The Pool in the Desert Part 28

She smiled them dry.

'Not now. But I am giving myself, I suppose, to many tears.'

'G.o.d help you,' I said. What else was there to say?

'There is no such person,' she replied, gaily. 'There is only a blessed devil.'

'Then you go all the way--to the logical conclusion?'

She hardly hesitated. 'To the logical conclusion. What poor words!'

'May I ask--when?'

'I should like to tell you that quite definitely, and I think I can. The English mail leaves tonight.'

'And you have arranged to take it?'

'We have arranged nothing. Do you know'--she smiled as if at the fresh colours of an idyll--'we have not even come to the admission? There has been between us no word, no vision. Ah, we have gone in bonds, and dumb!

Hours we have had, exquisite hours of the spirit, but never a moment of the heart, a moment confessed. It was mine to give--that moment, and he has waited--I know--wondering whether perhaps it would ever come. And today--we are going for a ride today, and I do not think we shall come back.'

'O Judy,' I cried, catching at her sleeve, 'he is only a boy!'

'There were times when I thought that conclusive. Now the misery of it has gone to sleep; don't waken it. It pleases me to believe that the years are a convention. I never had any dignity, you know, and I seem to have missed the moral deliverance. I only want--oh, you know what I want. Why don't you open your telegram?'

I had been folding and fingering the brown envelope as if it had been a sc.r.a.p of waste paper.

'It is probably from Mrs. Watkins about the victoria,' I said, feeling its profound irrelevance. 'I wired an offer to her in Bombay.

However'--and I read the telegram, the little solving telegram from Army Headquarters. I turned my back on her to read it again, and then I replaced it very carefully and put it in my pocket. It was a moment to take hold of with both hands, crying on all one's G.o.ds for steadiness.

'How white you look!' said Mrs. Harbottle, with concern. 'Not bad news?'

'On the contrary, excellent news. Judy, will you stay to lunch?'

She looked at me, hesitating. 'Won't it seem rather a compromise on your part? When you ought to be rousing the city--'

'I don't intend to rouse the city,' I said.

'I have given you the chance.'

'Thank you,' I said, grimly, 'but the only real favour you can do me is to stay to lunch.' It was then just on one.

'I'll stay,' she said, 'if you will promise not to make any sort of effort. I shouldn't mind, but it would distress you.'

'I promise absolutely,' I said, and ironical joy rose up in me, and the telegram burned in my pocket.

She would talk of it, though I found it hard to let her go on, knowing and knowing and knowing as I did that for that day at least it could not be. There was very little about herself that she wanted to tell me; she was there confessed a woman whom joy had overcome; it was understood that we both accepted that situation. But in the details which she asked me to take charge of it was plain that she also kept a watchful eye upon fate--matters of business.

We were in the drawing-room. The little round clock in its Armritsar case marked half-past three. Judy put down her coffee cup and rose to go. As she glanced at the clock the light deepened in her eyes, and I, with her hand in mine, felt like an agent of the Destroyer--for it was half-past three--consumed myself with fear lest the blow had miscarried.

Then as we stood, suddenly, the sound of hoofs at a gallop on the drive, and my husband threw himself off at the door and tore through the hall to his room; and in the certainty that overwhelmed me even Judy, for an instant, stood dim and remote.

'Major Jim seems to be in a hurry,' said Mrs. Harbottle, lightly. 'I have always liked your husband. I wonder whether he will say tomorrow that he always liked me.'

'Dear Judy, I don't think he will be occupied with you tomorrow.'

'Oh, surely, just a little, if I go tonight.'

'You won't go tonight.'

She looked at me helplessly. I felt as if I were insisting upon her abas.e.m.e.nt instead of her salvation. 'I wish--'

'You're not going--you're not! You can't! Look!'

I pulled it out of my pocket and thrust it at her--the telegram.

It came, against every regulation, from my good friend the Deputy Adjutant-General, in Simla, and it read, 'Row Khurram 12th probably ordered front three hours' time.'

Her face changed--how my heart leaped to see it change!--and that took command there which will command trampling, even in the women of the camp, at news like this.

'What luck that Bob couldn't take his furlough!' she exclaimed, single-thoughted. 'But you have known this for hours'--there was even something of the Colonel's wife, authority, incisiveness. 'Why didn't you tell me? Ah--I see.'

I stood before her abashed, and that was ridiculous, while she measured me as if I presented in myself the woman I took her to be. 'It wasn't like that,' she said. I had to defend myself. 'Judy,' I said, 'if you weren't in honour bound to Anna, how could I know that you would be in honour bound to the regiment? There was a train at three.'

'I beg to a.s.sure you that you have overcalculated,' said Mrs. Harbottle.

Her eyes were hard and proud. 'And I am not sure'--a deep red swept over her face, a man's blush--'in the light of this I am not sure that I am not in honour bound to Anna.'

We had reached the veranda, and at her signal her coachman drove quickly up. 'You have kept me here three hours when there was the whole of Bob's kit to see to,' she said, as she flung herself in; 'you might have thought of that.'

It was a more than usually tedious campaign, and Colonel Robert Harbottle was ambushed and shot in a place where one must believe pure boredom induced him to take his men. The incident was relieved, the newspapers said--and they are seldom so clever in finding relief for such incidents--by the dash and courage shown by Lieutenant Chichele, who, in one of those feats which it has lately been the fas.h.i.+on to criticize, carried the mortally wounded body of his Colonel out of range at conspicuous risk of depriving the Queen of another officer. I helped Judy with her silent packing; she had forgiven me long before that; and she settled almost at once into the flat in Chelsea which has since been credited with so delightful an atmosphere, went back straight into her own world. I have always kept her first letters about it, always shall.

For months after, while the expedition still raged after snipers and rifle-thieves, I discussed with Lady Chichele the probable outcome of it all. I have sometimes felt ashamed of leaping as straight as I did with Anna to what we thought the inevitable. I based no calculation on all Mrs. Harbottle had gone back to, just as I had based no calculation on her ten years' companions.h.i.+p in arms when I kept her from the three o'clock train. This last was a retrospection in which Anna naturally could not join me; she never knew, poor dear, how fortunate as to its moment was the campaign she deplored, and nothing to this day can have disturbed her conviction that the bond she was at such magnificent pains to strengthen, held against the strain, as long, happily, as the supreme need existed. 'How right you were!' she often said. 'She did, after all, love me best, dear, wonderful Judy!' Her distress about poor Robert Harbottle was genuine enough, but one could not be surprised at a certain ambiguity; one tear for Robert, so to speak, and two for her boy. It could hardly be, for him, a marriage after his mother's heart.

And she laid down with some emphasis that Somers was brilliantly ent.i.tled to all he was likely to get--which was natural, too...

I had been from the beginning so much 'in it' that Anna showed me, a year later, though I don't believe she liked doing it, the letter in part of which Mrs. Harbottle shall finally excuse herself.

'Somers will give you this,' I read, 'and with it take back your son.

You will not find, I know, anything grotesque in the charming enthusiasm with which he has offered his life to me; you understand too well, you are too kind. And if you wonder that I can so render up a dear thing which I might keep and would once have taken, think how sweet in the desert is the pool, and how barren was the prospect from Balclutha.'

It was like her to abandon in pride a happiness that asked so much less humiliation; I don't know why, but it was like her. And of course, when one thought of it, she had consulted all sorts of high expediencies. But I sat silent with remembrance, quieting a pang in my heart, trying not to calculate how much it had cost Judy Harbottle to take her second chance.