FOOTNOTES:
[36] Government by order.
CHAPTER XII.
| "She had a step that walked unheard, |
| It made the stones like grass; |
| Yet that light step had crushed a heart |
| As light as that step was." |
| —W.H.Davies. |
At last, Roy was actually coming. The critical moment was upon them; and Rose sat alone in the drawing-room awaiting him.
Her mother was out; had arranged to be out for the evening also. The strain between them still continued; and it told most on Rose. The cat-like element in her loved comfort; and an undercurrent of clash was peculiarly irritating in her present sore, uncertain state of heart. Weeks of it, she knew, would scarcely leave a dent on her mother's leathern temperament. When it came to a tug the tougher nature scored, which was one reason why she had so skilfully avoided tugs hitherto.
True, she was of age; and her father's small legacy gave her a measure of independence. But how could one set about getting married in the face of open opposition? And—how keep the truth from Roy? Or tone it down, so that he would not go off at a tangent straightaway?
Assuredly the Fates had conspired to strip her headlong romance of its gilded trappings. But her moment for marriage had come. She was sick to death of the Anglo-Indian round—from the unattached standpoint, at least. Roy fascinated her as few men had done; and she had been deliberately trying to ignore the effect of her mother's brutal frankness. Their coming together again, in these changed conditions, would be the ultimate test. Such a chasm of distance seemed to yawn between that tender parting in her boudoir and this critical reunion—in another world....
Sounds of arrival brought her to her feet; but she checked the natural impulse to welcome him in the verandah. Her innate sense of drama shrank from possible awkwardness, a false step, at the start.
And now he appeared in the doorway—very straight and slim in his grey suit, with the sorrowful black band on his arm.
"Rose!" he cried—and stood gazing at her, pulses hammering, brain dizzy. The mere sight of her brought back too vividly the memory of those April days that he had been resolutely shutting out of his mind.
His pause—the shock of his changed aspect—held her motionless also. He looked older, more sallow; his sensitive mouth compressed; no lurking gleam in his eyes. He seemed actually less good-looking than she remembered; for anguish is no beautifier.
So standing, they mutely confronted the change in themselves—in each other; then Rose swept forward, both hands held out.
"Roy—my darling—what you must have been through! Can you—will you—in spite of all——?"
Next moment, in his silent, vehement fashion, he was straining her to him; kissing her eyes, her hair, her lips; not in simple lover's ecstasy, but in a fervour of repressed passion, touched with tragedy, with pain....
Then he held her from him, to refresh his tired eyes with the sheer beauty of her; and was struck at once by the absence of colour; the wide black sash, the black velvet round her throat and hair.
He touched the velvet, looking his question. She nodded, drawing in her lip to steady it.
"I felt—I must. You don't mind?"
"Mind——?—Sometimes I wonder if I shall ever really mind things any more."
His face worked. That queer dizziness took him again. With an incoherent apology, he sat down rather abruptly, and leaned forward, his head between his hands, hiding the emotion he could not altogether control.
Rose stood beside him, feeling helpless and vaguely aggrieved. He had just got back to her, after a two weeks' parting, and he sat there lost in an access of grief that left her quite out of account. Inadvertently there flashed the thought, "Whatever Lance might have suffered, he would not succumb." It startled her. She had never so compared them before....
Then, looking down at his bowed head, compunction seized her, and tenderness, that rarely entered into her feeling for men. She could think of nothing to say that would not sound idiotically commonplace. So she laid her hand on his hair, and moved it caressingly now and then.
She felt a tremor go through him. He half withdrew his head, checked himself, and capturing her hand, pressed it to his lips, that were hot and feverish.
"Roy—what is it? What went wrong?" she asked softly.
He looked up now with a fair imitation of a smile. "Just—an old memory. It was dear of you. Ungracious of me."—Pain and perplexity went from her. She slipped to her knees beside him, and his arm enclosed her. "Sorry to behave like this. But I'm not very fit. And—seeing you, brought it all back so sharply! It's been—a bit of a strain, this last week. A letter from Thea—brave, of course; but broken utterly. The wedding too: and that beast of a journey fairly finished me."
