"No harm!" he echoed blankly. "What harm have you done?"
She looked at him, realising her own imprudence, yet for all that not sufficiently mistress of herself for caution. A worse woman than she might have kept silence; but she could not. The shame, the dread of betraying the lad who trusted her so utterly forced her on.
"Don"t ask, George!" she pleaded. "I can"t tell you--indeed there is nothing to tell. Only you must not go down to Hodinuggur now. Believe me, it is better you should not. I can give you no reason, but it is so. Don"t go, George, for my sake.
"For your sake," he echoed, still more blankly. "Why? I don"t understand--Mrs. Boynton, I----" He paused; his hand went up in a fierce gesture, and came down in still fiercer clasp on the mantelpiece. His eyes left her face, shifting their startled, incredulous gaze to his own grim jest leaning against the bra.s.s Buddha.
"Unless--unless----"
There was a dead silence.
"If there is anything to tell," he said at last, "tell it me for G.o.d"s sake; it would be better--than this. Why am I to stay?--for your sake."
Tell! How could she tell the horrible truth; and yet if he knew all he might be able to help. Then the need of support, the craving for sympathy, which at all times make it hard for a woman in trouble to keep her own counsel, fought against the evasion suggested by caution.
"Oh, George! I meant no harm--I did not, indeed." The weak appeal for mercy, which presages so many a miserable confession, struck cold to the lad"s heart. He walked over to the table and flung himself into a chair, hiding his face in his clasped hands.
"You had better tell me everything," he said in a m.u.f.fled voice. "Then I shall know what to do--don"t be afraid--it--it won"t make any difference."
Once more his words roused her self-scorn and made her forget herself for a time. "But it must make a difference, I want it to make a difference," she cried hotly, crossing to the table in her turn, and seating herself opposite him. "Yes! I will tell you. It is the only thing to be done now."
She was never a woman given to sobs and tears, and even through the shame of it all, there was a relief in telling the tale.
"Yes! yes!" he said once, interrupting that ever recurring plea of her own innocence of evil intent, "of course you meant no harm. So you took the jewels and sold them to Manohar Lal for six thousand rupees."
The fact, recounted in his hard, hurt voice, seemed to strike her in its true light for the first time, and she looked up wildly from the resting-place her head had found upon her bare crossed arms.
"Did 11, she asked, pushing the curls from her forehead. "Yes, I suppose I did. It seems incredible now. Oh, George, what shall I do?
what shall I do?"
It did seem incredible, and yet his fears as to what she might yet have to tell him, proved his credence of what he had already heard.
"You had better go on," he answered dully. "I can"t say what is to be done till I have heard all."
The sound of his own voice shocked him. Was it possible that he was sitting calmly listening to such a story from her lips and asking her to go on? The curse of the commonplace seemed to settle upon him, depriving him even of his right to pa.s.sionate emotion.
"Is that all?" he asked wearily, when she had told him of everything save the empty _dandy_ waiting outside the dressmaker"s shop. His question came more from the desire to help her along should there be more to tell than from curiosity or fear. Since, from the very beginning, he had been vexedly conscious of his own relief in remembering that she had returned his watch and chain before she had even reached home.
The query, however, roused in her a sudden fierce resentment against her own humiliation. Every syllable of that story, now that it was told, seemed an outrage on that love of smooth things which was her chief characteristic, and a sort of vague wonder at her own confidence made her answer swiftly.
"That is all I know. Is it not enough?" After all, it was true; what more was there to tell save the barest possibilities?
Her reply left George face to face with action, yet he sat on silent, unable even to speak. At last he rose, and crossing to where she leant face downwards over the table, stood beside her with quivering lips. "I am sorry," he began, then stopped before the fatuity of his own words.
"Do you think I am not sorry too?" she broke in recklessly, raising herself to look him full in the eyes. "I wish I were dead--if that would help; but it won"t. Something must be done; and done at once.
George! Why should you go down? To stay is so simple, and it will hurt no one--believe me, it is best--best for us all."
She was back to the position she had taken up before her appeal to his pa.s.sion had recoiled upon herself, but he could not follow her so far, and he gave a bitter laugh.
"For you and for me, no doubt. But for Dan? Remember what the possible loss of promotion means to him. Besides, I have promised. No! I must go down, that much is certain."
"And after?"
For the life of him he could not tell. He seemed unable to think of any course of action save the palpably proper one of going straight to the Chief and telling him of the plot laid against the sluice-gate. His instinct for this remaining clear and well defined amid all the confusion. As he stood silent, almost sullen, she laid her hand quickly on his arm. "You will not be rash, George--for my sake you will not----"
"Whatever I do will be for your sake," he said unsteadily.
"And you must not be angry with me. Indeed and indeed, I meant no harm at first, and afterwards I was so frightened; so afraid for you all.
