am so afraid of the contents of that unfortunate letter leaking out. With this general election going on----'

He shrugged his shoulders and rose. 'I am no politician, as I told you; but as a personal matter----'

She rose also and challenged him with eyes, voice, and manner. 'I do not choose it to be a personal matter. It is more than that; it might concern the prestige, the honour of our Government! Surely you must still care for that? You used----'

He interrupted her with a laugh. 'It would be in a parlous state if it depended on me. I don't trouble my head about patriotism nowadays, I a.s.sure you.'

She came a step nearer, as if to bar a hint he gave of leaving. 'Is that possible?' she asked, almost sternly; 'within gunshot, as we stand now, of a place where Englishmen died in hundreds to keep the hand of their race upon the plough of India.'

The lightness had no choice but to pa.s.s from his face.

'Mine left it ten years ago, Lady Arbuthnot,' he said, his voice matching hers; 'and yours, excuse me, is not the one to wile it back.

But for your husband's sake--not for yours, that past is past--I will----'

She lost her temper absolutely then. 'Who thinks, who wishes it otherwise? Can you not understand my motive in coming to you?'

'Perfectly,' he said coolly. 'You feel responsible--why, G.o.d knows!-- for the hash I have made of my life. I speak from your point of view, remember. Of course, nothing I can say will mitigate this feeling; it is a habit you good women have. Now I, as a man, should have thought that the palpable result of my going my own way, instead of yours, would have given you the certainty of having been right in refusing to countenance it.'

She did not speak for a second, and when she did there was a tremor in her voice. 'That doesn't lessen--the--the pity of it,' she said, half to herself; 'it is pitiful. Even if you had any one, wife or child----' She broke off and added apologetically, 'One can scarcely help regrets.'

Once more the man in him felt annihilated by the revelation of the woman in her. 'My--my dear, kind lady,' he said, touched in spite of himself, 'I can a.s.sure you I get along splendidly all round. You're all too kind. And as for the kids,' he added half nervously, for she looked as if she would cry, and he wished to cheer her up, 'I'm chums with the lot of them. Jerry, for instance! What a ripping little chap he is--such a lot of go; but he isn't a bit like you.'

She stood looking at him without replying for a moment, and the half-puzzled expression which had been in her face when she had watched him and the child standing hand-in-hand at the racecourse returned to it. 'No!' she said. 'Nor like his father. He has harked back in face to my mother's people--she was a distant cousin of your father's, you remember. And in mind--who knows? But I'm glad you like him; he returns the compliment.'

It seemed so, indeed, for Jerry himself, appearing that instant, had his hand tucked into Jack Raymond's even before he delivered his message, which was to the effect that dad was wanting mum to go home.

He gabbled this through, in order to say, with a military formality learned, to his great delight, from Captain Lloyd, 'Ah, sir! I'm glad it's you; 'cos it isn't weally dark, an' Miss Dwummond's weading the _Spectator_, so it's just the time for you to show me the pwoperest places in the Garden Mound, please, as you pwomised you would. I mean the places where people was blown up--or deaded somehow!'

'You bloodthirsty young ruffian!' laughed Jack Raymond, feeling relieved at the interruption. 'All right! come along! I promised to take him round and tell him about the defence, Lady Arbuthnot,' he explained; 'but perhaps you will allow me to find your carriage for you first.'

'Thanks,' she replied curtly, 'my husband will do that. Good-night, Mr.

Raymond. I am sorry I was not so successful in my request as--as my son.'

He stared after her yet once more. Women were inexplicable. Here was this one quite happily married--he had known that for years--and yet she would have liked--what the deuce would she have liked? He turned half impatiently to the child, and said, 'Come along, young Briton, and be sentimental over the past! Come and contemplate the deeds of your ancestors and make believe you're a hero. That's the game!'

'But I _am_ going to be one when I'm growed up, you know,' protested Jerry.

The man paused and looked down at the child. 'If you get the chance, dear little chap,' he said bitterly, 'but the mischief is that what with express trains and telegrams, you've seldom to do more than you're told to do. And so most of the C.B.'s and V.C.'s are given for doing one's simple duty.'

'My dad's a C.B.,' commented the child sagely; 'but then he can do his compound duties too. Can you?'