She leaned closer, comforting him by the feel of her nearness. Then her practical brain suggested needs more pedestrian, none the less essential.
"Dearest—you're simply exhausted. How about tea—or a peg?"
He pleaded for a peg, if permissible. She fetched it herself; made tea; plied him with sandwiches and sugared cakes, for which he still retained his boyish weakness.
But talking proved difficult. There were uncomfortable gaps. In their first uplifted moment all had seemed well. Love-making was simple, elemental, satisfying. Beyond the initial glamour and passion of courtship they had scarcely adventured, when the fabric of their world was shattered by the startling events of those four days. Both were realising—as they stepped cautiously among the fragments—that, for all their surface intimacy, they were still strangers underneath.
Roy took refuge in talk about Lahore; the high tribute paid to the conduct of all troops—British and Indian—and police, under peculiarly exasperating circumstances, the C.O.'s conviction that unless sterner measures were taken—and adhered to—there would be more outbreaks, at shorter intervals, better organised....
He hoped her charming air of interest was genuine, but felt by no means sure. And all the while, he was craving to know what she had to say for herself; yet doubting whether he could stand the lightest touch on his open wound. Lance had begged him not to hurt her. Had it ever occurred to that devout lover how sharply she might hurt him?
Tea and a restful hour in an arm-chair eased the strain a little. Then Rose suggested the garden, knowing him susceptible to the large healing influences of earth and sky; also with diplomatic intent to draw him away from the house before her mother's meteoric visitation.
And she was only just in time. The rattle of rickshaw wheels came up the main path two minutes after they had turned out of it towards a favourite nook, which she had strangely grown to love in the last two weeks.
"Poor darling! You've just missed Mother!" She condoled with him, smiling sidelong under her lashes; and she almost blessed her maternal enemy for bringing back the familiar gleam into his eyes.
"Bad luck! Ought we to go in again?"
"Gracious, no. She's only tearing home to change for an early dinner at Penshurst and the theatre. Anyway, please note, you're immune from the formalities. We're going to have a peaceful time, quite independent of Simla rushings. Just ourselves to ourselves."
"Good."
It was an asset with men—second only to her beauty—this gift for creating a restful atmosphere.
Her nook, in an angle above the narrow path, was a grassy bank, looking across crumpled ranges—velvet-soft in the level light—to the still purity of the snows.
"Rather nice, isn't it?" she said. "I'm not given to mooning out of doors; but I've spent several evenings here ... lately."
"It's sanctuary," Roy murmured; but his sigh was tinged with apprehension. Flinging off his hat, he reclined full length on the gentle slope, hands under his head, and let the healing rays flow into the deeps of his troubled being.
Rose sat upright beside him, her fingers locked loosely round one raised knee. She was troubled too, and quite at a loss how to begin.
"So you've not been going out much?" he asked, after a prolonged pause.
"No—how could I—with you, so unhappy, down there—and...."—She deliberately met his eyes; and the look in them impelled her to ask: "What is it, Roy—lurking in your mind?"
"Am I—to be frank?"
She shivered. "It sounds—rather chilly. But I suppose we'd better take our cold plunge—and get it over!"
"Well"—he hesitated palpably. "It was only a natural wonder—if you care ... all that ... now he's gone, how could you deliberately hurt him so—while he lived?"
She drew in her lip. It was going to be more unsteadying than she had foreseen.
"How can a woman explain to a man the simple fact that she is incurably—perhaps unforgivably—a woman?"
"I don't know. I hoped you could—up to a point," said Roy, looking away to the snows and remembering, suddenly, that was where he ought to be now—with Lance—always Lance: no other thought or presence seemed vital to him, these days. Yet Rose remained beautiful and desirable—and clearly she loved him.
"It doesn't make things easier, you know," she was saying, in her cool, low voice, "to feel you are patently regretting events that, unhappily, did hurt—him; but also—gave me to you...."
Her beauty, her evident pain, penetrated the settled misery that enveloped him like an atmosphere.
"Darling—forgive me!" He reached out, pulling her hands apart, and his fingers closed hard on hers. "I'm only trying—clumsily—to understand...."