Oh, don"t be angry with me, George."
He set her hand aside with a hopeless gesture, and turned away to hide the tears in his eyes. She did not understand, and a great dumbness was upon him. He could say nothing. After all, what was there to say? She had done this thing, meaning no harm, and he must save her, and himself, and Dan from the consequences, somehow. He took out his watch mechanically and looked at the time. Barely ten o"clock! So it was possible to destroy heaven and earth in half an hour!
"It is time you were going," he said, in quite a commonplace tone. "I can see you so far. You had better go. Gordon--and the others--might wonder."
It was the first time he had ever hinted at the supposition that some definite tie existed between her and her cousin; this, and his cynical acceptance of the fact that in the tragedy of life action must be swayed by the desire of the spectators as much as by the emotions of the actors themselves, brought home to Gwen her crime against the boy"s youth, and for the first time she broke into a sob.
"Oh, George! why did I do it? why did I do it?"
Why, indeed? A pitiable thing, surely, to stand silent without an answer. Pitiable also for the woman, forced by considerations into self-control. Into bathing her face, possibly powdering it, certainly re-arranging the pretty artful curls, and so setting off through the dark night to the Town Hall, as if nothing had happened. For what loss of liberty is comparable to that entailed on the possessor of a fringe which will come out of curl, even with the damp of tears?
The first clouds of the coming monsoon were drawn over the heads of the hills like an executioner"s cap, and George, riding the hired pony behind the _dandy_, felt as if he were following the funeral of a faith condemned to death. A dreary little procession this, despite its goal, as it wound its way between the dark chasm of the valleys on the one side and the dark shadow of the hills on the other. And then, like some enchanted palace set between earth and sky, that pile upon the ridge sending long beams of light and fitful s.n.a.t.c.hes of dance-music across the ravines came into view; so familiar, yet so strange. So were the twinkling lamps, the crowd of _rickshaws_ and _dandies_ blocking up the angles and arches, the red carpet in the porch, the red streak of baize climbing up the white stairs.
He kept that pearl-edged hem of her garment from the dust till she reached them.
"Have you settled what you are going to do?" she asked in a low voice, as he held out his hand to say good-bye. He shook his head.
"I"ll settle it somehow, you needn"t be afraid."
"I am not afraid. But, if the worst comes to the worst, I will not let others suffer for my fault. So be careful--for my sake."
"Whatever I do will be for your sake--you know that."
He stood watching her go up the stairs; up and up, until the last trail of that hem disappeared amid the coloured lamps and flowers. That was the end of it all!--of all save Hodinuggur and the desire to kill somebody. First of all, however, there must be safety for her; and that might be secured by money. During that three miles" ride his thoughts had been busy over possibilities, and one of them made him turn the hired pony"s nose towards Manohar Lal"s shop instead of homewards.
There was no power in India like the power of rupees, he thought; and they--with the Club still open and half a dozen young fellows as reckless as oneself ready to back the chance of one living to pay just debts--were not difficult to borrow for a month or two. Especially when there was something--not much--but still a few hundred pounds or so to come when the dear old governor---- George choked down a sob in a curse at the hired pony for stumbling over the ill-paved alley.
The dawn had broken when the patient beast pulled up for the last time by the verandah of Colonel Tweedie"s house. A drowsy servant dozed against the long coffin-like dhooli, the bearers crouched outside, nodding in a circle round a solitary hookah.
"The Huzoor having lost chance of the mail, may perhaps delay till eve," suggested the half-roused torch-bearer, mechanically corking up his useless bottle of oil at the sight of the growing glow in the east.
George, his face flushed yet haggard, stood for an instant looking over the pine woods to where, had the light been stronger, he might have seen the angle of a little house among the trees. After all, why should he not stop now, if only to see her grat.i.tude? Twelve hours, delay was not much, especially when she was safe. Why need that be his last sight of her going up the stairs with the pearls----pearls!--
An hour afterwards, when the sun tipped over the lower hills to make the morning glories, festooned from rock to rock, open their eyes, they opened them upon the coffin-like dhooli going rapidly down hill to the accompaniment of shuffles and grunts, and recurring protestations that the sahib was "_do mun puccka_."[4] If the heaviness of heart could have been measured, George might have weighed a ton.
Even at the best of times the descent from the cool hills to the hot plains is never easy, and in this case paradise lay behind, purgatory in front.
"I am so sorry Mr. Keene has gone," said Rose Tweedie at breakfast. "I shall miss him dreadfully." Lewis Gordon"s eyebrows went up superciliously.
"No doubt; but he was right to go, in more ways than one."
Colonel Tweedie, busy over a virtuous plate of porridge and milk which in some mysterious way he regarded as a sign of youth, gave his preliminary cough.