The Pool in the Desert Part 15

'It's not fair to ask women to live much in India. Sometimes it's the children, sometimes it's ill health, sometimes it's natural antipathy to the place; there's always a reason to take them away.'

'Yes,' said Madeline, turning a glance of scrutiny on him. His face was impa.s.sive; he was watching mechanically for a chance to slay a teasing green spider-fly.

'That is the beginning of the tragedy I was thinking of. Time does the rest, time and the aridity of separations. How many men and women can hold themselves together with letters? I don't mean aging or any physical change. I don't mean change at all.'

'No,' said Madeline, and this time, though her curiosity was greater, she did not look at him.

'No. The mind could accustom itself to expect that, and so forestall the blow, if it really would be a blow, which I doubt. For myself, I'm pretty sure that nothing of that kind could have much effect upon one's feeling, if it were the real thing.' He spoke practically to himself, as if he had reasoned this out many times.

'Oh, no!' said Madeline.

'But separation can do a worse thing than that. It can REINTRODUCE people, having deprived them of their mutual illusion under which they married. If they lived together the illusion would go, I suppose, but custom and comfort would step in to prevent a jar. There never would be that awful revelation of indifference.'

He stopped sharply, and the hope went through Madeline's mind that her face expressed no personal concern for him. There was a small red stain in the brown of his cheek as he looked at her to find out, and he added, 'I've known--in Bombay--one or two bad cases of that. But, of course, it is the wife who suffers most. Shall we canter on?'

'In a minute,' said Madeline, and he drew his rein again.

She could not let this be the last word; he must not imagine that she had seen, through the simple crystal of his convictions, the personal situation that gave them to him.

'Of course,' she said, thoughtfully, 'you know the Anglo-Indian world and I don't. You must have observed this that you speak of it; it sounds only too probable. And I confess it makes my little impression very vulgar and superficial.' She turned her head and a candid smile to him.

'All the same, I fancy that the people who are capable of suffering much that way are the exceptions. And--I don't care--I believe there is more cheap sentiment in this place than the other kind. What do you think I heard a woman say the other day at a tiffin-party? "No man has touched my heart since I've been married," she proclaimed, "except my husband!"

AT A TIFFIN-party!'

She heard the relief in Innes's laugh and was satisfied.

'How does it happen,' he said, 'that women nowadays are critical of the world so young?'

'I shall be thirty in September, and we no longer look at society through a tambour-frame,' she said, hardily.

'And I shall be forty-three next month, but hitherto I have known it to produce nothing like you,' he returned, and if there was ambiguity in his phrase there was none in his face.

Miss Anderson made with her head her little smiling gesture--Simla called it very American--which expressed that all chivalrous speech was to be taken for granted and meant nothing whatever; and as they turned into the Ladies' Mile gave her horse his head, and herself a chance for meditation. She thought of the matter again that evening before her little fire of snapping deodar twigs, thought of it intently.

She remembered it all with perfect distinctness; she might have been listening to a telephonic reproduction.

It was the almost intimate glimpse Innes had given her of himself, and it brought her an excitement which she did not think of a.n.a.lyzing. She wrung from every sentence its last possibility of unconscious meaning, and she found when she had finished that it was eleven o'clock.

Then she went to bed, preferring not to call Brookes, with the somewhat foolish feeling of being unable to account for her evening. Her last reflection before she slept shaped itself in her mind in definite words.

'There are no children,' it ran, 'and her health has always been good, he says. She must have left him after that first six months in Lucknow, because of a natural antipathy to the country--and when she condescended to come out again for a winter he met the different lady he thinks about. With little hard lines around the mouth and common conventional habits of thought, full of subservience to his official superiors, and perfectly uninterested in him except as the source of supplies. But I don't know why I should WANT her to be so disagreeable.

As a matter of fact, Mrs. Innes, travelling at the moment with the mails from London to Bombay, was hastening to present to Miss Anderson features astonis.h.i.+ngly different.

Chapter 3.III.

The lady guests at Peliti's--Mrs. Jack Owen and the rest--were giving a tea in the hotel pavilion. They had the band, the wife of the Commander-in-Chief, the governess from Viceregal Lodge and one little Viceregal girl, three A.D.C.'s, one member of council, and the Archdeacon. These were the main features, moving among a hundred or so of people more miscellaneous, who, like the ladies at Peliti's, had come up out of the seething Plains to the Paradise of the summer capital. The Pavilion overhung the Mall; looking down one could see the coming and going of leisurely Government peons in scarlet and gold, Cashmiri vendors of great bales of embroideries and skins, big-turbaned Pahari horse-dealers, chaffering in groups, and here and there a mounted Secretary-sahib trotting to the Club. Beyond, the hills dipped blue and bluer to the plains, and against them hung a single waving yellow laburnum, a note of imagination. Madeline Anderson was looking at it when Mrs. Mickie and Mrs. Gammidge came up with an affectionate observation upon the cut of her skirt, after which Mrs. Mickie harked back to what they had been talking about before.