"And goodness knows I'm willing to help you," she sighed, returning his pressure. "But—I'm afraid the little I can say for myself won't do much to regild my halo—if there's any of it left! I gather you aren't very well up in women, or girls, Roy?"
"No—I'm not. Perhaps it makes me seem to you a bit of a fool?"
"Quite the reverse. It's all along been a part of your charm."
"My—charm?"
There was more of tenderness than amusement in her low laugh. "Precisely! If you didn't possess—some magnetic quality, could I have been drawn away from a man—like Lance, when I'd nearly made up my mind—to face the music."
For answer, he kissed her captured hand.
Then: "Roy, if it doesn't hurt too much," she urged, "will you tell me first—just—what Lance said?"
It would hurt, horridly. But it was as well she should know; and not a word need he withhold. Could there be a finer tribute to his friend? It was his own share in their last unforgettable talk that could not be reproduced.
"Yes—I'll tell you," he said. And, his half-closed eyes resting on the sunlit hills, he told her, in a voice from which all feeling was carefully expunged. Only so could he achieve the telling; and she listened without interruption, for which he felt grateful, exceedingly....
When it was over he merely moved his head and looked up at her; and she returned his look, her eyes heavy with tears. Mutually their fingers tightened.
"Thank you," she said. "It makes me ... ashamed, but it makes me proud."
"It made me angry and bewildered," said Roy. "If you really were ... coming his way, what the devil did I do to upset it all? Of course I admired you; and I was interested—on his account. But—I had no thought—I was absorbed in other things——"
She nodded slowly, not looking at him. "Quite so. And I suppose—being me—I didn't choose that a man should dance with me, ride with me, obviously admire me, and yet remain absorbed in other things. And—being you—of course it never struck you that, for my kind of girl, your provocatively casual attitude almost amounted to a challenge. Besides—as I said—you were charming; you were different. Perhaps—if I'd felt a shade less sure—of Lance, if he'd had the wit even to seem keen on some one else ... he might have saved himself. As it was—you were irresistible."
She heard him grit his teeth; and turned with swift compunction.
"My poor Roy! Am I jarring you badly? I suppose, if I talked till midnight, I'd never succeed in making a man like you understand how purely instinctive it all is. Analysed, like this, it sounds cold-blooded. But, it's just—second nature. He—Lance—understood up to a point. That's why he was aggressive that day: oh—furiously angry; all because of you. The pair you are! He said if I fooled you, and didn't play fair, he'd back out, or insist on a pucca engagement. And—yes—it did have the wrong effect. It made me wonder—if I could marry a man, however splendid, who owned such exacting standards and such a hot temper. And there were you—an unknown quantity, with the Banter-Wrangle discreetly in pursuit. A supreme inducement in itself!—Yes, distinctly, that afternoon was a turning-point. Just Lance losing his temper, and you coolly forgetting an arrangement with me——"
She paused, looking back over it all; felt Roy's hold slacken and unobtrusively withdrew her hand.
"Soon after Kapurthala, he was angry again. And that time, I'm afraid I reminded him that our engagement was only 'on' conditionally; that if he started worrying at me, it would soon be unconditionally off——"
"So it should have been!" Roy jerked up on to his elbow, and confronted her with challenging directness. "Once you could speak like that, feel like that, you'd no right to keep him hanging on—hoping when there was practically no hope. It wasn't playing the game——"
This time she kept her eyes averted, and a slow colour invaded her face. There was a point beyond which feminine frankness could not go. She could not—would not—tell this unflatteringly critical lover of hers that it was not in her nature to let the one man go till she felt morally sure of the other.
Roy had only a profile view of her warm cheek, her sensitive nostril a-quiver, her lip drawn in. And when she spoke, it was in the tense, passionate tone of that evening at Anarkalli.
"Oh yes—it's easy work sitting in judgment on other people. I told you I hadn't much of a case—I asked you to make allowances. You clearly can't. He asked you—not to hurt me. You clearly feel you must. Yet—in justice to you both—I'm doing what I can. I've never before condescended to explain myself—almost excuse myself—to any man; and I certainly never shall again. It strikes me you'd better apply your own indictment ... to your own case. If you can think and feel ... as you seem to do, better face the fact and be done with it——"
But Roy, startled and penitent, was sitting upright by now; and, when she would have risen, he seized her, crushing her to him, would she or no. In her pain and anger she more than ever drew him. In his utter heart-loneliness, he more than ever needed her. And the reminder of Lance crowned all.
