Part 11 (1/2)

And she, too, held her breath before the vision; for she saw it also.

Saw herself, as he had described her, and the glamour of it, the desire of it, a.s.sailed her, body and soul.

Yet she made a desperate, a pa.s.sionately resentful effort to ignore them. ”I didn't know you were so well up in _chiffons_, Mr. Carlyon,”

she said, with a forced laugh. ”Did you ever think of setting up a milliner's shop? One is badly needed in Eshwara.”

But the glamour of it had come to Lance Carlyon like a revelation, and the blood was leaping in his veins. ”I will, if you--” he began.

She scarcely recognized his voice in one way. In another she knew it must be his; for all the vitality and strength, the single-mindedness and simplicity which she had seen in him so often, were crowded into it; brought into it by fancy, concentrated by a mere suggestion--of herself.

The magic of this seemed to encompa.s.s her; she sought shelter from it recklessly.

”I?” she interrupted. ”I don't go in for that sort of thing, Mr. Carlyon. You seem to forget my work--work which I value above--milliners! Try Mrs. Smith--there she is coming in her victoria; she is one of the best-dressed women I ever saw.”

She could not certainly have looked better than she did as, seeing Lance Carlyon, she called to him as her carriage drove up.

”Do you know where Captain Dering is? He promised--”

Here Lance, with guilty haste, interrupted her. He was just about to drive over and give her a message. Dering had had a touch of fever; he had been over at the palace arranging about the Chinese lanterns for the decorations till late the evening before, and--

”He might have sent a little sooner,” put in Mrs. Smith. ”I have been waiting; he said he would drive me in his dogcart.” There was no vexation, only an almost pathetic surprise in her voice; and Lance looked guiltier still.

”I'm awfully sorry--it's all my fault--I was late to begin with, and then--” He glanced at Erda involuntarily,--compromisingly, it seemed to her.

”I am afraid I kept Mr. Carlyon,” she said, haughtily; ”most unwillingly, I a.s.sure you. Thanks so much, but I can get in quite well by myself.”

As she drove off, however, her head was in a whirl; and as, when pausing to pick up Dr. Campbell, the whole panorama of the camp, the hills behind it, the distant temples of Eshwara, the busy place-seekers in the foreground, the scarlet-sin-stains of the _chupra.s.sies'_ coats against the dazzling whiteness of the tents, lay before her, one of those rare, incomprehensible moods came upon her when the soul retreats into its spiritual body, so that the sight grows clear, the touch keen, and you can feel the round world spin beneath your feet, see the shadow of earth stretching far among the stars.

The World's Desire! What was it?

Brought up to believe that the heart of man--that mainspring of the spinning world--was vile, she had never asked herself why this was so.

She had read the story of Adam and Eve with unquestioning faith, yet never sought to know what had changed the good to evil.

But now, as her eyes rested on those far-distant peaks with that faint mist about their feet hiding the ”Cradle of the G.o.ds,” and followed, as far as the eye could follow in the nearer hills, the climbing track worn by the weariness of that eternal search after righteousness, she asked herself what it was which kept mankind so long upon the road; asked herself, for the first time, what that first sin had been which had lost Paradise.

No lack of desire after salvation, surely. Generation on generation of Eastern pilgrims had worn that path out of the sheer rock, had agonized after good, and remained evil. A little shudder of memory ran through her at the thought--how evil! And now the West, with its white tents, its white face, its white creed, had come to show a newer, a better way.

Had it? But what had it done for itself? She had worked for two years in London ere coming out to India; and another shudder of memory swept over her of what she had seen there.

The World's Desire! Lance Carlyon had called her that--a woman with a red-gold apple in her hand.

The sound of angry dispute brought her back to realities. They were pa.s.sing out of the camp under the triumphal arch, and one of its sentries was barring the entrance of an ash-smeared figure which was brandis.h.i.+ng a stamped pet.i.tion paper, as if it had been a card of admission, and yelling excitedly for ”Justice! justice!”

”It is that pernicious fellow, Gorakh-nath,” remarked Dr. Campbell, sententiously. ”He wishes, no doubt, to appeal against Captain Dering's order, of which I, for one, am heartily glad. A Christian government is bound to refuse sanction to the practice of a faith which, it is impossible not to see, is degrading in the extreme to those who hold it.”

Erda's eyes were still clear; clear with what those who do not see, call dreams.

”Yet it seeks what we do--peace--forgiveness--the cradle of the goodness, the innocence it left behind--somehow.”

Dr. James Campbell turned to her in dignified, amazed displeasure. ”May I ask what has caused--”