The Pool in the Desert Part 17

Nevertheless, Madeline knew precisely when that lady was expected, and as she sauntered in the bazaar one morning, and heard Innes's steps and voice behind her, her mind became one acute surmise as to whether he could possibly postpone the announcement any longer. But he immediately made it plain that this was his business in stopping to speak to her.

'Good morning,' he said, and then, 'My wife comes tomorrow.' He had not told her a bit of personal news, he had made her an official communication, as briefly as it could be done, and he would have raised his hat and gone on without more words if Madeline had not thwarted him.

'What a stupidity for him to be haunted by afterward!' was the essence of the thought that visited her; and she put out a detaining hand.

'Really! By the Bombay mail, I suppose--no, an hour or so later; private tongas are always as much as that behind the mail.'

'About eleven, I fancy. You--you are not inclined for a canter round Summer Hill before breakfast?'

'I am terrified of Summer Hill. The Turk always misbehaves there.

Yesterday he got one leg well over the khud--I WAS thankful he had four.

Tell me, are you ready for Mrs. Innes--everything in the house? Is there anything I can do?

'Oh, thanks very much! I don't think so. The house isn't ready, as a matter of fact, but two or three people have offered to put us up for a day or so until it is. I've left it open till my wife comes, as I dare say she has already arranged to go to somebody. What are you buying?

Country tobacco, upon my word! For your men? That's subversive of all discipline!'

The lines on his face relaxed; he looked at her with fond recognition of another delightful thing in her.

'You give sugar-cane to your horses,' she declared; 'why shouldn't I give tobacco to mine? Goodbye; I hope Mrs. Innes will like "Two Gables".

There are roses waiting for her in the garden, at all events.'

'Are there?' he said. 'I didn't notice. Goodbye, then.'

He went on to his office thinking of the roses, and that they were in his garden, and that Madeline had seen them there. He thought that if they were good roses--in fact, any kind of roses--they should be taken care of, and he asked a Deputy a.s.sistant Inspector-General of Ordnance whether he knew of a gardener that was worth anything.

'Most of them are mere coolies,' said Colonel Innes, 'and I've got some roses in this little place I've taken that I want to look after.'

Next day Madeline took Brookes, and 'The Amazing Marriage', and a lunch-basket, and went out to Mashobra, where the deodars shadow hardly any scandal at all, and the Snows come, with perceptible confidence, a little nearer.

'They almost step,' she said to Brookes, looking at them, 'out of the realm of the imagination.'

Brookes said that they did indeed, and hoped that she hadn't by any chance forgotten the mustard.

'The wind is keen off the glaciers over there--anybody would think of a condiment,' Miss Anderson remarked in deprecation, and to this Brookes made no response. It was a liberty she often felt compelled to take.

The Snows appealed to Madeline even more than did Carintha, Countess of Fleetwood, to whose fortunes she gave long pauses while she looked across their summits at renunciation, and fancied her spirit made strong and equal to its task. She was glad of their sanctuary; she did not know where she should find such another. Perhaps the spectacle was more than ever sublime in its alternative to the one she had come away to postpone the sight of; at all events it drove the reunion of the Inneses from her mind several times for five minutes together, during which she thought of Horace by himself, and went over, by way of preparation for her departure, all that had come and gone between them. There had been luminous moments, especially as they irradiated him, and she dwelt on these. There was no reason why she should not preserve in London or in New York a careful memory of them.

So the lights were twinkling all up and down and round about Simla when she cantered back to it and it was late when she started for the Worsleys, where she was dining. One little lighted house looked much like another perched on the mountainside, and the wooden board painted 'Branksome Hall, Maj.-Gen. T.P. Worsley, R.E.,' nailed to the most conspicuous tree from the main road, was invisible in the darkness.

Madeline arrived in consequence at the wrong dinner-party, and was acclaimed and redirected with much gaiety, which gave her a further agreeable impression of the insouciance of Simla, but made her later still at the Worsleys. So that half the people were already seated when she at last appeared, and her hostess had just time to cry, 'My dear, we thought the langurs must have eaten you! Captain Gordon, you are not abandoned after all. You know Miss Anderson?' when she found herself before her soup.

Captain Gordon heard her account of herself with complacence, and declared, wiping his moustache, that a similar experience had befallen him only a fortnight before.

'Did you ever hear the story of that absent-minded chap, Sir James Jackson, who went to the RIGHT dinner-party by mistake?' he asked, 'and apologized like mad, by Jove! and insisted he couldn't stay. The people nearly had to tie him down in his--' Captain Gordon stopped, arrested by his companion's sudden and complete inattention.

'I see a lady,' interrupted Madeline, with odd distinctness, 'curiously like somebody I have known before.' Her eyes convinced themselves, and then refused to be convinced of the inconceivable fact that they were resting on Violet Prendergast. It was at first too amazing, too amazing only. Then an old forgotten feeling rose in her bosom; the hand on the stem of her wine-gla.s.s grew tense. The sensation fell away; she remembered her emanc.i.p.ation, the years arose and rea.s.sured her during which Violet Prendergast, living or dead, had been to her of absolutely no importance. Yet there was a little aroused tremour in her voice as she went on, 'She is on the General's right--he must have taken her in.

Can you see from where you are sitting?'

'These narrow oval tables are a nuisance that way, aren't they? You don't know who you're dining with till the end of the function. Oh! I see--that's Mrs. Innes, just out, and fresh as paint, isn't she? The Colonel'--Captain Gordon craned his head again--'is sitting fourth from me on this side.'

'Mrs. Innes! Really!' said Madeline. 'Then--then of course I must be mistaken.'

