Leonie of the Jungle Part 31

"I will tell you some day!"

"Tell me _now_!"

"No! not now! It is of love that I should have to speak, and in all these past weeks you have not let me touch your hand or speak to you of love. You have put a barrier between us, a barrier of a misplaced fear, which has grown higher and stronger since I have had to confess to failure in finding any trace of your old servant. India is wide, dear, and its villages uncountable, and _I_ am not distressed over the empty return of these last months; all that worries me is, that while prowling about the Himalayas out of reach of the post, I never knew what had happened to you, or that you were in India."

Leonie sighed as she opened her hand and looked at the small bones.

"Tell me now, Jan!" she insisted.

"No! Leonie, I cannot. There will be no one near us when I do tell you, and except as a souvenir of that very fine old man, you need not keep them, because my love is a still greater and surer charm to bring you the great happiness they promise."

CHAPTER x.x.xII

"And thou shalt become an astonishment, a proverb, a byword."--_The Bible_.

When Leonie returned to Calcutta she found that the tale of her courageous act which had preceded her, and of which home and local papers had exhausted themselves in praise, had not served to endear her to that little white community, which suffers from social myopia, and the self-adjusted chains of what it most mistakenly calls caste.

Not likely that the feminine members of Jute, military, railway, or law circles _would_ open their arms any wider to this young, and beautiful, widowed creature with the mop of naturally curling hair, now that, if so minded, she could verbally and positively flap one of the finest tiger skins that had ever come out of Bengal in their heat-stricken faces.

In fact some of the young ones as they wrestled with the nightly problem of their own dank, straight particular bit of woman's glory, would doubtless, if questioned, have upheld the Hindu custom of completely shaving the widowed head.

Many, in fact, had been the meetings of these younger mem-sahibs in bungalows, or flats, at Firpoes, or in clubs, where, under the pretext of criticising the latest fas.h.i.+ons from overseas, they discussed the pros and cons of accepting this person into the haven of their Anglo-Indian bosom.

The elder ones kept out of the clatter, having suffered and fought in similar crises in their own day as had their mothers, and their mothers' mothers before them since the days before the mutiny; being moreover resigned to the corrugated appearance of their faces, and the, in consequence, perambulatory instincts of their lords.

"Her _undies_," said a woman who, with the excuse of borrowing a book, had essayed to spy out the land of Leonie's cabin. "I saw her running ribbons in them--the most _ex_-quisite crepe de Chine, hand embroidered and trimmed with _real_ lace!"

"How _de trop_!" had answered a matron, whose household _linge_ and personal _lingerie_ showed complete only in the sections of finger napkins and undervests, as is the way of a careless, untidy woman's linen stock.

"Well, that's easily understood," chimed in a third. "After all she _is_ trade."

And the no's had carried it.

Wherefore, although in ignorance of the verdict, she did exactly what every other woman did, and went where they went, she most certainly did _not_ have what one would call a good time. She loved the Maidan and golf at the Jodhpur Club, or Tollygunge, before breakfast; she cordially loathed shopping and duty calls; grudged the hours lost out of life in the daily afternoon siesta, and took part in dances, bridge, dinners, and all the usual monotonous effort to kill time, with the air of an indifferent, disgruntled statue.

Gossip was no joy to her, scandal she would not tolerate, and the women commenced the task of ostracism by means of half-uttered phrases and little invidious smiles; and most men voted her _odd_ owing to a certain indescribable barrier which they invariably encountered when they approached her over impulsively, and which really did _not_ tally with her enticing, bizarre beauty.

Yes! they voted her odd, certainly, but in the secret places of their hearts and bungalows some of them would ponder.

Had not the major sahib's bearer curled himself up on the mat beneath the bed and gone to sleep, while the major sahib, after the ball, had sat in his s.h.i.+rt-sleeves upon that bed until three in the morning; and over and over again mentally slid up and down the room with supple, slender Leonie in his arms, where, in the earlier hours of the night, she had rested seemingly content for one half-second before he had let her go under the palms.