'Can I?' echoed the man, and his voice belied the inevitable smile on his face. 'Well! I don't know. I expect I could, Jerry--if I tried.'

So hand-in-hand the two, boy and man, crossed the carriage-drive which lay between the club and the rising ground beyond it. Ground kept as a garden in memory of the deeds which had blossomed in its dust. For on that scarce perceptible mound, the English flag, taking advantage of every available inch to stand its highest, had floated for nine long months over the rebel town of Nushapore. Had floated securely, though the hands which held it grew fewer and weaker day by day. Had floated royally, though kings' palaces challenged it from the right, challenged it from the left.

And now, more than forty years after, the mound--set thick with blossoming trees--stretched as a peaceful lawn between those palaces still; but the one was an English club and the other Government House.

'That's the gate, Jerry,' said Jack Raymond, 'where Gunner Smith asked the mutineers--they were only three feet from the wall, you know--to oblige him with a pipe light, because he had been so long on duty that he had run short.'

Jerry laughed vaingloriously, uproariously.

'That was to cheek 'em, sir, wasn't it, sir? For, of course, _he_ didn't care if he never smoked no more, so long as he kept 'em outside! Oh! isn't it just orful nice?'--here he heaved a sigh of pure delight--' and now, please, I want where boys like me did sentry, an'

where the guns got wed-hot and boomed off of 'emselves, an' where every one blowed 'emselves up like in a stwawbewwy-cweam smash, becos' the enemy was cweepin', cweepin' in, don't you know?'

The child's voice ran on, eager, joyous, hopeful, and the man was conscious of a thrill that seemed to pa.s.s into his own veins from that little clasping hand.

'All in good time, Jerry! don't rush your fences,' replied Jack Raymond, and the thrill seemed to have invaded his voice.

So across the lawns, and along the winding walks bosomed in tall trees, where the birds were twittering their nightly quarrel for the uppermost roosting-place, those two, boy and man, the present and the future of the race, with its unforgotten past linking them, strolled hand-in-hand.

And the daylight lingering with the moonlight lay hand-in-hand also; lay softly, kindly, upon all things.

'This is the east battery, Jerry,' said the man in a hushed voice, to match the peace of the garden. 'Campbell--he was a relation of your mother's, by the way, and so a sort of relation of mine--never left it for five months. He is here still, if it comes to that, for he was literally blown to bits at last by a sh.e.l.l he was trying to throw back on the enemy. He'd done it dozens of times before, but this time--was the last!'

There was not much to see. Only a slab in the dim gra.s.s with 'East Battery' cut upon it.

'Mum told me about that,' said Jerry in an awed whisper. 'His name was Gerald, same as mine,'--he paused to look doubtfully at the face above him--'she said it was an eggsample to me. But I'm not goin' to be blowed up first. My sh.e.l.ls'll always burst just in the vewy wightest places, bang in the middle of the enemy, so I can laugh at 'em before I dead.'

Jack Raymond, pa.s.sing on, felt a pang. 'Always in the very rightest places!' That had been the dream of another boyhood.

The sky was as a pearl overhead; a pearl set in a darkening tracery of trees. The moon began to stretch faint fingers of shadow after the retreating day, and still those two, man and boy, pa.s.sed from one immemorial deed to another, while the small hand sent its thrill to the big one, so that Jack Raymond wondered at the tremor in his voice as he said, pointing through the trees--

'And there's the general's house with the English flag flying still!'

Jerry stiffened like a young pointer on its first covey, every inch of him centred on the grey tower, its flagstaff draped dimly with the royal ensign, which rose against the sky. Then, standing square, head up, he saluted.

'Mum told me to do that always when I saw it,' he explained, 'because it's the only place in all the wide, wide world where the flag flies day and night, to show, you know, that it never was hauled down--never--never.' He heaved another sigh of satisfaction, but his face took a puzzled expression. 'Only, you know, I've been here before.

I weally have. I wemember it quite, quite well. An' the guns was booming, an' they was wanting to pull down the flag, an' I wouldn't let them.'

Jack Raymond looked down at the child and smiled. 'You, or some one of your sort, dear old chap; and I'll bet you'd do it again, wouldn't you, Jerry?'