'She's straight enough now, I suppose,' this lady said.

'She goes down. But she gives people a good deal of lat.i.tude for speculation.'

'Who is this?' asked Madeline. 'I ask for information, to keep out of her way. I find I am developing the most shocking curiosity. I must be in a position to check it.'

The ladies exchanged hardly perceptible glances. Then Mrs. Gammidge said, 'Mrs. Innes,' and looked as if, for the moment, at any rate, she would withhold further judgment.

'But you mustn't avoid the poor lady,' put in Mrs. Mickie, 'simply because of her past. It wouldn't be fair. Besides--'

'Her past?' Madeline made one little effort to look indifferent, and then let the question leap up in her.

'My dear,' said Mrs. Gammidge, with brief impatience, 'he married her in Cairo, and she was--dancing there. Case of chivalry, I believe, though there are different versions. Awful row in the regiment--he had to take a year's leave. Then he succeeded to the command, and the Twenty-third were ordered out here. She came with him to Lucknow--and made slaves of every one of them. They'll swear to you now that she was staying at Shepheard's with an invalid mother when he met her. And now she's accepted like everybody else; and that's all there is about it.'

'There's nothing in that,' said Madeline, determinedly, 'to prove that she wasn't--respectable.'

'N--no. Of course not,' and again the eye of Mrs. Gammidge met that of Mrs. Mickie.

'Though, you see love,' added the latter lady, 'it would have been nicer for his people--they've never spoken to him since--if she had been making her living otherwise in Cairo.'

'As a barmaid, for instance,' said Madeline, sarcastically.

'As a barmaid, for instance,' repeated Mrs. Gammidge, calmly.

'But Simla isn't related to him--Simla doesn't care!' Mrs. Mickie exclaimed. 'Everybody will be as polite as possible when she turns up. You'll see. You knew, didn't you, that she was coming out in the Caledonia?'

'No,' said Madeline. She looked carefully where she was going to put her coffee-cup, and then she glanced out again at the laburnum hanging over the plains. 'I--I am glad to hear it. These separations you take so lightly out here are miserable, tragic.'

The other ladies did not exchange glances this time. Miss Anderson's change of tone was too marked for comment which she might have detected.

'Colonel Innes got the telegram this morning. She wired from Brindisi,'

Mrs. Gammidge said.

'Does he seem pleased?' asked Mrs. Mickie, demurely.

'He said he was afraid she would find it very hot coming up here from Bombay. And, of course, he is worried about a house. When a man has been living for months at the Club--'

'Of course, poor fellow! I do love that dear old Colonel Innes, though I can't say I know him a bit. He won't take the trouble to be nice to me, but I am perfectly certain he must be the dearest old thing inside of him. Worth any dozen of these little bow-wows that run round after rickshaws,' said Mrs. Mickie, with candour.

'I think he's a ridiculous old glacier,' Mrs. Gammidge remarked, and Mrs. Mickie looked at Madeline and said, 'Slap her!'

'What for?' asked Miss Anderson, with composure. 'I dare say he is--occasionally. It isn't a bad thing to be, I should think, in Indian temperatures.'

'I guess you got it that time, dear lady,' said Mrs. Mickie to Mrs.

Gammidge, as Madeline slipped toward the door.

'Meant to be cross, did she? How silly of her! If she gives her little heart away like that often, people will begin to make remarks.'

'The worst of that girl is,' Mrs. Mickie continued, 'that you never can depend upon her. For days together she'll be just as giddy and jolly as anybody and then suddenly she'll give you a nasty superior bit of ice down the back of your neck like that. I've got her coming to tea tomorrow afternoon,' Mrs. Mickie added, with sudden gloom, 'and little Lord Billy and all that set are coming. They'll throw buns at each other--I know they will. What, in heaven's name, made me ask her?'

'Oh, she'll have recovered by then. You must make allowance for the shock we gave her, poor dear. Consider how you would feel if Lady Worsley suddenly appeared upon the scene, and demanded devotion from Sir Frank.'