"My darling—don't go off at a tangent, that way," he implored her, his lips against her hair. "For me—it's a sacred bond. It can't be snapped in a fit of temper—like a bit of knotted thread. I'll accept ... what I can't see clear. We'll stand by each other, as you said. Learn one another—Rose...! My dearest girl—don't——!"
He strained her closer, in mingled bewilderment and distress. For Rose—who trod lightly on the hearts of men, Rose—the serene and self-assured—was sobbing brokenly in his arms....
Before the end of the evening, they were more or less themselves again; the threatened storm averted; the trouble patched up and summarily dismissed, as only lovers can dismiss a cloud that intrudes upon their heaven of blue.
CHAPTER XIII.
"Le pire douleur est de ne pas, pleurer ce qu'on a perdu."—De Coulevain.
But as days passed, both grew increasingly aware of the patch; and both very carefully concealed the fact. They spent a week of peaceful seclusion from Simla and her restless activities. Roy scarcely set eyes on Mrs Elton; but—Rose having skilfully prepared the ground—he merely gave her credit for her mother's unusual display of tact.
Neither was in the vein for dances or tennis parties. They rode out to Mashobra and Fagu. They spent long days, picnicking in the Glen. Roy discovered, with satisfaction, that Rose had a weakness for being read to and a fair taste in literature, so long as it was not poetry. He also discovered—with a twinge of dismay—that if they were many hours together, he found reading easier than talking.
On the whole, they spent a week that should, by rights, have been ideal for new-made lovers; yet, at heart, both felt vaguely troubled and disillusioned.
Pain and parting and harsh realities seemed to have rubbed the bloom off their exotic romance. And for Rose the trouble struck deep. She had deliberately willed to put aside her own innate shrinking from the Indian strain in Roy. But she reckoned without the haunting effect of her mother's plain speaking. At first she had flatly ignored it; then she fortified her secret qualms by devising a practical plan for getting away to a friend in Kashmir. There was a sister in Simla going to join her. They could travel together. Roy could follow on. And there they two could be quietly married without fuss or audible comment from their talkative little world.
It was not precisely her idea of the manner in which she—Rose Arden—should be given in marriage. But the main point was that—if she could help it—her mother should not score in the matter of Roy. Could she help it? That was the question persistently knocking at her heart.
And she was only a degree less troubled by the perverse revival of her feeling for Lance. Vanished—his hold on her deeper nature seemed mysteriously to strengthen. Memories crowded in, unbidden, of their golden time together just before Roy appeared on the scene; till she almost arrived at blaming her deliberately chosen lover for having come between them and landed her in her present distracting position. For now it was the ghost of Lance that threatened to come between her and Roy; and the irony of it cut her to the quick. If she had dealt unfairly by these two men, whose standards were leagues above her own, she was not, it seemed, to escape her share of suffering....
For Roy's heart also knew the chill of secret disillusion. The ardour and thrill of his courtship seemed fatally to have suffered eclipse. When they were together, the lure of her was potent still. It was in the gaps between that he felt irked, more and more, by incipient criticism. In the course of that first talk, she had unwittingly stripped herself of the glamour that was more than half her charm; and at bottom his Eastern subconsciousness was jarred by her casual attitude to the sanctities of the man and woman relation, as instilled into him by his mother. When he quarrelled with her treatment of Lance, she saw it merely as a rather exaggerated concern for his friend. There was that in it, of course; but there was more.
Yet undeniably Desmond's urgent plea influenced his own effort to ignore the still small voice within him, that protested against the whole affair. At another time he would have taken it for a clear intimation from his mother; but she seemed to have lost, or deserted him, these days. All he could firmly hold on to, at present, was his loyalty to Lance, his duty to Rose; and both seemed to point in the same direction.
