When the Birds Begin to Sing Part 30

The Rubicon has been crossed. Eleanor is among the lost--on the other side!

Erminie is sitting under the pale light of a yellow lamp, deep in a novel.

The heroine is wavering on the verge of an irredeemable error, and Erminie's kind heart is thoroughly in the book. She is a sympathetic reader, and her eyes moisten as they scan the pages.

She is guilty of serious skipping, and as steps are heard in the hall below, glances at the finish.

A sigh of relief escapes her.

"Oh, I am glad she didn't! I am glad she is saved!" exclaims Mrs. Lane involuntarily, rising, as she thinks, to meet Nelson, since this is his hour to return.

Instead, Philip stands before her, white as a corpse. His haggard features are accentuated by the mellow lamp light, his figure sways, tottering till he steadies himself by grasping the back of a chair.

He has not tasted food that day, and she fancies he looks shrunken, marvelling at his altered appearance.

She dares not ask him what has happened, but just gazes with wondering sympathy into his miserable eyes.

"It has come," he gasps, pa.s.sing one hand over his brow.

"What?" murmurs Erminie, under her breath.

"Eleanor and Quinton--they have gone together."

His voice vibrates through the room. A gasp of horror escapes Mrs.

Lane. She staggers back.

"What shall you do?" she asks.

"What will I do?" echoes Philip, his eyes flas.h.i.+ng, and the colour rus.h.i.+ng back in a flood to his ashen cheeks. "Find her--track her to the end of the earth. Everything in life has closed to me this day. I shall only exist for one motive--one unswerving aim. She thinks she has escaped me, but the world is small, and while Eleanor and I are both in the same hemisphere----"

He pauses, for the room swims round.

A look that Erminie can never forget crosses his face--a look of sublime love, checked by an expression of devilish rage and hatred.

The two seem battling a moment for pre-eminence.

Then he draws himself up to his full height, as if fighting for breath, and falls heavily upon the floor at Erminie's feet. Nelson's voice is heard calling her without.

She rushes to the door with a wild cry:

"Help--help! Philip is DEAD!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: She rushes to the door with a wild cry.]

CHAPTER XV.

AH, FOR SOME RETREAT, DEEP IN YONDER s.h.i.+NING ORIENT.--_Tennyson_.

"Have you ever heard anything more of that poor Mr. Roche, whose wife deserted him?" asks Erminie's sister-in-law.

"No," replies Mrs. Lane sadly. "We had one awful night when he came and told us the news, and fainted. I am so weak-minded, I thought he was dead immediately, and shrieked and tore my hair, and made quite a scene. I always jump at conclusions, it is so stupid of me. Nelson had a bad time of it that night. We sent for a doctor, but it was ages before we got him round, and then he seemed so strange and reticent that it frightened me still more. I thought he would lose his reason, he had just that look on his face. The following day he left us without a word. He just held both my hands very tightly, and said thank you with his eyes. Of course I made a fool of myself, and kissed him and cried over him like a child, which only made matters worse. I asked him what he intended doing, and he gasped 'Eleanor' under his breath, and rushed out of the house. We have never seen him since."

"How strange! Then he has entirely vanished out of your lives? I thought he seemed strangely depressed at the theatre, the evening we went to the Savoy."

"Ah! that was the night before."

"Yes, he disappointed me. I had heard so much of your charming cousin, but I suppose the poor fellow had some inkling of it then."

"I never expect to see him again. He was a very sensitive man, and the curious or condoling looks of acquaintances would have driven him mad.

Nelson says he has left England, yet no one knows where he has gone.

The nice home on Richmond Terrace is broken up, and I have practically lost a brother. It was a strange ending to his married career."

"That is what comes of marrying beneath you. These people with low minds----"

Erminie stops her sister-in-law with a deprecating gesture. She is staunch to Philip, and knows how it would pain him to hear these words.

"I was fond of her," she says simply. "Let us talk of something else."

"I wish we could go up to the source of the Irrawaddy River, where no white man has ever been," says Eleanor, laying her hand confidingly in Carol's. "I should not be afraid with you, dear--such a traveller, and knowing the country so well. How many years is it since you were last in India?"

"Over seven. How did I drag through them without you?" he replies tenderly.

"We had a glorious voyage, didn't we? and everybody was so nice to us.

I remember, Carol, how frightened I felt when first you suggested this long journey, and promised to take me north of Burmah to this strange, uncivilised village, where I should have to eat nothing but rice, or shoot my own game. Of course you had been here before, and though it is so wild and out of the way, there are still some white people to remind us we are not all savages."

"My dear, you must not call them 'savages,'" he says smiling. "They are really very nice, though a trifle odd and original; but that is what you like, I believe."

"Oh! yes. I am quite in love with my black servants. I think they are ever so much more picturesque and pleasant than my Richmond acquaintances. They look on me as a white angel, which no one would have done at home," with a smile at her quiet humour.

Eleanor's feelings by now are blunted to a certain extent, and she frequently jests on the wholesome horror with which her English friends must now regard "that reckless Mrs. Roche!"

Yet there are times when the thought of her sin rises like a dark thundercloud over the suns.h.i.+ne of this life of love.

She is standing in the low verandah of her bamboo house, looking out over a network of gorges, rifts, and ravines, precipices in peaks, with villages crowning each crest. The houses are thatched with long gra.s.s, which grows over the hills, while below in the valley the rice is cultivated in terraces. The villages are stockaded with bamboo, and the water runs through them in troughs of split bamboo.

"The people are certainly very dirty," says Eleanor, watching an old woman with large amber earings, pounding rice, and talking to a dusky man in a blue turban.

"Yes. They wear their clothes till they fall off, and never wash except when it rains. That man below is a noted warrior in these parts."

"How do you know?"

"You see the sword slung over his shoulder, with a bamboo hoop? Well, the tiger's hoop is a sign of distinction."

"I wish the old woman would stop pounding. She makes my back ache to look at her. She has been making linen on a loom all day, and must be dreadfully tired."