She gave a quick cry, more of pain than anger, and hid her face on the table in sudden despair.
"You are very cruel," she said indistinctly.
He walked back toward her, remorseful at the sight of her miserable self-abas.e.m.e.nt. He had not meant to hit so hard, being accustomed himself to facing facts without flinching.
"Yes! I am cruel; but a life like mine doesn"t make a man gentle. And I don"t see how this trivial concealment of fact--for that is all it would be--can change the boy"s character or help him. If I did----" he paused. "I should like to help you if I could, Mrs. Erlton, if only because you--you refused me charity! But I cannot see my way. It would do no one any good. Begin with me. I"m not a religious man, Mrs.
Erlton. I don"t believe in the forgiveness of sins. So my soul--if I have one--wouldn"t benefit. As for my body? At the risk of you offering me diamonds again,"--he smiled charmingly,--"I must mention that I should lose--how much is a detail--by concealment. So I must go out of the question of benefit. Then there is you----"
He broke off to walk up and down the room thoughtfully, then to pause before her. "I wish you to believe," he said, "that I want really to understand the truth, but I can"t, because I don"t know one thing. I don"t know if you love your husband--or not."
She raised her head quickly with a fear behind the resentment of her eyes. "Put me outside the question too. I have told you that already.
It is the simplest, the best way."
He bowed cynically. She came no nearer to truth than evasion.
"If you wish it, certainly. Then there is the boy. You want to prevent him from realizing that his father is a--let us twist the sentence--what his father is. You have, I expect, sent him away for this purpose. So far good. But will this concealment of mine suffice?
Will no one else blab the truth? Even if concealment succeeds all along the line, will it prevent the boy from following in his father"s steps if he has inherited his father"s nature as well as his face?
Wouldn"t it be a deterrent in that case to know early in life that such instincts can"t be indulged with impunity in the society of gentlemen? You will never have the courage to keep the boy out of your life altogether as you are doing now. Sooner or later you will bring him back, he will bring himself back, and then, on the threshold of life, he will have an example of successful dishonesty put before him.
Mrs. Erlton! you can"t keep up the fiction always; so it is better for you, for me, for him, to tell the truth--and I mean to tell it."
She rose swiftly to her feet and faced him, thrusting her hair back from her forehead pa.s.sionately, as if to clear away aught that might obscure her brain.
"And for my husband?" she asked. "Have you no word for him? Is he not to be thought of at all? You asked me just now if I loved him, and I was a coward. Well! I do not love him--more"s the pity, for I can"t make up the loss of that to him anyhow. But there is enough pity in his life without that. Can"t you see it? The pity that such things should be in life at all. You called me a religious woman just now.
I"m not, really. It is the pity of such things without a remedy that drives me to believe, and the pity of it which drives me back again upon myself, as you have driven me now. For you are right! Do you think I can"t see the shame? Do you think I don"t know that it is too late--that I should have thought of all this before I called my boy"s nature out of the dark? And yet----" her face grew sharp with a pitiful eagerness, she moved forward and laid her hand on his arm. "It is all so dark! You said just now that I couldn"t keep up the fiction; but need it be a fiction always? What do we know? G.o.d gives men a chance sometimes. He gives the whole world a chance sometimes of atoning for many sins. A Spirit moves on the Waters of life bringing something to cleanse and heal. It may be moving now. Give my husband his chance, Mr. Greyman, and I will pray that, whatever it is, it may come quickly."
He had listened with startled eyes; now his hand closed on hers in swift negation.
"Don"t pray for that," he said, in a quick low voice, "it may come too soon for some of us, G.o.d knows--too soon for many a good man and true!" Then, as if vexed at his own outburst, he drew back a step, looking at her with a certain resentment.
"You plead your cause well, Mrs. Erlton, and it is a stronger argument than you perhaps guess. So let him have this chance that is coming.
Let us all have it, you and I into the bargain. No don"t be grateful, please, for he may prove himself a coward, among other things. So may I, for that matter. One never knows until the chance comes for being a hero--or the other thing."
"When the chance comes we shall see," she said, trying to match his light tone. "Till then, good-by--you have been very kind." She held out her hand, but he did not take it.
"Pardon me! I have been very rude, and you----" he paused in his half-jesting words, stooped over her outstretched hand and kissed it.
