"I am sorry," he began; then his thought overflowed conventional speech, making him exclaim--"Don"t look so scared, for pity"s sake!"
"Don"t look like that!" she echoed swiftly. "That is what you said the last time I saw you: "Don"t, Belle, the whole world is before you, life and happiness and love." It was not true, and you have only made it worse by coming back to upset everything, to take away everything."
"I am not going to take anything. The money--"
"Money, what money? I was not thinking of money. Ah, I remember now!
Of course it is yours, all yours."
Then silence fell between them again; but it was a silence eloquent of explanation. So eloquent that Philip Marsden had to turn aside and look out on the red bars of the sunset before he could beat down the mad desire to take instant advantage of her self-betrayal. But he was a man who above all things claimed the control of his own life, and the knowledge that he too had been caught unawares helped him. "It is all my fault, Mrs. Raby," he said, coming back to her, with a great deference in voice and look. "This has startled you terribly, and you have been ill, I think."
"Yes, I have been ill, very ill. The baby died, and then--oh, Philip, Philip! I thought you were dead; I did indeed."
That was the end. Every atom of chivalry the man possessed, every sc.r.a.p of good in his nature responded to the pitiful appeal. "I do not wonder," he answered, and though he spoke lightly there was a new tone in his voice which always remained in it afterwards when he addressed her. "I thought I was dead myself. Come, let us sit down, and I will tell you how it all happened. Yes, I thought I was dead; at least so Afzul Khan declares--"
"Afzul Khan! That was the name of the sepoy you arrested at Faizapore."
Did she remember that? It was so long ago; long before the day he had seen her last, when he had tried to comfort her, and she had sobbed out her sorrow as to a brother, in just such another bare shadowy room as this. Ah, poor Belle, poor Belle! Had it all been a mistake from beginning to end? The only refuge from bewildering thought seemed speech, and so he plunged into it, explaining, at far greater length than he would otherwise have done, how he came to be sitting beside her, instead of lying with whitening bones in some deep pool in the mountains. He must, he said, have become unconscious from loss of blood, and slipped into the river after he was wounded, for Afzul Khan from his place of concealment on the water"s edge had seen him drifting down and dragged him to safety. They were a queer lot, the Afghans, and Afzul believed he owed the Major a life. After that it was a week ere he could be taken to decent shelter, because Afzul was also wounded; but of all this he himself knew nothing. His unconsciousness pa.s.sing into delirium it was six weeks ere he awoke to find himself in a sort of cave with snow shining like sunlight beyond the opening, and Afzul cooking marmot-flesh over a smoky fire. Even after that there was a rough time what with cold and hunger, for it was an enemy"s country, and the people about were at blood-feud with Afzul"s clan. At last it became a toss-up for death one way or the other, seeing he was too weak to attempt escape. So he had given himself up to the tribe, trusting that to their avarice an English prisoner might be worth a ransom, while Afzul had gone east promising to return with the swallows.
Then months had pa.s.sed bringing threats of death more and more constant as the promised amba.s.sador never returned, until towards autumn, being stronger, he managed to escape, and after running the gauntlet of danger and starvation succeeded in reaching Afzul"s tribe, only to find him slowly recovering from rheumatic fever brought on by exposure and privation. The poor fellow had been at death"s door, and long ere he was strong enough to act as pilot eastwards winter had set her seal on the pa.s.ses. So there they had remained, fairly comfortable, until spring melted the snows. "And," he added with a smile, for Belle"s face had resumed its calm, "I grew quite fat, in comparison! Yet they all took me for a ghost when I walked in to the mess-room at Kohat one evening after dinner,--just as I walked in here."
But her truthful eyes looked into his and declined the excuse. "No! I did not take you for a ghost, except for an instant. I knew it was you, and that you had come back to claim--everything."
"Then you knew wrong. I have come to claim nothing. Perhaps I have no right to claim anything; so it need make no difference--"
"It must make a difference to John," she interrupted coldly. "I was thinking of him. It is hard on him at all events."
