CHAPTER I.
"After all that has been, and is no more—after all that has passed between us, but never can pass again, why are we fated to meet—and here?" wailed the girl, Clare Thorne, in her heart (for though a wedded wife, she was but a girl yet, being barely in her twentieth year), as she suddenly saw, with strangely-mingled emotions of joy, fear, and sorrow, the face of Fred Wilmot.
It was on a Sunday morning early, ere the East Indian sun was quite up, and in the cantonment church of Mirzapatam, a few miles from the Jumna, that this unexpected recognition took place.
The girl heard not the voice of the preacher, her husband Cecil Thorne, the chaplain of the station; she forgot for a time where she was, and her thoughts fled—fled away from that strange-looking cantonment church, with its long punkahs pulled by nut-brown coolies (who watched with amazement "the white man's poojah") moving alike over the head of the preacher and his congregation, when even at that early hour the air was breathless, and when the ring-necked paraquets, green pigeons, and other birds twittered in and out at the open jalousies—fled home, while her heart seemed to stand still—home to a quaint old English church in beautiful Kent, with its low broad Norman arches, its stained glass windows, its sculptured effigies, above which old iron helmets hung, and spiders spun their dusty webs undisturbed—for there it had been that she had last seen the face she now looked on, breathlessly, the face of her first love and then betrothed, Fred Wilmot, ere misfortune separated them, and a cruel fate sent her to Central India, to become the wife of the Reverend Cecil Thorne.
On the preceding day a new regiment had marched in, but she knew not till that moment at the morning sermon, that among its officers was Lieutenant Frederick Wilmot, till she saw him with his men, in his braided white kalkee uniform, carrying under one arm his pith helmet, encircled by a blue veil, and looking with his lithe form, embrowned face, dark grey eyes and heavy moustache, handsomer than ever, and so unlike her husband, Cecil Thorne, in his flowing white Indian cassock.
Square in figure, grave, massive, and commanding in form, the latter was a man, who, though all kindness and gentleness, seldom smiled and never laughed, and was one all unsuited to the volatile Clare; yet she had married him for a home; though knowing that every thought and impulse of her mind were at variance with his, and had given herself to him because she was heart-sick with the struggle for daily bread as a governess, and feared her hopeless future when left alone in India. A few years before—for he was much her senior—Cecil Thorne had been a hard-working curate on £80 per annum in one of the most squalid parts of the English metropolis, and was thankful to accept from the Bishop of Calcutta the post he held at the remote and sun-baked station of Mirzapatam. He was a good man, truly a soldier of Heaven, and among the sick and the dying, did many a task of mercy, from which even the doctors, and all, save the sisters of charity, shrank, especially in the times of famine and cholera.
Intent on his sermon, he saw not the glance of mutual recognition between Clare and Wilmot, the grave bow exchanged, and the paleness that came over the two young eager faces, whose troubled gaze sought each other from time to time, as their thoughts went back to their past—
"The love that took an early root,
And had an early doom."
"Why are we fated to meet again, and here?" was the ever-recurring thought of Clare, as she strove to fix her eyes on the grave face of her husband and listen to his eloquence, but she heard it not.
Her face was not a beautiful one, but it was sweet, earnest, and most winning in all its varying expressions.
India had paled it already, but the light of her dark hazel eyes, the warm tint of her rosebud lips, and her rich brown hair, almost black in hue, were all unchanged as when Wilmot had covered them with kisses and caresses, in the sad hour of their severance that seemed so long ago.
In due time the service was over, the congregation dispersing and departing on horseback or in buggies, while the new regiment, to the clangour of its band, was marching into its lines, and Fred Wilmot, she knew, was with it. Fearful that he might address her ere the column was formed, she remained nervously in her seat, striving to pray for strength of purpose, or for her past dull content, and then, when she deemed herself safe, drove home alone, for her husband, though hot the coming noon, had sick and other visits to pay.
Clare feared that Wilmot might call at their bungalow on the following day, as every one calls on every one else on arriving at a new station in India; so she resolved to take her horse and be out of his way in the cool of the evening, and also early on the following morning, but to evade him always in the narrow European circle at Mirzapatam she knew would be impossible.
That day her husband was long absent on his parochial duties, and Clare was not sorry; she wanted time for thought—but thought only took the line of refining, and a comparison of what was now the inevitable, with what might have been.
Clare was formed by nature for excitement, society, music, and gaiety, she did not like to be left to mope as a parson's wife "in the station to which the Lord had called her," as her husband constantly phrased it; and she had been wont to writhe under his advice as to how she was to comport herself, what she was to wear and not to wear, and to avoid the groups of young officers about the "Band Stand," and all risk of gup or gossip. His intense goodness, his awful sense of propriety, even his fervid piety, had bored and wearied the young wife ere their dull honeymoon was well over; for though a good girl in every way, Clare was not pious, as Mr. Thorne understood piety. She went, per order, to church twice on Sunday, but flatly refused to teach "little niggers" in the mission schools, and he groaned in spirit over her contumacy. The excitement she wished, was not to be found in visiting old Hindoo women and teaching naked little boys that the precepts of Menou, the lawgiver, were idolatry.
"Oh dear, for what did you marry me, Cecil?" she asked one evening impatiently, when she heard the strains of military music coming from the forbidden band-stand, and knew that all the little gaiety of the place was centred there.
"To be a helpmate to me, Clare," he replied gravely, "and to share with me, so far as becomes my wife, my labours in the vineyard of our Divine Master. In our little Bengali church are regular Sabbath services and weekly prayer-meetings; there are four patshalas or elementary schools; but to not one of these have you gone; there are much evangelistic work and colportage work to be done, yet you assist in them not, and will not even sing the hymns I have translated from the Tembavani."
"If I did, Cecil—dear Cecil, would you let me go even once a week to the military promenade—I do so love the band?" she asked, with her eyes full of tears.
"No; such frivolity becomes not my wife," was the firm reply.
Repiningly she obeyed his dictum in every respect, and when other ladies ventured to remonstrate with her, Clare, to do her justice, ever upheld her husband, and treated him with respect and honour.