Part 8 (1/2)
”It might, if I had not heard a good deal of it before. You are chronically devoted to one or other of us, my beloved Pagan! That's the root of the difficulty.”
In atonement for directness of speech, she laid hands upon his shoulders, and smiled very tenderly into his face.
”I am chronically devoted to you, _coeur de mon coeur_,” he declared in all sincerity. ”That is the only form of it I have yet known.”
His reward was a b.u.t.terfly kiss between the eyebrows.
”Out of your own mouth you stand condemned! It is quite charming for me; and for the rest--one accepts the unavoidable! But in sober prosaic truth, Michel, Elsie Mayhew is a great deal too good for you; and that nice Engineer boy, Mr Malcolm, is desperately in earnest about her, I have seen his whole heart in his eyes when he looks at her----”
”_Mais, ma chere_, what a serious derangement of his organism!” Michael broke in with irreverent laughter. ”When all's said, the heart is a practical machine--even the heart of a lover, and a little of it must have been left below for pumping purposes!”
She stamped her foot in helpless irritation.
”Michel, how exasperating you are! Can't you see that I am in earnest?”
”Like my incomparable rival?” he queried unabashed. ”Poor devil! I wish him no harm. Is it my fault, after all, if the lady prefers a man who is not cut out on a pattern, and filed for reference at the War Office? He is immaculate, _ce cher Malcolm_, from his parting to the toes of his boots. And, _ma foi_, he is clean--like all that redoubtable army of British officers--aggressively clean, inside and out, which one cannot always say with truth! But he has no finesse, no _savoir faire_ where women are concerned. If he is in earnest let him try weapons more compelling than his _beaux yeux_. A man was not given lips and a pair of hands for eating and fighting merely; and if he cannot turn them to good account, he deserves the fate that will a.s.suredly be his.”
Quita's sigh, as she turned impatiently away, may have arisen from a pa.s.sing thought of that other, who had also been remiss in putting lips and hands to their legitimate use, and had reaped disaster accordingly.
She took off her helmet, as if suddenly aware of its weight, and tossed it into a chair.
”Is Miss Mayhew giving you another sitting after our sunrise picnic, on Dynkund, to-morrow?” she asked in a changed voice.
”Yes, and I intend that she shall stay on for tiffin also.”
”Then I will persuade Major Garth to follow suit, so that we may be a _parti carre_. And now, as it's more than half-past breakfast-time, we might begin to think about sitting down! I believe Major Garth is riding up this morning with some books I lent him, and I must get forward a little with my picture before he comes.”
”His office hours seem to have become a negligible quant.i.ty lately,”
Maurice remarked casually, his eyes on Elsie's face.
”Yes, I told him so a few days ago, apparently without much effect.
Major Garth is one of those men who combine a maximum of pleasure and a minimum of work with the capacity for securing good appointments, which is quite an achievement--of its kind. I suppose I must gently point out to him that now the station is waking up it would be well to consider the proprieties a little more than we have done so far; or the 'b.u.t.ton Quail' will be forbidding Elsie the house. She is volubly disapproving already, denounces him as a 'dangerous man' . . .
delectable adjective! But the cackle of Quails is nothing to me. So long as the man behaves himself, and amuses me, I shall continue to see just as much of him as I think fit.”
Major Garth, it may be mentioned in pa.s.sing, had lately secured the coveted post of Station Staff Officer. He also had spent the winter months in Dalhousie; and he could by no means be reckoned among the men who fail with women through undue fastidiousness in regard to ways and means.
CHAPTER IV.
”A bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter.”--_Eccles_.
”Tired already? Nonsense! The air at this height is pure elixir vitae. It gives one a foretaste of the joy of being disembodied! I feel five years younger since I left the bungalow.”
”And I, on the other hand, feel uncomfortably aware that I shall never see the forty-third milestone again!” And, seating himself deliberately on the trunk of a fallen deodar, James Garth looked up at his companion, where she stood above him on a rough-hewn block of granite, her alpenstock held high like a shepherd's crook, the slender, shapely form of her outlined upon a sky already athrill with the foreknowledge of dawn.
Standing thus, lightly poised, impatient of delay, slim and upright as a young birch-tree, a cl.u.s.ter of roses at her waist, her expressive face shadowed by the wide-brimmed helmet, she appeared triumphantly, girlishly young, for all her eight-and-twenty years. Her cheeks glowed; irrepressible animation sparkled in her eyes. The shock and jar of twenty-four hours ago seemed forgotten, as though they had never been, for Quita Maurice was blessed with the happy faculty of living vividly and exclusively in the present, and the exhilaration of ascent, the prospect of watching the world's awakening from a pine-crowned pinnacle, nine thousand feet up, were, for the moment, all-sufficing.
James Garth, in his upward glance, appraised every detail of her dress and person; savoured to the full her very individual--if, at times, thorn-set--charm. He was a connoisseur of woman--of their moods, their minor vanities, their methods of defence and attack--this man whose career had been mainly remarkable for a succession of sentimental friends.h.i.+p, innocuous and otherwise.