The Native Born; or, the Rajah's People Part 29

To her surprise, Travers made no mention of the subject she dreaded.

He took her hand in his, and led her into the shady drawing-room. She made no attempt to protest, nor did she offer him any formal greeting.

She was oppressed and hypnotized by the conviction that a crisis was about to break over her head which no power of hers could avert. He did not let her hand go. He still held it between his own as they stood opposite each other, and she felt that he was trembling.

"Lois," he said, "Lois, don't think me mad. There are limits to a man's endurance. I have held out so long that I can hold out no longer. I have come because I must speak to you alone. Will you let me?"

She knew now what was coming, and she made a gentle effort to free herself.

"Mr. Travers, will you think me very conceited if I say that I know what you have come to tell me?" she said, with an earnestness which did not conceal her anxiety. "Will you forgive me if I ask you not to tell me? It would be hard to have to spoil our friends.h.i.+p. It has been a great deal to me."

"Does that mean that you don't care?"

"I did not say that. As proof that I do care I will give you my whole confidence, I will be absolutely honest with you. Will you think me very low-spirited if I tell you that a man still holds a place in my life--a man who cares nothing for me? I ought to forget him--my pride should make it possible, and yet I can not, and somehow I do not think I ever shall."

"Isn't that rather a hard punishment for him, Lois?"

"For him?"

"I, too, will be honest. I know whom you mean and I ask you--does Stafford look a happy man? He looks like a man weighed down by a heavy burden. I believe that burden is the knowledge that he has sinned against you, that in his heedlessness, folly, what you will, he has spoiled your life. Until he feels that you have regained your happiness he will never be able to find his own."

A spasm of pain pa.s.sed over her face.

"You mean--I stand in his way?"

"I believe so. And I am sure of one thing--for your own sake as well as for his, you must shake off your old affection for him, and how better than through the cultivation of a new and stronger love? My dear little girl, you couldn't pretend that all the happy hours we have spent together count for nothing. You say my friends.h.i.+p has been a great deal to you. What else is friends.h.i.+p but the sanest, most lasting, and n.o.blest part of love? What surer basis was ever the union between a man and woman built upon? I know what you would say--it has come too soon. You have only just pulled yourself up from a hard blow, and you feel that you must have time to right yourself and all the hopes that were bowled over with you. My dear, I understand that--G.o.d knows, I understand too well--but have pity on me. Think how I have waited, and how time has drifted on and on for me. Must I wait the best years of my life? Won't you let me add the whole of my love to time's cure for healing the old wound?"

There was no pretense in his pleading, no pretense in the pa.s.sion with which his voice shook. And because it was genuine, it carried her forward on the wave of powerful feeling toward his will.

"I do care for you," she said, with a strong effort to appear calm.

"As a friend you are very dear to me, and you are no doubt right to cla.s.s friends.h.i.+p so highly. But I can not pretend that I love you. I do not love you. And a woman should love the man she marries."

He let her hands fall.

"And so you are going to let your life remain empty, little woman?"

"Empty?" she echoed.

"Yes, empty. Will it prove the strength of my love for you if I tell you that it has given me the power to look straight into your heart?

How many times have I read there the thought: 'Of what use is it all?

My life has no object, no end or aim. No one needs me now.' Lois, one man needs you--needs you perhaps as much as he loves you. That man is myself. If you say you have done nothing in the world, look into the soul that I open out to you and to you alone. There is not a generous, honest deed or thought which has not its origin in you. For your sake I have beaten down the devil under my feet--I have tried to live as I meant to live before the time when I, too, found that there was no object in it all, that no one cared whether I was good or bad. This much have you changed in me--it has been your unconscious work. Are you going to leave the task which surely G.o.d has left for you to accomplish?"

He had touched the chord in her which could only give one response, and he knew it. There lay the canker which made her energy and cheerfulness a mere task to hide the real disease. Half unconsciously she had loved Stafford and half unconsciously she had built her life upon him. When he had been taken from her, the foundations had been shaken, and she found herself crippled by a horrible sense of emptiness and purposelessness. In England she would have flung herself into some intellectual pursuit, as other women do who have suffered heart s.h.i.+pwreck. But she was in India, and in India intellectual food is scarce. Pleasure is the one serious occupation for the womenkind; and though pleasure may be a good narcotic for some, for Lois it was worse than useless. She needed one being for whom she could bring sacrifices and endless patient devotion, and there was no one. Her two guardians lived for her, and that was not what she hungered after with all the thwarted energy of her soul. She wanted to work for somebody, not to be worked for--and no one needed her, no one except this man. She looked at him. She saw that her long silence was torture to him; she saw that he was suffering genuinely, and her heart went out to him in pity.

Pity is a woman's invariable undoing. How many women--sometimes happy, sometimes unhappy, according to the rulings of an inscrutable Fate--have married, partly out of flattered vanity, but chiefly because they are good-hearted, and labor under the mistaken conviction that a man's happiness rests on their decision? And in this particular instance Lois was honestly attached to Travers. She felt that to lose him would be to lose a friend whom she could ill spare. Yet a blind instinct forced her to a last resistance.

"I do not love you," she repeated, almost desperately.

"I do not ask for that now, because I know that it will come. I ask you to be my lifelong friend and helper. Remember your promise, Lois!

