Part 37 (1/2)

”_Parbleu, cherie, qu'y-a-t'il a maintenant_?” he demanded, with an odd mingling of irritation and concern.

”Cholera at Dera Ishmael--Eldred's gone down this morning. . . .” Then tears overwhelmed her, and he turned sharply away. ”Oh go, . . . go, and have your breakfast, Michel; and let me be. I want nothing, nothing, but to be left alone.”

And vanis.h.i.+ng into her room, she bolted the door behind her.

Maurice frowned, and sighed. In all his knowledge of her, Quita had never so completely lost her self-control. It was quite upsetting: and he disliked being upset the first thing in the morning. It put him out of tune for the rest of the day. But after all . . one must eat. And he retraced his steps to the dining-room.

”I wish to heaven she had never discovered this uncomfortable husband of hers!” he reflected as he went ”Since he will neither marry her, nor leave her alone; and it is we who have to suffer for his heroics!”

For all that, he found speedy consolation in the thought that at ten o'clock a new 'subject' was coming to sit to him:--a wrinkled hag, whom he had met on his way back from Jundraghat, bent half double under a towering load of gra.s.s, her neutral-tinted tunic and draped trousers relieved by the scarlet of betel-nut on her lips and gums, and by a goat's-hair necklet strung with raw lumps of amber and turquoise, interset with three plaques of beaten silver;--the only form of savings bank known to these simple children of the hills.

While hastily demolis.h.i.+ng his breakfast, Maurice visualised his picture in every detail: and with the arrival of his model all thought of Quita and her woes was crowded out of his mind. Yet the man was not heartless, by any means. He was simply an artist of the extreme type, endowed by temperament with the capacity for subordinating all things,--his own griefs no less than the griefs of others,--to one dominant, insatiable purpose. And according to his lights he must be judged.

Quita remained invisible till lunch-time, lying inert, where she had flung herself, upon her unmade bed.

The first tempest of misery, and rebellion, and self-castigation had given place to sheer exhaustion. For even suffering has its limitations; which is perhaps the reason why grief rarely kills. All the springs of life seemed suddenly to have run down. Her spirit felt crushed and broken by the obstructiveness of all about her. The strain of the past three weeks, following upon a severe shock, had told upon her more than she knew; and this morning's sharp revulsion of feeling brought her near to purely physical collapse.

And while she lay alone through two endless hours, tracing designs from the cracks in the whitewashed wall, one conviction haunted her with morbid persistence. Because she had not valued him in the beginning, because she had repudiated him in a moment of wounded pride, he would be taken from her, now that heart and soul were set upon him, and she would never see him again. It was useless to argue that the idea was childish; a mere nightmare of overwrought nerves. It persisted and prevailed, till she felt herself crushed in the grip of a relentless, impersonal Force, against which neither penitence nor tears would avail.

Finally, worn out with pain and rebellion, she fell asleep.

BOOK III.-THE TENTS OF ISHMAEL.

CHAPTER XVIII.

”Leave the what at the what's-its-name, Leave the sheep without shelter; Leave the corpse uninterred, Leave the bride at the altar.”

--Kipling.

Even in a land where danger and discomfort flourish like the unG.o.dly, that journey from the cedar-crowned Himalayas to the white hot flats of the Derajat, with the Punjab furnace in full swing, was an experience not readily forgotten by the three who set out upon it in the dripping grey dawn of a July morning. Before them stretched two nights and three days of pure martyrdom, aggravated by that prince of evils--a troubled mind: for the Desmonds a haunting anxiety, and for Lenox the hara.s.sing realisation that his own strength or weakness during the next few months stood for no less than the happiness or misery of the only woman on earth. It is this irrevocable fusion of two lives, and the network of responsibilities arising from an act less simple than it seems, that const.i.tute the strength, the charm, the tragedy of marriage: and a dim foreknowledge of its complexity dawned upon Lenox during his penitential progress into a land of fire and death.

Throughout their fifty mile descent to the foot-hill terminus it rained perseveringly. But toward evening the clouds parted, and an hour of suns.h.i.+ne set the drenched earth steaming like a soup kettle when the lid is lifted off. Desmond had ordained that Lenox and his wife should be carried down in doolies; an indignity to which they submitted under protest: and Honor, scrambling out of her prison through an opening level with the ground, pa.s.sed quite gratefully from its stuffy twilight, redolent of sodden canvas and humanity, to the smell of hot wood and leather that pervaded the sun-saturate railway carriage awaiting them in Pathankot station.

With the unhurried deftness of an experienced pilgrim, she set about making the place cooler, and more habitable; drew up all the window-shutters; opened her bedding roll; and taking possession of Lenox, established him, with tender imperiousness, in the least stifling corner, a pillow set lengthways behind him. He leaned against it, and closed his eyes.

”Head bad?” she asked a little anxiously. For the concussion headache is no child's play, and ten hours in a doolie might breed neuralgia in a cannon-ball.

”Pretty average. Nothing to trouble about.” The a.s.surance was not convincing: and she gleaned the truth from two deep lines in his forehead.

”I'm going to make you some tea in a minute,” she announced cheerfully, opening her basket, and clamping a travelling spirit-lamp to the woodwork above the seat. ”Real tea. Not the stewed leaves and water we should pay six annas for outside! There's half a dozen of soda, three pints of champagne, a fowl, and an aspic in the icebox under your seat. But tea would be best now. We'll keep the rest for your dinners.”

He opened his eyes and smiled at her.

”You've a remarkable talent for spoiling a man!”

”It's one I'm very proud of,” she answered simply: and leaning out of the open doorway, caught sight of her husband striding down the platform, closely followed by an army of coolies, two bearers, and two pessimistic-looking dogs on chains. ”Theo,” she called, ”do leave that eternal luggage to Amar Singh, and come and be spoilt! We're going to have tea.”

Before the train jolted out of the station, she had served it to them in large cups, an insubstantial biscuit in each saucer: for it is drink, not food, that a man wants when the thermometer stands at 110 degrees in the shade.