"Hard! Of course it is hard," he answered with a sudden pain at his heart. "Yet it is not my fault. I meant no harm."
"You have done no harm as far as I know," was the still colder reply.
But in her turn she rose and looked out to that low bar of red still lingering in the horizon. "It is all very unfortunate, but we shall manage,--somehow." There was a pause, then she added in quite her ordinary tone, "I don"t think John can be coming to-night, so we need not wait dinner for him. They have taken your things to the end room.
I see a light there."
"But I have no right--" he began, crossing to where she stood.
She turned to him with a sudden gracious smile. "Right! you have every right to everything. You have given me,--what have you not given me?"
A tall figure crouching in the verandah rose as they pa.s.sed through the open French window.
"Who is that?" she asked, half startled.
"Afzul Khan. I can"t take him back to the regiment, of course, but he came so far with me. He has business, he says, in Faizapore."
"Afzul Khan! Call him here, please."
It was a curious group: those two bound to each other by such a tissue of misunderstanding and mistake, and the Pathan responsible for part of those mistakes. He stood by _salaaming_ stolidly; for all that taking in the scene with a quick eye.
"You have brought me back the best friend I ever had," said Belle with a ring in her voice, and all instinctively her hand sought her companion"s and found it.
"It is G.o.d"s will, not mine," was the reply. Not an atom of sentiment in the words, not a sc.r.a.p of sanctimoniousness; simply a statement of fact. G.o.d"s will! And stowed away in the folds of his fur coat lay a long blue envelope, ominously stained with blood, and addressed in a free bold hand to Miss Belle Stuart, favoured by Major Marsden of the 101st Sikhs. That was poor d.i.c.k"s will at any rate. Even in their ignorance those two looked at each other and wondered. G.o.d"s will! It was strange, if true.
"We dine in the garden now, it is cooler. I shall be ready in ten minutes," said Belle.
She was waiting for him under the stars when he came out from his room, and the slender figure against its setting of barren plain and over-arching sky seemed all too slight for its surroundings.
"You must be very lonely here," he said abruptly.
Her light laugh startled him. "Not to-night at any rate! To-night is high holiday, and I only hope the _khansamah_ will give us a good dinner. Come! you must be hungry."
Thinking over it afterwards the rest of the evening seemed like a dream to Philip Marsden. A halo of light round a table set with flowers; a man and a woman talking and laughing, the man with a deep unreasoning content in the present preventing all thought for the future. How gay she was, how brilliant! How little need there was for words with those clear sympathetic eyes lighting up into comprehension at the first hint; and with some people it was necessary to have Johnson"s dictionary on the table ready for reference! Afterwards again, as he sat in the moonlight smoking his cigar, and the cool night wind stirred the lace ruffle on the delicate white arm stretched on the lounge chair, how pleasant silence was; silence with the consciousness of comprehension. Then when her hand lay in his as they said good-night how dear her words were once more. "I want you to understand that I am glad. Why not? You thought I meant the money, but it was not that. I don"t know what I meant, but it was not that. I used to cry because I couldn"t thank you; and now you have come, I do not want to."
"Thank me for what?" he asked, with a catch in his voice.
But there was no answering tremble in hers. "You are not so wise as your ghost; it knew. Supposing it was better to be dead after all?
That would be a pity, would it not? Good-night. John will be home to-morrow."
He stood and stared at the lamp after she had gone, as if its feeble ray would illuminate the puzzle of a woman"s face and words. He did not know that for the first time in her life Belle had turned on Fate.
"I do not care," she had said, recklessly, as she walked up and down waiting for him amid the flowering oleanders. "One cannot be always thinking, thinking. He has come back and I am glad. Surely that is enough for to-night."