Has not the time come when we need each other--when no one else is left?" He took her hand again. He felt that she was won.

"If you need me--I care for you enough to try and love you as my husband."

"Thank you, Lois!"

His inborn tact and knowledge of the human character stood him again in good stead. He made no violent demonstration of his triumph and happiness, thus breaking roughly into a region which as yet for him was dangerous ground. As he had done months before, when the road to success had seemed blocked, he lifted her hand reverently and gratefully to his lips.

Thus it was that Captain Adam Nicholson waited patiently but in vain for Travers' return with his old playfellow. As one by one the Rajah's guests took their departure in order to prepare for the evening's festivities, he gave up his last hope.

"I suppose it was too late," he thought ruefully. "Or--she was so young, and it's many years ago--maybe she has forgotten."

It was not till long afterward that he knew how unconsciously his first supposition had brushed past the truth.

CHAPTER XVI

FATE

Travers had correctly described the new Marut club-house as a fine building on which the paint had been laid with a generous hand. The original modest design had been rejected as unworthy, and Nehal Singh had ordered the erection of a miniature copy of his own palace, the ball-room being line for line a reproduction of the Great Hall, save that the decorations, which in the palace were inimitable, had been carried out with dignified simplicity, and that some necessary modernization had been added. Gold and white predominated, where in the original, precious stones glistened; the brackets for the torches were transformed into small artistic lamps which had been ordered from Madras; and from the ceiling a heavy chandelier added brilliancy to the shaded light. The central floor had been left free for dancing, but the slender pillars ranged on either side formed separate little alcoves banked with flowers and plants. It was in one of these refuges from the whirr and confusion of gay dresses and white uniforms that Stafford took up his watch. He had arrived late, thanks to Travers, who had detained him at his bungalow in a long and earnest conversation. The two men had subsequently driven together to the club, and had further been hindered on their way by a curious accident. Just where the road pa.s.sed an unprotected ravine, a native had sprung out from some bushes and, having waved his arms wildly, disappeared. The horse had immediately taken fright, and for a moment the car and its occupants stood in danger of being flung headlong down the precipice. Stafford's strength and nerve had saved the situation, but the incident had effectually put an end to their conversation, and now for the first time Stafford found himself alone and at liberty to bring some order into his troubled thoughts.

He was not, as Marut supposed, a conscience-stricken man, but a man with a diseased conscience, his sense of duty and responsibility developed to abnormities which left him no clear judgment. He had broken with Lois because he loved her and because there seemed no other way of s.h.i.+elding her from the most terrible blow that could fall upon any human life--judging by the only standard he knew, which was his own. He had asked Beatrice to be his wife because it cut the last link and because he knew--Travers had told him--that the Station had long since coupled their names together in a way that cast a deeper shadow about Beatrice's reputation.

"It's no one's fault, old fellow," Travers had said sympathetically.

"You meant no harm, but you were often with her, and that old fiend, Mrs. Cary, has told every one that you 'were as good as--' And then you know what the people are here. When they see that things are at an end between you and Lois they will dig their knives deeper into Miss Cary, without giving her the credit of having won her game. She is fairly at every one's mercy here. I am sorry for Lois, but the other is worse off, according to my lights."

Stafford had said nothing. Goaded by Travers' words and blinded by the catastrophe which had broken upon him, he had acted without thought, without consideration, for the first time in his life obeying the behests of a headlong impulse. He had asked Beatrice to be his wife, and to-night was to put the final seal upon their alliance. Again it was Travers who had spoken the decisive word.

"A secret engagement is a piece of folly," he said, "and Miss Cary is mad to wish it. For your sake as well as hers, everything must be above-board. Or are you s.h.i.+rking?"

Stafford had made a hot retort. It was not in the scope of his character to turn back on a road which he had marked out for himself, and he waited now for Beatrice with the unshaken resolution of a man who believes absolutely in himself and his own code. He waited even with a certain impatience. Shortly before he had seen her standing at the Rajah's side, a fair and beautiful contrast to his eastern splendor, and, somehow, in that moment, he had understood Travers'

warning as he had not understood it before. She was to be his wife, she was to bear his name, and it was his duty to protect her if need be from herself. He was about to leave the alcove to go in search of her when she pushed aside the hangings and entered. The suddenness of her appearance and something in her expression startled him. He did not notice how radiantly beautiful she was nor the taste and richness of her dress. He saw only that there was a curious look of pain and fear in her eyes which warmed his friends.h.i.+p and aroused in him afresh the desire to s.h.i.+eld her from the malice of the eyes that watched them.

"Have I been a long time coming?" she asked, taking the chair he offered her. "I am so sorry. The Rajah kept me."

Her voice sounded breathless and there was a forced lightness in her tone which did not escape him. He bent a little over her.

"It does not matter," he said. "You look troubled. Is there anything wrong?"

She laughed.

"Nothing."

He hesitated, and then went on slowly:

"There is one matter I want to speak to you about, Beatrice. It is the matter of--our engagement. I think you are wrong to wish it kept secret. I think it can only bring trouble and misunderstanding. Will you not allow me to tell every one?"

The white satin slipper stopped its regular tattoo on the rugged floor. She lifted her face to his and looked him full in the eyes.