She removed her eyes almost stealthily from the other woman's face and fixed them on the pattern of the table-cloth. Her brain guided her clearly through the tumult of her perception, and no emotion could be observed in the smiling attention which she gave to Captain Gordon's account of the afternoon's tandem racing; but there was a furious beating in her breast, and she thought she could never draw a breath long enough to control it. It helped her that there was food to swallow, wine to drink, and Captain Gordon to listen to; and under cover of these things she gradually, consciously, prepared herself for the shock of encounter which should be conclusive. Presently she leaned a little forward and let her glance, in which no outsider could see the steady recognition, rest upon the lady on the General's right, until that person's agreeable blue eyes wandered down the table and met it.

Perhaps Madeline's own eyelids fluttered a little as she saw the sudden stricture in the face that received her message, and the grimace with which it uttered, pallid with apprehension, its response to a pleasantry of General Worsley's. She was not consummate in her self-control, but she was able at all events to send the glance travelling prettily on with a casual smile for an intervening friend, and bring it back to her dinner-roll without mischief. It did not adventure again; she knew, and she set herself to hold her knowledge, to look at it and understand it, while the mechanical part of her made up its mind about the entrees, and sympathized with Captain Gordon on his hard luck in having three ponies laid up at once. She did not look again, although she felt the watching of the other woman, and was quite aware of the moment at which Mrs.

Innes allowed herself the reprieve of believing that at the Worsley's dinner-party at least there would be no scandal. The belief had its reflex action, doing something to calm her. How could there be--scandal--she asked herself, and dismissed with relief the denunciations which crowded vague but insistent in her brain. Even then she had not grasped the salient points of the situation; she was too much occupied with its irony as it affected her personally; her impressions circled steadily round the word 'twice' and the unimaginable coincidence. Her resentment filled her, and her indignation was like a clear flame behind her smiling face. Robbed twice, once in New York and--oh! preposterous--the second time in Simla! Robbed of the same things by the same hand! She perceived in the shock of it only a monstrous fatality, a ludicrously wicked chance. This may have been due to the necessity of listening to Captain Gordon.

At all events it was only as she pa.s.sed Colonel Innes on her way to the drawing-room and saw ahead of her the very modish receding back of Mrs.

Innes that she realized other things--crime and freedom.

It was the reversion of power; it brought her a great exultation. She sat down under it in a corner, hoping to be left alone, with a white face and s.h.i.+ning eyes. Power and opportunity and purpose--righteous purpose!

The circ.u.mstances had come to her in a flash; she brought them up again steadily and scrutinized them. The case was absolutely clear. Frank Prendergast had been dead just seven months. Colonel Innes imagined himself married four years. Violet Prendergast was a bigamist, and Horace Innes had no wife.

That was the marvellous transcendent fact; that was what lifted her and carried her on great pulsing waves that rolled beyond the walls of the little fripperied drawing-room and its collection of low-necked women, out into her life, which had not these boundaries. She lived again in a possible world. There was no stone wall between herself and joy.

The old Mussulman butler who offered her coffee looked at her with aroused curiosity--here was certainly a memsahib under the favour of G.o.d--and as she stirred it, the shadow that Violet Prendergast had thrown upon her life faded out of her mind in the light that was there.

Then she looked up and met that lady's vivid blue eyes. Mrs. Innes's colour had not returned, but there was a recklessness in the lines of her mouth. In the way she held her chin, expressing that she had been reflecting on old scores, and antic.i.p.ated the worst. Meeting this vigilance Miss Anderson experienced a slight recoil. Her happiness, she realized, had been brought to her in the hands of ugly circ.u.mstance.

'And so melodramatic,' she told herself. 'It is really almost vulgar. In a story I should have no patience with it.' But she went on stirring her coffee with a little uncontrollable smile.

A moment later she had to contemplate the circ.u.mstance that her hostess was addressing her. Mrs. Innes wished to be introduced. Mrs. Innes, incarnate, conscious sensation, was smiling at her, saying that she must know so great a friend of her husband's. He made so few friends, and she was so grateful to anybody who was good to him. Eyes and voice tolerably in rein, aware of the situation at every point, she had a meretricious daring; and it occurred to Madeline, looking at her, that she was after all a fairly competent second-cla.s.s adventuress. She would not refuse the cue. It would make so little difference.

'On the contrary, I am tremendously indebted to Colonel Innes. He has been so very kind about ponies and jhampanies and things. Simla is full of pitfalls for a stranger, don't you think?' And Miss Anderson, unclosing her fan, turned her reposeful head a little in the direction of three married schoolgirls voluble on her left.

'Not when you get to know the language. You must learn the language; it's indispensable. But of course it depends on how long you mean to stay.'

'I think I will learn the language,' said Madeline.

'But General Worsley told me you were leaving Simla in a fortnight.'

'Oh no. My plans are very indefinite; but I shall stay much longer than that.'

'It is Miss Anderson, isn't it?--Miss Madeline Anderson, of New York--no, Brooklyn?'

Madeline looked at her. 'Did not the General say so?' she asked.

'Yes, he did. But one looks to make quite sure.'

'I can understand that.'

Mrs. Innes leaned forward with one elbow on her knee.

It was not a graceful att.i.tude, but it gave the casual air to the conversation which was desirable.

'What are you going to do?' she said.

'My plans are as indefinite as possible, really,' Madeline returned.

'I may spend the cold weather in Calcutta, or go into camp with the Dovedells--I should like that.'

'Mrs. Innes,' cried the nearest schoolgirl, 'we are coming tomorrow to see all the lovely things in your boxes, may we?'