And, "d.a.m.n it all, she's not a flirt," did not a certain youthful sahib who wors.h.i.+pped openly at her shrine exclaim, as he thought, in the unpleasantly heated watches of the night, of that moment when she had smiled down sweetly into his adoring eyes, as his cheek brushed her hand while she was arranging her habit, and he her stirrup leather.

How _were_ they to know that, distracted by an ever-increasing fear, and lost in an overwhelming love, Leonie had no more remembrance than the man in the moon of the fact that she had danced with the one, and smiled upon the other.

It was the final flare of the season in the shape of a ball at Government House; one of those mixed ma.s.sed gatherings to which you are invited either on account of your rank, or your unblemished reputation, or the fact that you've had the forethought to inscribe your name in the visiting-book.

Leonie was standing with Jan Cuxson near an open door under a revolving fan which disturbed the outer ma.s.ses of the hair she had piled haphazard upon the top of her small head, catching the great coils together with huge pins, and strengthening the entire structure by means of a finely wrought, diamond-hilted steel dagger, looted in the Mutiny by a not over-punctilious forbear.

"I wonder you don't cut your hair to bits," had once remarked before a mult.i.tude, an envious dame, whose curls reposed cosily in a box o'

nights, and who had grave doubts as to the sincerity of Leonie's tawny locks.

"I run it through in its sheath," Leonie had replied, pulling the sheathed dagger out as she spoke, so that her hair had fallen in a jumbled scented mantle all over her, causing the men to put their hands in their pockets, or behind their backs, and the women to mechanically pat their heads; just as you fidget unconsciously with your veil, or the curls above your ear, when someone of your own s.e.x, and far better turned-out, happens upon your horizon.

On this night her absurdly small feet made her head look almost top heavy, just as the uncorseted small waist emphasised the width of her shoulders, and the violet shadows enlarged the opalescent weird eyes looking wearily on the scene around her.

Why didn't she go back to England if she hated it all so much?

Because she couldn't! Because India held her and she waited upon Fate as patiently as ever did Mr. Micawber.

"Lady Hickle ought to go to the hills, she's looking absolutely f.a.gged!"

The male voice drifted in through the window upon a pause in the music.

"Well! continuous _sleep-walking's_ not likely to make you look your best, is it?"

The d.a.m.nable giggle at the end of the remark brought a frown to Jan Cuxson's face as he picked up somebody's wrap from a chair, put it round Leonie and led her unresistingly down the steps into the grounds.

It sounds better to say "grounds" rather than "compound" when speaking of Government House.

"I--I _hate_ all this," Leonie said impulsively as she sat down on a marble seat. "I hate India--I--I----"

She flung her head back, and it came to rest upon the man's shoulder, and she s.h.i.+vered ever so lightly when he pressed it still further back, pinioning her arms so that she could not move.

"Leonie."

The sudden authority in the voice brought a light to the eyes on a level with his mouth; she moved unconsciously, and Cuxson suddenly letting her go caught both her hands in one of his, pulled her round sideways, and jerked them up to his chin, and she laughed softly as she fell slightly forward; and laughed even more softly when he crushed her back again against him with his hands upon her breast.

Both heedless in their love of the eyes watching, of the hidden form, and above all of that relentless will which causes some of us uncontrollably to do odd things at odd moments under the Indian stars.

If _only_ he had not hesitated, if only he had turned the face to him then and there and closed the gold-flecked eyes with kisses.

But instead he held her crushed to the point of agony against him with his mouth upon the sweetness of her neck, leaving the gold-flecked eyes to open wider, and still wider as they stared straight into the shrubbery around, where the flaming poinsettia flowers looked black under the stars.

"Beloved! Leonie, listen----"

"_Don't!_ please don't!"

She pulled herself free and knelt on one knee upon the bench, with both hands outstretched against him; and he, not grasping the psychological points of the moment, sat down dumbly beside her, instead of mastering her physically, or mentally on the spot as it behoved him to do.

Heavens! what fools some men can be with that jungle animal woman within their hands.

"Leonie, listen dear, I want you to marry me, dear--soon!"

The words fell upon Leonie's clamouring soul as dismally as the raindrops of your childhood fell upon the window-pane when you were waiting to start for a picnic.