It was not much to claim, and yet it made the puzzle so much the harder for Philip Marsden. He sat on the edge of his bed, and swore to himself that he did not know what it all meant, that he did not even know his own feelings. To leave a girl with whom you fancied yourself in love and who apparently hated you; to die, and fall out of love, only to find when you came back to life, that she who had scorned you living had taken a fancy to your memory. Nay more, to find that something in you had survived death. What? Were the elements of a French novel born out of such materials? He had never thought over these questions, being one of those men who, from a certain physical fastidiousness, are not brought into contact with them. So he may have been said to be, in his way, quite as conventional in his morality as any woman; and the suggestion of such a situation offended him quite as much as it would have offended Belle. The pride and combativeness of the man rose up against the suggestion even while the very thought of her glad welcome thrilled him through and through. He wished no harm to her,--G.o.d forbid! And yet if one were to believe the world--bah! what was one to believe? He was too restless to sleep, and, with the curious instinct which drives most good men to be tempted of the devil in the wilderness, he put on a pair of thick boots, turned up his trousers methodically, and set out to seek peace in a moonlight walk. Bathos, no doubt; but if the sublime borders on the ridiculous, the commonplaces of life must touch on its tragedy. It was a broad white road down which he started at a rattling pace.
Before, behind, it merged into a treeless horizon and it led--G.o.d knows where! For all he knew it might be the road leading to destruction; the ready-made conventional turnpike worn by the feet of thousands following some bell-wether who had tinkled down to death when the world was young. The moon shone garishly, eclipsing the stars. It seemed a pity, seeing they were at least further from this detestable world than she,--a mere satellite dancing attendance on a half-congealed cinder, and allowing it to come between her and the light at every critical moment! A pretty conceit, but not thought; and Philip was there with the firm intention of thinking out the position.
Yet again and again he found himself basking in the remembrance of Belle"s welcome. How glad, how unfeignedly, innocently glad she had been, till fear crept in. Fear of what? Of the French novel, of course. He had felt it himself; he had asked himself the same question, doubtless, as she had; and what in heaven"s name was to be the answer? Must love always be handfast to something else? Or was it possible for it to exist, not in the self-denying penance of propriety and duty, but absolutely free and content in itself? Why not?
As he tramped along, stunning noises came from a neighbouring village; thrummings of tom-toms, and blares of inconceivable horns mingling in a wild, beast-like tumult. That meant a marriage in all its unglozed simplicity of purpose; a marriage, to use the jargon, unsanctified by love. But after all what had love to do with marriage? What could the most unselfish dream of humanity have to do with the most selfish, the most exacting, the most commonplace of all ties? Love, it is true, might exist side by side with marriage, but the perfection of the one was not bound up in the perfection of the other. Had not the attempt to find an unnecessary fig-leaf by uniting sentiment to pa.s.sion, only ended in an apotheosis of animalism not much above that which found expression in those hideous yells and brayings? Above! nay below! for it degraded love and pa.s.sion alike by false shame.
To escape the wedding party he struck away from the road, and felt relieved when he had got rid of its hard-and-fast lines, its arrogance of knowing the way. The clumps of tall tiger-gra.s.s shot arrowlike against the velvet sky, and every now and again a faint rustle at their roots told of something watching the intruder; a brooding partridge may be, perhaps a snake with unwinking eyes. And as he walked, his thoughts seemed to lead him on, till something of the truth, something naked yet not ashamed as it had been before mankind ate of the sorrowful tree, came home to him. It could not be true, that verdict of the world. He would defy it.
Suddenly he found himself confronted by a strange barrier, blocking his way. As far as eye could reach on either side rose a wall of shadow twenty feet high, a wall dense and dark below, filmy as cobwebs where the ta.s.selled reeds of which it was composed touched the purple of the sky. The gossamer wings of a day could pa.s.s through those feathery tops; but below, even the buffalo had to seek an oozy track here and there. He had often heard of this reed wall, which, following the old river bed, divides village from village as effectually as when the stream ran fast and deep; but its curious aptness to his thoughts startled him. Impenetrable save for those who sought the mire, or those with the wings of a dove. Which was it to be? As he stood arrested by his own fancy a night-heron flitted past; its broad white wings whirred softly, and its plumed head, craning forward, with blood-red eyes searching the shadows, cleft the moonlight. By some strange jugglery of fancy it reminded him of a picture by Gustave Dore, and with the remembrance of Francesca da Rimini came that of the scared look in poor Belle"s face.