It struck him as strange that she did not mention the wedding; and she had been so full of it that very first evening. Once, when he casually asked if any fixtures were decided on yet, she had smiled and answered, "No; not yet." And some other topic had intervened.
It was only a degree less strange that she spoke so often of Lance, without attempting to disguise her admiration—and something more. And in himself—strangest of all—this surprising manifestation stirred no flicker of jealousy. It seemed a link, rather, drawing, them nearer together. She frankly encouraged talk of their school-days that involved fresh revealings of Lance at every turn: talk that was anodyne or anguish according to his mood.
She also encouraged him to unearth his deserted novel and read her the opening chapters. In Lahore, he had longed for that moment; now he feared lest it too sharply emphasise their inner apartness. For the Indian atmosphere was strong in the book; and the Indian atmosphere jarred. The effect of the riots had merely been repressed. It still simmered underneath.
Only once she had broken out on the subject; and had been distinctly restive when he demurred at the injustice of sweeping indictments against the whole country, because a handful of extremists were trying to wreck the ship. Personally he blamed England for virtually assisting in the process. It had come near to an altercation—very rare event with Rose; and it had left Roy feeling more unsettled than ever.
A few readings of his novel made him feel more uncomfortable still. Like all true artists, he listened, as he read, with the mind of his audience; and intuitively, he felt her antagonism to the Indian element in his characters, his writing, his theme.
For three days he persisted. Then he gave it up.
They were sitting in their nook; Rose leaning back, her eyes half closed, gazing across the valley. In the middle of a flagrantly Indian chapter, he broke off: determined to take it lightly; not to make a grievance of it: equally determined she should hear no more.
For a few seconds she did not realise. Then she turned and looked up at him. "Well——? Is that all?"
"Yes. That's all—so far as you're concerned!"
Her brows went up in the old beguiling way. He felt her trying to hide her thought, and held up a warning finger.
"Now, don't put it on! Frankly—isn't she relieved? Hasn't she borne the infliction like a saint?"
The blood stirred visibly under her pallor. "It was not an infliction. Your writing's wonderful. Quite uncanny—the way you get inside people and things. If there's more—go on."
"There's a lot more. But I'm not going on—even at her Majesty's express command!—Look here, Rose ... let be." He suddenly changed his tone. "I can feel how it bothers you. So—why pretend...?"
She looked down; twisting her opal ring, making the delicate colours flash and change.
"It's a pity—isn't it?"—she seemed to muse aloud—"that more than half of life is made up of pretending. It becomes rather a delicate problem—fixing boundary lines. I do admire your gift, Roy. And you're so intensely human. But I confess, I—I am jerked by parts of your theme. Doesn't all this animosity and open vilification affect your own feeling about—things, the least bit?"
"Yes. It does. Only—not in your way. It makes me unhappy, because the real India—snowed under with specious talk and bitter invective—has less chance now than ever of being understood by those who can't see below the surface."
"Me—for instance?"
He sighed. "Oh, scores and scores of you, here and at Home. And scores of others, who have far less excuse. That's why one feels bound to do what one can...."
His thoughts on that score went too deep for utterance.
But Rose was engaged in her own purely personal deliberations.
"You might want to come out again ... afterwards?"
"Yes—I should hope to. Besides ... there are my cousins...."
"Indian ones——?"
"Yes. Very clever. Very charming. Rose ... you've been six years in India. Have you ever met, in a friendly way, a cultivated, well-born Indian—man or woman?"
"N-no. Not worth mentioning."
"And ... you haven't wanted to?"
He felt her shrink from the direct question.
"Why press the point, Roy? It needn't make any real difference—need it—between you and me?"
Her counter-question was still more direct, more searching.
"Perhaps not—now," he said. "It might ... make a lot ... afterwards——"
At that critical juncture their talk was interrupted by a peon with a note that required immediate attention: and Roy, left alone, felt increasingly disillusioned and dismayed.
Later on, to his relief, Rose suggested a ride. She seemed suddenly in a more elusive mood than he had experienced since their engagement. She did not refer again to his novel, or to the thorny topic of India; and their parting embrace was chilled by a shadow of constraint.
