The Pool in the Desert Part 22

The fourth skin which enables so many of us to be callous to all but the relative meaning of careless phrases had not been given to Innes, and her words fell upon his bare sense of propriety.

'Jealous,' he said, 'of a married woman? I find that difficult to understand.'

Violet's face straightened out.

'Don't be absurd, Horace. These boys are always jealous of somebody or other--it's the occupation of their lives! I really don't see how one can prevent it.'

'It seems to me that a self-respecting woman should see how. Your point of view in these matters is incomprehensible.'

'Perhaps,' Violet was driven by righteous anger to say, 'you find Miss Anderson's easier to understand.'

Colonel Innes's face took its regimental disciplinary look, and, though his eyes were aroused, his words were quiet with repression.

'I see no reason to discuss Miss Anderson with you,' he said. 'She has nothing to do with what we are talking about.'

'Oh, don't you, really! Hasn't she, indeed! I take it you are trying to make me believe that compromising things are said about Mr. Holmcroft and me at the Club. Well, I advise you to keep your ears open a little more, and listen to the things said about you and Madeline Anderson there. But I don't suppose you would be in such a hurry to repeat them to HER.'

Innes turned very white, and the rigidity of his face gave place to heavy dismay. His look was that of a man upon whom misfortune had fallen out of a clear sky. For an instant he stared at his wife. When he spoke his voice was altered.

'For G.o.d's sake!' he said, 'let us have done with this pitiful wrangling. I dare say you can take care of yourself; at all events, I only meant to warn you. But now you must tell me exactly what you mean by this that you have said--this--about--'

'The fat's in the fire,' was Mrs. Innes's reflection.

'Certainly, I'll tell you--'

'Don't shout, please!'

'I mean simply that all Simla is talking about your affair with Miss Anderson. You may imagine that because you are fifteen years older than she is things won't be thought of, but they are, and I hear it's been spoken about at Viceregal Lodge. I KNOW Lady Bloomfield has noticed it, for she herself mentioned it to me. I told her I hadn't the slightest objection, and neither have I, but there's an old proverb about people in gla.s.s houses. What are you going to do?'

Colonel Innes's expression was certainly alarming, and he had made a step toward her that had menace in it.

'I am going out,' he said, and turned and left her to her triumph.

Chapter 3.IX.

She--Violet--had unspeakably vulgarized it, but it must be true--it must be, to some extent, true. She may even have lied about it, but the truth was there, fundamentally, in the mere fact that it had been suggested to her imagination. Madeline's name, which had come to be for him an epitome of what was finest and most valuable, most to be lived for, was dropping from men's lips into a kind of an abyss of dishonourable suggestion. There was no way out of it or around it. It was a cloud which encompa.s.sed them, suddenly blackening down.

There was nothing that he could do--nothing. Except, yes, of course--that was obvious, as obvious as any other plain duty. Through his selfishness it had a beginning; in spite of his selfishness it should have an end. That went without saying. No more walks or rides. In a conventional way, perhaps--but nothing deliberate, designed--and never alone together. Gossip about flippant married women was bad enough, but that it should concern itself with an unprotected creature like Madeline was monstrous, incredible. He strode fiercely into the road round Jakko, and no little harmless snake, if it had crawled across his path, would have failed to suffer a quick fate under the guidance of his imagination. But there was nothing for him to kill, and he turned upon himself.

The sun went down into the Punjab and left great blue-and-purple hill worlds barring the pa.s.sage behind him. The deodars sank waist deep into filmy shadow, and the yellow afterlight lay silently among the branches.

A pink-haunched monkey lopading across the road with a great show of prudence seemed to have strayed into an unfamiliar country, and the rustling twigs behind him made an episode of sound. The road in perpetual curve between its little stone parapet and the broad flank of the hill rose and fell under the deodars; Innes took its slopes and its steepnesses with even, unslackened stride, aware of no difference, aware of little indeed except the physical necessity of movement, spurred on by a futile instinct that the end of his walk would be the end of his trouble--his amazing, black, menacing trouble. A pony's trot behind him struck through the silence like percussion-caps; all Jakko seemed to echo with it; and it came nearer--insistent, purposeful--but he was hardly aware of it until the creature pulled up beside him, and Madeline, slipping quickly off, said--

'I'm coming too.'

He took off his hat and stared at her. She seemed to represent a climax.

'I'm coming too,' she said. 'I'm tired of picking flies off the Turk, and he's really unbearable about them tonight. Here, syce.' She threw the reins to the man and turned to Innes with a smile of relief. 'I would much rather do a walk. Why--you want me to come too, don't you?'

His face was all one negative, and under the unexpectedness of it and the amazement of it her questioning eyes slowly filled with sudden, uncontrollable tears, so that she had to lower them, and look steadily at the hoof-marks in the road while she waited for his answer.

'You know how I feel about seeing you--how glad I always am,' he stammered. 'But there are reasons--'

'Reasons?' she repeated, half audibly.

