Part 11 (1/2)
”You're amazingly good to me, Mrs Desmond; and I'm an ungrateful brute.
Will you overlook that, and play me something warranted to soothe jarred nerves, till your husband comes?”
”Of course I will, gladly. Only you mustn't expect real music from a hireling!”
She chose one of Beethoven's most tenderly gracious Allegrettos, and the soul of the hireling responded creditably to the magic of her touch.
But before she had played many bars a clatter of hoofs announced Desmond's return. He flung himself from the saddle, cleared the verandah steps at a bound, and entered the room:--a man of magnetic vitality, with a temperament like a clear flame; a typical officer of that isolated force to whose gallantry and unwearied devotion to duty India owes more than she is apt to acknowledge, or, possibly, to perceive. He nodded a welcome to Lenox, signed to him to remain seated, and going straight to the piano laid a hand on his wife's shoulder.
”Don't stop. Finish your piece,” he said, as she smiled up at him; and he did not remove his hand, but remained standing there, in simple satisfaction at having got back to her.
Now and again, at very rare intervals, Nature seems to select a favoured man and woman to uphold the torch of the ideal, lest it be reduced to sparks and smoke, to refute the cynic and the pessimist; to hearten a world nauseated and discouraged by the eternal tragi-comedy of marriage, with the spectacle of a human relations.h.i.+p of unsullied beauty: a relations.h.i.+p that pa.s.ses, by imperceptible degrees, from the first antiphony of pa.s.sionate hearts to a deep deliberate bliss, ”durable from the daily dust of life.”
Desmond's first marriage had brought him no such revelation of the hidden mysteries of union; no companions.h.i.+p worthy of the name; and the happiness that comes late, on the heels of conflict and pain, takes a more conscious grip on the heart, is more firmly held to, more jealously guarded, than that which meets us on the threshold, and is accepted as part of the natural order of things. Blest with vivacity, courage, and an ardent zest for Frontier soldiering, Desmond had rarely found life other than very good; but he had only proven the full measure of its goodness since his marriage with Honor Meredith. And the mouths brought increasing reliance on her comrades.h.i.+p; increasing insight into the depths and delicacies of a pa.s.sion that was almost genius. His need of her was deeper now than it had been two years ago, when he had believed himself at the summit of desire. For a great love is like a great mountain-range. Each height scaled reveals farther heights beyond. Attainment is no part of our programme here; and there may well be truth in the axiom that ”to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.”
But Eldred Lenox, tangled in the twofold cords of temperament and circ.u.mstance, was denied even the privilege of travelling hopefully, and at moments like the present he suffered the additional torment of looking into happiness through another man's eyes. It was futile to reiterate the obvious drawbacks of marriage for an ambitious man, standing on the threshold of a coveted career. These distracting Desmonds cheerfully and unconsciously refuted them all! But he accepted the thorns of the situation as toll paid for the privilege of an intimacy he would on no account have forgone, and endured them with the grim stoicism that was his.
The Allegretto ended, Honour swung round on her stool, and set forth her Chumba project without reference to Eldred's threatened departure.
Desmond laughingly professed himself ready to obey orders, within reasonable limits; and it was finally decided that he should write at once to Colonel Mayhew, Resident of the native State in which Dalhousie's hills are situated, and whose capital lies in a cup-shaped valley eighteen miles below the English station.
Thereupon Lenox rose to take his leave; but on the threshold he paused, as though an afterthought had occurred to him.
”Next time you happen to go out calling, Mrs Desmond,” he said, with studied carelessness, ”you might like to look up a Miss Maurice and her brother. They've been here all the winter; and are living on the top of Bakrotas. I met them--some years ago, in Switzerland. Artists, out here for painting purposes--and rather out of the common run. You might find them interesting.”
”They sound as if they would be! Thank you for letting me know of their existence. I'll amuse myself by exploiting them while you two are away.”
But Lenox had no wish to expatiate upon the subject, and with a muttered disclaimer he was gone.
CHAPTER VI.
”I will but say what mere friends say-- Or only a thought stronger.
I will hold your hand as long as all may-- Or--no very little longer.”
--Browning.
”No, I don't like her, and I don't believe I ever shall. One cannot deny that she is beautiful, charming, complete; too complete for my taste. _Cela me gene_. I know no other way to express it.”
Quita Maurice balanced herself on the railing of her matchbox verandah, and gazed critically at the corner where the last of Honor Desmond's _jhampannis_ had not long since disappeared from view. Garth, the inevitable, stood close beside her, faultlessly equipped as always, even to the gold-tipped cigarette, and the violets that blossomed perennially in his coat. He grew them in pots expressly for the purpose; and his bearer set them in a wine-gla.s.s on his breakfast-table every morning.
Quita's verdict on her visitor moved him to a smile of half-cynical amus.e.m.e.nt. He enjoyed her occasional unabashed lapses into the eternal feminine.
”I'm with you there,” he answered, heartily. ”The worst fault a human being can commit is to be faultless. Poor Mrs Desmond! She will have to subsist without our admiration.”
”No need to waste pity on her, _mon ami_. I am convinced that she gets far more admiration than is good for her as it is. She has only been married a little over two years, I believe, and it is safe to presume that her husband idolises her shadow. She is the sort of woman men put on a pedestal, and wors.h.i.+p kneeling; and women mostly detest, because, in their secret hearts, they would like to be up there too! Personally I have no use for pedestals. I am content to be _bon camarade_! As for that sublime Desmond woman, I feel morally certain that she never commits an indiscretion, or has a knot in her shoe-lace, or loses her scissors!”
”Are you peculiarly lenient towards those three failings?”
”I am quite culpably lenient towards the whole tribe of human failings.