He turned aside impatiently beset once more by the desire for escape and struck across the plain; coming, after a time, on a footpath which he followed mechanically through the tamarisk bushes, until he emerged on an open s.p.a.ce where a h.o.a.r frost of salt crystals glittered on rows and rows of tiny mounds. So pure, so white, that the eye might have sworn to a winter"s night even while the other senses told of more than summer"s heat; a deception increasing the unreality with which Philip recognised that his wandering steps had led him to a village grave-yard. A far cry from the marriage feast! He sat down on the pile of disordered bricks and stucco which marked the resting-place of the saint round whose bones the faithful had gathered, and asked himself what chance there was of standing out against the opinion of the many in life, if even in death it was always follow my leader?
A quaint place it was; no enclosure, no token of hope or grief, no symbol of faith; nothing but the dead, clean forgotten and out of mind. Ah! but Belle had not forgotten him, and if he had remained dead she would have gone on giving him the best part of herself without reproach, without remorse. Was death then the only freedom from the body? He sat so long immersed in his own thoughts that the slow stars were wheeling to meet the dawn ere he rose, and threw out his arms cramped by long stillness. Dead, yet alive,--that was the old panacea.
Was nothing else attainable? Must love be killed? Why?
A rustle in the tamarisks beyond the open made him turn sharply, and make his way towards the corner whence it proceeded. As he did so a group of men defiled from the bushes, set down the burden they carried, and, without looking round, began to dig a grave. The hour, the absence of wailing, gave Philip a momentary thought that he might be a.s.sisting at the concealment of some crime, but his knowledge of the people rea.s.sured him. Yet as he approached, all the party--save a very old man mumbling his beads--scurried into the jungle, and so he judged it wiser to stop and give the orthodox salutation. The patriarch rose in feeble haste. "Allah be praised! we thought you were the ghost already. Come back; come back!" he cried in louder quavering voice. ""Tis only a Presence, seeking sport, doubtless. Come back, and get her under earth ere dawn, or "twill be the worse for all."
Then, as one by one his companions crept back to their task, he answered Philip"s curious looks with waggling head. "Only a wanton woman, _Huzoor_. Seven months ago meek as a dove, playing about the village with maiden-plaited hair. But when the matrons unbound it for the bridegroom, as in due course of duty, the wickedness came out. It is so with some women; a fancy that hath not bit nor bridle; a wantonness of mind when G.o.d made them to be mothers. And she would have been one--ay, a happy one--for all her fancies, had she not wept herself into a wasting and died with her unborn child. Cursed creature, bringing evil on the whole village with her whims! Quick, quick, my sons! Hide her before dawn, with the irons round her thumbs, and the nails through her feet. Then will I sow the mustard-seed in her path homewards, so that c.o.c.k-crow will ever send her back to the worms ere she hath done gathering. And all for a fancy when G.o.d made women to be mothers! A wanton mind! A wanton mind!"
The broken, quavering voice went on accusingly as Philip turned away sick at heart. Here was the other side of the shield; and which was the truth?
He went home feeling he had gained very little from the wilderness.
CHAPTER XIX.
The night which had proved so restless to Philip Marsden had been for Belle, strangely enough, one of profound repose. Never, since as a child she fell asleep with the fresh cool caress of her pillow, had she felt less inclination to be wakeful, less desire for thought. The measureless content which comes so seldom, save in a pleasant dream, held her, body and soul. To feel it was enough. Yet as she woke to the sound of her husband"s early return, she woke also to a full consciousness of the change Philip"s resurrection from the dead must bring into their lives. A hasty remorse at her own brief happiness made her slip on a morning-gown and go into her husband"s office-room.