'I don't know how to tell you. I will write. But let me put you up again--'

'I will not,' Madeline said, with a sob, 'I won't be sent home like a child. I am going to walk, but--but I can quite well go alone.' She started forward, and her foot caught in her habit so that she made an awkward stumble and came down on her knee. In rising she stumbled again, and his quick arm was necessary. Looking down at her, he saw that she was crying bitterly. The tension had lasted long, and the snap had come when she least expected it.

'Stop,' Innes said, firmly, hardly daring to turn his head and ascertain the blessed fact that they were still alone. 'Stop instantly. You shall not go by yourself.' He flicked the dust off her habit with his pocket-handkerchief. 'Come, please; we will go on together.' Her distress seemed to make things simple again. It was as if the cloud that hung over them had melted as she wept, and lifted, and drifted a little further on. For the moment, naturally, nothing mattered except that she should be comforted. As she walked by his side shaken with her effort at self-control, he had to resist the impulse to touch her. His hand tingled to do its part in soothing her, his arm ached to protect her, while he vaguely felt an element of right, of justice, in her tears; they were in a manner his own. What he did was to turn and ask the syce following if he had loosened the Turk's saddle-girths.

'I shall be better--in a moment,' Madeline said, and he answered, 'Of course'; but they walked on and said nothing more until the road ran out from under the last deodar and round the first bare boulder that marked the beginning of the Ladies' Mile. It lay rolled out before them, the Ladies' Mile, sinuous and grey and empty, along the face of the cliff; they could see from one end of it to the other. It was the bleak side of Jakko; even tonight there was a fresh springing coldness in it blowing over from the hidden snows behind the rims of the nearer hills. Madeline held up her face to it, and gave herself a moment of its grateful discipline.

'I have been as foolish as possible,' she said, 'as foolish as possible.

I have distressed you. Well, I couldn't help it--that is all there is to be said. Now if you will tell me--what is in your mind--what you spoke of writing--I will mount again and go home. It doesn't matter--I know you didn't mean to be unkind.' Her lip was trembling again, and he knew it, and dared not look at it.

'How can you ask me to tell you--miserable things!' he exclaimed. 'How can I find the words? And I have only just been told--I can hardly myself conceive it--'

'I am not a child in her teens that my ears should be guarded from miserable things. I have come of age, I have entered into my inheritance of the world's bitterness with the rest. I can listen,' Madeline said.

'Why not?'

He looked to her with grave tenderness. 'You think yourself very old, and very wise about the world,' he said; 'but you are a woman, and you will be hurt. And when I think that a little ordinary forethought on my part would have protected you, I feel like the criminal I am.'

'Don't make too much of it,' she said, simply. 'I have a presentiment--'

'I'll tell you,' Innes said, slowly; 'I won't niggle about it. The people of this place--idiots!--are unable to believe that a man and a woman can be to each other what we are.'

'Yes?' said Madeline. She paused beside the parapet and looked down at the indistinct little fields below, and the blurred ma.s.ses of white wild roses waving midway against the precipice.

'They can not understand that there can be any higher plane of intercourse between us than the one they know. They won't see--they can't see--that the satisfaction we find in being together is of a different nature.'

'I see,' said Madeline. She had raised her eyes, and they sought the solemn lines of the horizon. She looked as if she saw something infinitely lifted above the pettiness he retailed to her.

'So they say--good G.o.d, why should I tell you what they say!' It suddenly flashed upon him that the embodiment of it in words would be at once, from him, sacrilegious and ludicrous. It flashed upon him that her natural anger would bring him pain, and that if she laughed--it was so hard to tell when she would laugh--it would be as if she struck him.

He cast about him dumb and helpless while she kept her invincibly quiet gaze upon the farther hills. She was thinking that this breath of gossip, now that it had blown, was a very slight affair compared with Horace Innes's misery--which he did not seem to understand. Then her soul rose up in her, brus.h.i.+ng everything aside, and forgetting, alas!

the vow it had once made to her.

'I think I know,' she said. 'They are indeed foolish. They say that we--love each other. Is not that what they say?'

He looked in amazement into her tender eyes and caught at the little mocking smile about her lips. Suddenly the world grew light about him, the shadows fled away. Somewhere down in the valley, he remembered afterward, a hill-flute made music. When he spoke it was almost in a whisper, lest he should disturb some newly perceived lovely thing that had wings, and might leave him. 'Oh, Madeline,' he said, 'is it true?'

She only smiled on in gladness that took no heed of any apprehension, any fear or scruple, and he himself keeping his eyes upon her face, said, 'It is true.'

So they stood for a little time in silence while she resisted her great opportunity. She resisted it to the end, and presently beckoned to the syce, who came up leading the pony. Innes mounted her mechanically and said, 'Is that all right?' as she put her foot in the stirrup, without knowing that he had spoken.

'Goodbye,' she said; 'I am going away--immediately. It will be better.

And listen--I have known this for weeks--and I have gone on seeing you.

And I hope I am not any more wicked than I feel. Goodbye.'