"How would it be—afterwards?" he wondered, riding back to the Club, at a foot's pace, feeling tired and feverish and gravely puzzled as to whether it might not—on all counts—be the greater wrong to make a fetish of a bond so rashly forged.
To-day, very distinctly he was aware of the inner tug he had been trying to ignore. And to-day it was more imperative; less easily stilled. Could it be ... veritably, his mother, trying to reach him—and failing, for the first time?
That thought prompted the test question—if she were alive, how would he feel about bringing Rose home as daughter-in-law, as mother of her grandson ... the gift of gifts? If she were alive, could Rose herself have faced the conjunction? And to him she was still verily alive—or had been, till his infatuate passion had blinded him to everything but one face, one form, one desire.
That night there came to him—on the verge of sleep—the old thrilling sensation that she was there—yearning to him across an impassable barrier. And this time he knew—with a bitter certainty—that the barrier was within himself. Every nerve in him craved—as he had not craved this long while—the unmistakable sense of her that seemed gone past recall. Desperately, he strained every faculty to penetrate the resistant medium that withheld her from him—in vain.
Wearied out, with disappointment and futile effort, he fell asleep—praying for a dream visitation to revive his shaken faith. None came; and conviction seized him that none would come, until....
One could not, simultaneously, live on intimate terms with earth and heaven. And Rose was earth in its most alluring guise. More: she had awakened in him sensations and needs that, at the moment, she alone could satisfy. But if it amounted to a choice; for him, there could be no question....
Next day and the day after, a sharp return of fever kept him in bed: and a touch of his father in him tempted him to write, sooner than face the strain of a final scene. But moral cowardice was not among his failings; also unquestionably—if irrationally—he wanted to see her, to hold her in his arms once again....
On the third morning he sent her a note saying he was better; he would be round for tea; and received a verbal answer. Miss Sahib sent her salaam. She would be at home.
So, about half-past three, he rode out to the house on Elysium Hill, wondering how—and, at moments, whether—he was going to pull it through....
Her smile of welcome almost unmanned him. He simply did not feel fit for the strain. It would be so much easier and more restful to yield to her spell.
"I'm so sorry. Idiotic of me," was all he said; and went forward to take her in his arms.
But she, without a word, laid both hands on him, holding him back.
"Rose! What's the matter?" he cried, genuinely upset. Nothing undermines a resolve like finding it forestalled.
"Simply—it's all over. We're beaten, Roy," she said in a queer, repressed voice. "We can't go on with this. And—you know it."
"But—darling!" He took her by the arms.
"No ... no!" The passionate protest was addressed to herself as much as to him. "Listen, Roy. I've never hated saying anything more—but it's true. You said, last time,—'Why pretend?' And that struck home. I knew I had been pretending hard—because I wanted to—for more than a week. You made me realise ... one couldn't go on at it all one's married life.—But, my dear, what a wretch I am! You're not fit...."
"Oh, I'm just wobbly ... stupid," he muttered, half dazed, as she pressed him down into a corner of the Chesterfield.
"Poor old boy. When you've had some tea, you'll be able to face things."
He said nothing; merely leaned back against the cushion and closed his eyes—part of him rebelling furiously against her quiet yet summary proceedings—while she attended to the sputtering kettle.
How prosaic, after all, are even the great moments of life! They had been ardent lovers. They had come to the parting of the ways. But a kettle on the boil would wait for no man; and, till the body was served, the troubles of the heart must stand aside.
She drew the table nearer to him; carefully poured out tea; carefully avoided his eyes. And—in the intervals between her mechanical occupations—she told him as much of the truth as she felt he could bear to hear, or she to speak. Among other things, unavoidably, she explained how—and through whom—her mother had come to know about their reservation——
"That young sweep!" Roy muttered, so suddenly half-alert and fierce that amused tenderness tripped up her studied composure.
"You'd go for him now, just the same, I believe!"
"I would—and a bit extra. Because—of you."
She sighed. "Oh yes, it was a mauvais quart d'heure of the first order. And coming on the top of your crushing letter——"
He captured her hand. Their eyes met—and softened.
"No, Roy," she said, gently but inexorably releasing her fingers. "We've got to keep our heads to-day, somehow."
