CHAPTER XIII
So Cyprian did very little explaining.
Hla Byu settled down like a shadow over their existence in one of the rooms, awaiting suggestions, and for some time none were forthcoming.
John welcomed the addition of Thu Daw to the household, but he was the only person to whom the addition was not fraught with strain.
Neither Cyprian nor Ferlie knew quite how to handle the question of Thu Daw's eyes and the message they carried.
Cyprian was broodingly silent during those days and looked tired. Till, at last, Ferlie stole into his office, balanced herself on the edge of the writing-table and sat there swinging abstracted legs.
He gave her time; only laying down his pen and sitting back in his chair.
"Perhaps," she said presently, "I am being rather careless in my handling of high explosives. Women and gunpowder can seldom come to a perfect understanding."
"Which being interpreted is——?"
"That I have no right to force my opinions upon anyone so much older than myself as you are—and I do realize that a woman cannot feel with a man."
"I know one who seems to," Cyprian told her gently.
Her mouth smiled gratefully at that but she kept her head bent over the tangling fingers in her lap.
"Cyprian. One should not try to run before one can walk. In some ways I am stupidly ignorant about practical facts.... Is this life too great a strain on you?"
Then, as he hesitated, while searching for her exact meaning, she went on in a swift rush of breathlessness.
"Let me get it out—somehow.... Man cannot help his dual nature. Women mostly can. If you have found Her helpful—I know you are without the mystical help religion brings in its wake—when my absence was more than you could bear, I would be willing to subordinate my prejudices on this gigantic question, to your common-sense, and let her help again should there be times when my presence may be more than you can bear. After all, she is the—mother of your son."
The last sentence was whispered and she did not move as his chair creaked.
"Ferlie!" For the first time in their lives there was a very real anger in the eyes which, unflinching now, captured hers and held them steady. His lips closed in a thin line and for a full minute she watched him, almost fearfully, as he framed his reply.
"How dare you?" he asked at long last. "How dare you?"
He got up and walked to the open door, to stand in it with his back to her, looking up and down the verandah. The act was instinctive since they were always alone, but he drew the glass panels together with a quick snapping of the latch before turning to face her again.
"You can only be a child, indeed, to come cold-bloodedly to any man with such an insult in your mind; most of all to the man you profess to respect."
"Respect! Oh, Cyprian——" But he could not spare her anything just then. He was too cruelly wounded.
"How can you—how can I believe that you have the smallest respect for me when I see myself, through this indefensible proposal of yours, as you must see me? Cannot you understand that what constituted a drug to deaden the physical suffering—I repeat the word, for that mental pain was physical to me caused by your withdrawal and your silence in a life which had been unconsciously centred in you for nearly eleven years—must affect me like a corroding poison, even in retrospect, now that sanity and mental control have returned with your presence?"
She stirred restlessly, struck with the justification for this point of view.
"Then, there is the moral aspect. Sometimes, I think that you, despite your genuine religious mysticism, are absolutely unmoral in your normal outlook. One can condone wrong too far. Your very compassion for that which right-minded people should shun becomes, of its injurious weakness, a sin. But—Good God!—who am I to talk to you of sin. I have not denied that you are infinitely above me, but I did not grasp you considered the gulf between us quite so wide as this morning you have made it out to be."
"Cyprian!"
The anguish in her voice roused him to some realization as to how far he had lost his temper. Still dazed with the shock she had afforded him, he saw her crumple up like a victim of lightning herself, across the solid writing-desk.
He went to her then and gathered her against his angrily-beating heart.
Strange that neither of them wondered what lay hidden in the heart of Hla Byu.
Ferlie, whenever she met her about the house, would smile kindly in place of the conversation which was impossible, and Thu Daw's picturesque little mother invariably smiled back, but her slanting brows lent enigma to this acknowledgment of the white woman's recognition.
She had been told that her Thakin, on whose generous supplies she had patiently lived apart, had returned across the great water, bringing with him a sister. But this was no sister, determined Hla Byu. Once, also, in careless answer to discreet questioning, the Thakin had informed her that he was alone in the world; except for herself, she had understood.
She came of a race to which love is the be-all and end-all of its women-folk's existence. The Impassive Teacher had not succeeded in releasing them from its bondage. For this reason must a Burmese woman be re-born as a man before she can attain Nirvana.