Kate stood looking at the hand with a slight frown after his horse"s hoofs died away; and then with a smile she shut the jewel case. Not that she closed the incident also; for full half an hour later she was still going over all the details of the past interview. And everything seemed to hinge on that unforeseen appeal of hers for a chance of atonement, on that unpremeditated strange suggestion that a Spirit might even then be moving on the face of the waters; until, in that room gay with English flowers, and peaceful utterly in its air of security, a terror seized on her body and soul. A causeless terror, making her strain eyes and ears as if for a hint of what was to come and make cowards or heroes of them all.
But there was only the flowerful garden beyond the arched veranda, only the soft gurgle of the doves. Yet she sat with quivering nerves till the sight of the gardener coming as usual with his watering pot made her smile at the unfounded tragedy of her imaginings.
As she pa.s.sed into the veranda she called to him, in the jargon which served for her orders, not to forget a plentiful supply to the heartsease and the sweet peas; for she loved her poor clumps of English annuals more than all the scented and blossoming shrubs which in those late March days turned the garden into a wilderness of strange perfumed beauty. But her cult of home was a religion with her; and if a visitor remarked that anything in her environment was reminiscent of the old country, she rejoiced to have given another exile what was to her as the shadow of a rock in a thirsty land.
So, her eye catching something barely up to western mark in the pattern of a collar her tailor was cutting for her new dress, she crossed over to where he squatted in the further corner of the veranda.
"That isn"t right. Give me something to cut--here! this will do."
She drew a broad sheet of native paper from the bundle of sc.r.a.ps beside him, and began on it with the scissors; too full of her idea to notice the faint negation of the man"s hand. "There!" she said after a few deft snippings, "that is new fashion."
"Huzoor!" a.s.sented the tailor submissively as, apparently from tidiness, he put away the remainder of the paper, before laying the new-cut pattern on the cloth.
His mistress looked down at it critically. There was a broad line of black curves and square dots right across the pattern suggestive of its having been cut from a t.i.tle-page. But to her ignorance of the Persian character they were nothing but the curves and dots, though the tailor"s eyes read clearly in them "The Sword is the Key of Heaven."
For he, in company with thousands of other men, had been reading the famous pamphlet of that name; reading it with that thrill of the heart-strings which has been the prelude to half the discords and harmonies of history. Since, quaintly enough, those who may hope to share your heaven are always friends, those who can with certainty be consigned to h.e.l.l, your enemies.
"That is all right," she said. "Cut it well on the bias, so that it won"t pucker."
As she turned away, she felt the vast relief of being able to think of such trivialities again after the strain and stress of the hours since her husband had come home from the race course, full of excited maledictions on the mean, underhand bribery and spying which might make it necessary for him to send in his papers--if he could. Kate had heard stories of a similar character before; since Major Erlton knew by experience that she had his reputation more at heart than he had himself, and that her brain was clearer, her tact greater than his.
But she had never heard one so hopeless. Unless this jockey Greyman, who, her husband said, was so mixed up with native intrigue as to have any amount of false evidence at his command, could be silenced, her labor of years was ruined. So long after her husband had gone off to his bed to sleep soundly, heavily, after the manner of men, Kate had lain awake in hers after the manner of women, resolving to risk all, even to a certain extent honesty, in order to silence this man, this adventurer; who no doubt was not one whit better than her husband.
And now? As her mind flashed back over that interview the one thing that stood out above all others was the bearing, the deference of the man as he had stooped to kiss her hand. For the life of her, she--who protested even to herself that such things had no part in her life--could not help a joy in the remembrance; a quick recognition that here was a man who could put romance into a woman"s life. The thought was one, however, from which to escape by the first distraction at hand. This happened to be the c.o.c.katoo, which, after a bath and plentiful food, looked a different bird on its new perch.
"Pretty, pretty poll," she said hastily, with tentative white finger tickling its crest. The bird, in high good humor, bent its head sideways and chuckled inarticulately; yet to an accustomed ear the sound held the cadence of the Great Cry, and the tailor, who had heard it given wrathfully, looked up from his work.
"Oh, Miffis Erlton! what a boo"ful new polly," came a silvery lisp. She turned with a radiant smile to greet her next door neighbor"s little boy, a child of about three years old, who, pathetically enough, was a great solace to her child-bereft life.