"Has yours so completely taken command of affairs?"
"I'm afraid—it has."
"Yet—you stood up to your mother?"
"Oh, I did—as I've never done yet. But afterwards I realised—it was only skin deep. She said ... things I can't repeat; but equally ... I can't forget; things about ... possible children...."
The blood flamed in Roy's sallow face. "Confound her! What does she know about possible children?"
"More than I do, I suppose," Rose admitted, with a pathetic half smile. "Anyway, after that, she refused to countenance the engagement—the wedding——"
Roy sat suddenly forward, scorn and anger in his eyes.
"Refused——! After the infernal fuss she made over me, because my father happened to have a title and a garden. And now——" his hand closed on the edge of the table. "I'm considered a pariah—am I?—simply on account of my lovely little mother—the guardian angel of us all!"
His blaze of wrath, his low passionate tone, startled her to silence. He had spoken so seldom of his mother since the first occasion, that—although she knew—she had far from plumbed the height and depth of his worship. And instinctively she thought, 'I should have been jealous into the bargain.'
But Roy had room just then for one consideration only.
"Here have I been coming to her house on sufferance ... polluting her precious drawing-room, while she's been avoiding me as if I was a leper, all because I'm the son of a sainted woman, whose shoe she wouldn't have been worthy ... oh, I beg your pardon——" He checked himself sharply. "After all—she's your mother."
Rose felt her cheeks growing uncomfortably warm. "I did warn you, in Lahore, some people felt ... that way."
"Well, I never dreamed they would behave that way. It's not as if I'd been born and reared in India and might claim relations in her compound."
"My dear—one can't make her see the difference," Rose urged desperately.
"Well, I won't stay any longer in her house. I won't eat her food——"
He pushed aside his plate so impatiently that Rose felt almost angry. But she saw his hand tremble; and covered it with her own.
"Roy—my dear! You're ill; and you're being rather exaggerated over things——"
"Well, you put me in such a false position. You ought to have told me."
She winced at that and let fall her hand.
"That's all one's reward for trying to save you from jars when you were knocked up and unhappy. And I told you ... I defied her ... I ... I would have married you...."
He looked at her, and his heart contracted sharply.
"Poor Rose—poor darling!" He was his normal self again. "What a beast of a time you must have had! But—how did you propose to accomplish it——?"
She told him, haltingly, of the Kashmir plan; and he listened, half incredulous, leaning back again; thinking: "She's plucky; but still, all she troubled about really was to save her face."
And she, noting his impatient frown, was thinking: "He's like a sensitive plant charged with gunpowder. Is it the touchiness of——?"
"I'm afraid I'd have kicked at that." His voice broke in upon her thought. "Such a hole-and-corner business. Hardly fair on my father...."
"Well, there's no question of it now," she reminded him, with a touch of asperity. "I've told you—the whole thing's defunct. Later—we'll be glad, perhaps, that I discovered in time that part of me could not be coerced—by the other part, which still wants you as much as ever. We should have been landed in disaster—soon or late. Better soon—before the roots have struck too deep. But you're so furiously angry with the reason—that you seem almost to forget ... the fact."
His eyes brooded on her, full of pain and the old, half-unwilling infatuation. He could not so hurt her pride as to confess that their discovery had been mutual. Let her glean what satisfaction she could from having taken the lead—first and last. Part of him, also, still wanted her; though in the depths, he felt a glimmer of relief that the thing was done—and by her.
"No," he said, "I don't forget the fact. But—the reason cuts deep. I want to know——" he hesitated—"is all this ... antipathy you can't get over—you and your mother—the ordinary average attitude? Or is it ... exceptionally acute?"
She drew in her lip. Why would he force her to hurt him more? For they had got beyond polite evasion. Clearly he wanted the truth.
"Mother's is acute," she said, not looking at him. "Mine—I'm afraid—is ... the ordinary average feeling against it. The exception would be to find a girl—especially out here—who could honestly ... get over it——"
"Unless—she cared in the real big way," Roy interposed; his own pain goading him to an unfair hit at her. "To be blunt, I suppose it's the case—of Lance over again. You've found ... you don't love me enough——?"
"And you——?" she struck back, turning on him the cool deliberate look of early days. "Do you love me enough? Do you care—as he did?"
"No—not as he did. I've cared blindly, passionately—somehow we didn't seem to meet on any other plane. In fact, it ... it was realising how magnificently Lance cared ... and how little you seemed able to appreciate the fact, that made me feel—as I did, down there. In a sense, he's been barring the way ... ever since...."
"Roy! How strange!" She faced him now, the mask of repression flung aside. "It's been the same—with me!"
"With you?"
"Yes. Ever since I heard ... he was gone, he has haunted me to distraction. I've seemed to see him and feel him in quite a different way."
"Good Lord!" Roy murmured—incredulous, amazed. "Human beings are the queerest things. If only ... you'd felt like that ... sooner——?"
"Yes—if only I had——!" she lamented frankly, looking straight before her.
"I'm glad—you told me," said her unaccountable lover.
"I nearly—didn't. But when you said that, I felt it might—ease things. And that was his great wish—wasn't it?—to ease things ... for us both. Oh—was there ever any one ... quite like him?"
Tears stood in her eyes, and Roy contemplating her—seeing, for the first time, something beyond her beauty—felt drawn to her in an altogether new way; and sitting there they talked of him quietly, like friends, rather than lovers on the verge of parting for good.
As real to them, almost, as themselves, was the spirit of the man who had loved both more greatly than they were capable of loving one another; who, in life, had refused to stand between them; yet, in death, had subtly thrust them apart....
Then there came a pause. They remembered....
"We're rather a strange pair—of lovers," she murmured shakily. "I feel, now, as if I can't bear letting you go. And yet ... it wouldn't last.—Dearest, will you be sensible ... and finish your tea?"
"No. It would choke me," he said with smothered passion. "If I've got to go—I'm going."
He stood up, bracing his shoulders. She stood up also, confronting him. Neither could see the other's face quite clear.
Then: "Only six weeks!" she said very low. "Roy—we ought to be ashamed of ourselves."
"I am—heartily," he confessed. "I was never more so."
She was looking down now, twisting her ring. "I'm afraid ... I'm not talented in that line. Somehow ... except for Lance, I can't regret it." She slid the ring over her knuckle.
"Oh, keep the beastly thing!" he flung out in an access of pain. "Or throw it down the khud. I said it would bring bad luck."
She sighed. "All the same—poor thing! It's too lovely...."
"Well then, don't wear it; but keep it"—his tone changed—"as a reminder. We have been something to one another ... if it couldn't be everything."
Her eyes were still lowered, her lips not quite steady.
"You've been ... very near it to me. Yet—it seemed, the more ... I cared, the less I could get over ... that. And I felt as if you—wouldn't get over.. Lance."
"My God! It's been a bitter, contrary business all round! I can't bear hurting you. And—the talk and all that——" She nodded. For her that was not the least bitter part of it all. "And you——? Oh, Lord—will it be Hayes to the fore again?"
"No!" Reproach underlay her vehemence. "Mother may rage. I shall go with Dolly Smyth to Kashmir.—And you——?"
"Oh, I'll go out to Narkhanda."
"Alone? But you're ill. You want looking after."
"Can't be helped. Azim Khan's a treasure. And really I don't care a damn what comes to me."
"Oh, but I do——!"
It was a cry from her heart. The strain of repression snapped. She swayed, just perceptibly——
In a moment his arms were round her; and they clung together a long while, in the only complete form of nearness they had known....
For Roy, that last passionate kiss was dead-sea fruit. For Rose, it was her moment of completest surrender to an elemental force she had deliberately played with only to find herself the sport of it at last....
When it was over—all was over. Words were impertinent. He held her hands close, a moment, looking into her tear-filled eyes. Then he took up hat and stick and stumbled blindly down the verandah steps....
Back in his bachelor room at the Club, he realised that fever was on him again: his eyeballs burning; little hammers beating all over his head. Mechanically, he picked up two letters that lay awaiting him: one from his father, one from Jeffers, congratulating him, in rather guarded phrases, on his engagement to Miss Arden.
It was the last straw.