"Yes, Sonny, isn"t it lovely?" she said, her slim white hand going out to bring the child closer; "and it screams splendidly. Would you like to hear it scream?"
Sonny, clinging tightly to her fingers, looked doubtful. "Wait till muvver comth, muvver"s comin" to zoo esectly. Sonny"s always flightened wizout hith muvver."
At which piece of diplomacy, Kate, feeling light-hearted, caught the little white-clad golden-curled figure in her arms and ran out with it into the garden, smothering the laughing face with kisses as she ran.
"Sonny"s a little goose to be "flightened,"" came her glad voice between the laughs and the kisses. "He ought never to be "flightened"
at all, because no one in all the wide, wide world would ever hurt a good little childie like Sonnykins--No one! No one! No one!"
She had sat the little fellow down among the flowers by this time, being, in good sooth, breathless with his weight; and now, continuing the game, chased him with pretense booings of "No one! No one!" about the pansy bed, and so round the sweet peas; until in delicious terror he shrieked with delight, and chased her back between her chasings.
It was a pretty sight, indeed, this game between the woman and the child. The gardener paused in his watering, the tailor at his work; and even the native orderly going his rounds with the brigade order-book grinned broadly, so adding one to the kindly dark faces watching the chasing of Sonny.
"My dear Kate! How can you?" The querulous voice broke in on the booings, and made Mrs. Erlton pause and think of her loosened hair pins. The speaker was a fair, diaphanous woman, the most solid-looking part of whose figure, as she dawdled up the path, was the large white umbrella she carried. "Here am I melting with the heat! What I shall do next year if George is transferred to Delhi, I don"t know. He says we shan"t be able to afford the hills. And he has the dogcart at some of those eternal court-martials. I wonder why the sepoys give so much trouble nowadays. George says they"re spoiled. So I came to see if you"ll drive me to the band; though I"m not fit to be seen. I was up half the night with baby. She is so cross, and George will have it she must be ill; as if children didn"t have tempers! Lucky you, to have your boy at home. And yet you go romping with other people"s. I wouldn"t; but then I look horrid when I"m hot."
Kate laughed. She did not, and as she rearranged her hair seemed to have left years of life behind her. "I can"t help it," she said. "I feel so ridiculously young myself sometimes--as if I hadn"t lived at all, as if nothing belonged to me, and I was really somebody else. As if----" She paused abruptly in her confidences, and, to change the subject, turned to the group behind Mrs. Seymour:--an ayah holding a toddler by the hand, a tall orderly in uniform carrying a year-old baby in his arms; such a languid little mortal as is seldom seen out of India, where the swift, sharp fever of the changing seasons seems to take the very, life from a child in a few hours. The fluffy golden head in its limp white sun-bonnet rested inert against the orderly"s scarlet coatee, the listless little legs drooped helplessly among the burnished belts and buckles.
"Poor little chick! Let me have her a bit, orderly," said Kate, laying her hand caressingly on the slack dimpled arm; but baby, with a fretful whine, nestled her cheek closer into the scarlet. A shade of satisfaction made its owner"s dark face less impa.s.sive, and the small, sinewy, dark hands held their white burden a shade tighter.
"She _is_ so cross," complained the mother. "It has been so all day.
She won"t leave the man for an instant. He must be sick of her, though he doesn"t show it. And she used to go to the ayah; but do you know, Kate, I don"t trust the woman a bit. I believe she gives opium to the child, so that she may get a little rest."
Kate looked at the ayah"s face with a sudden doubt. "I don"t know,"
she said slowly. "I think they believe it is a good thing. I remember when Freddy was a baby----"
"Oh, I don"t believe they ever think that sort of thing," interrupted Mrs. Seymour. "You never can trust the natives, you know. That"s the worst of India. Oh! how I wish I was back in dear old England with a real nurse who would take the children off my hands."
But Kate Erlton was following up her own doubt. "The children trust them----" she began.
"My dear Kate! you can"t trust children either. Look at baby! It gives me the shudders to think of touching Bij-rao, and see how she cuddles up to him," replied Mrs. Seymour, as she dawdled on to the house; then, seeing the bed of heartsease, paused to go into raptures over them. They were like English ones, she said.
The puzzled look left Kate"s face. "I sent some home last mail," she replied in a sort of hushed voice, "just to show them that we were not cut off from everything we care for; not everything."