Hla Byu, once established by Cyprian in his house, finally ceased to worry about any Nirvana that did not include him. Naturally quick and full of initiative, she gleaned something from the orderly regulation of his days and more from close association with the class-refinement of his habits. He was truly one of the greater Thakins and not one of that set which dines in the costume it also uses for sleeping; though, doubtless, it seemed sensible to choose one's coolest garments for the exertion of eating, thought Hla Byu, in those past days when she had been able to compare notes with other women in her position.
And, now, she was eminently suited for the post to which Ferlie relegated her: that of nurse-companion to John and Thu Daw. There was little enough for her to do but to superintend the games of her son with the Thakin's acknowledged nephew and to watch Thu Daw's latent intelligence developing daily along the lines of a European child's.
Yet, as the weeks slipped by, she did not appear to find them happy and the unguessed-at resentment, veiled under her submissive demeanour, was smouldering into a gnawing flame which hurt while it burnt. To Cyprian she had become more than a stranger, being of less account in his life than a table or chair.
The star-flowers she gathered to wear drew appreciative comments from Ferlie, which, oddly enough, angered her so that she ceased entirely from thus decorating the polished ebony of her hair. She had brought with her new lungis of soft gay silk, rejoicing in them as his gifts, but she might have gone in rags for all he remarked of her daintiness and charm. Not so immune does a man become on account of a sister's presence.
Even Thu Daw failed to sweeten the bitterness of her cup of humiliation. He would stretch out welcoming arms to Ferlie now for her to carry him away to look at pictures with John, and his Burmese mother began to feel alienated from the foreign blood in his veins. A child was of his father's nationality.
No one read her soul nor conceived the approach of the ultimate crisis.
One night Ferlie heard Cyprian call to her from the room he occupied at the far end of the long verandah. She had not begun to undress and hurried along to him immediately, carrying a hurricane lantern since scorpions sometimes lay out on the cool stone after dark.
He stood in the doorway, his face queerly expressive.
"I want you to look at this."
In the pale-lemon flame of an oil reading-lamp, the room showed shadow-streaked, but the air was saturated with the sweet heavy scent of some freshly-plucked flower.
He took the lantern from her hand and lifted it high, flinging its rays across the bed.
His pillow and counterpane were invisible for a mass of starry blooms whose warm sweetness petalled this prepared fairy couch. Ferlie caught her breath, uncertain whether she most wanted to laugh or to cry. True to her immortal tendency to snatch beauty from every corner of the world, however close it lurked, she said swiftly, "Cyprian, it's pretty! It's so pretty. Look just at the prettiness of it. But oh ... if only it had not been ... inevitable!"
He answered, simply enough, without facing her,
"I guessed you'd say that. I never dreamed of this. I never do seem to foresee things. But, however you look at it, she must go."
It was not then that they discovered she had already gone.
* * * * * *
She was taken out of the river very early in the morning when a silver film of dew veiled the rushes and new buds were blossoming to life upon the soaking trees. Flame-of-the-forest reared its scorching beauty above her when they laid her limp upon the shore; her bright draperies draggled, and the once shining coil of her hair hanging in a tangled shroud over her breast.
And so Cyprian saw her when summoned to identify her as his "servant." Well and truly had she served a Master more crushingly exacting than he.
In the haunted days—and nights—which followed for him, Cyprian felt that, but for Ferlie's gentle patience and sense of vision, he might easily have lost his reason.
At first he was merely stunned. Later, when he thawed to understanding of the part his own impotent hand had taken in directing the tragedy, he spoke of himself as a murderer.
Ferlie stepped in and sternly banished the word.
"It is pure hysteria that makes you use it," she told him. "I blame myself more than you, for I am a woman and should have been enough in sympathy with another women's mind to have prevented this. If you are a murderer then I am a murderess."
He railed at her foolishness but sped off on another track.
"Why should this have happened to me?" in bewildered anger. "No other man of my acquaintance has ever had to face such an experience, and I have done no more than what so many do. In this custom there is no disgrace to the woman. She usually settles down, in the end, with one of her own race. I—Ferlie, believe me—I tried to play the game. She need never have done it. I tell you there was no disgrace."
"There was something else though," she reminded him, "and that left her little choice. It is as I said, Cyprian; no one seems able to escape its scourge."
"But they don't love like that," he persisted. "How can they? There is no link but that frail fleshly one of which a man remains vaguely ashamed the whole time."
"There is that link," and she pointed to Thu Daw, perilously employed with a coloured wooden mallet and a rusty nail.
She moved across the room to take it away from him and, substituting a woollen ball, returned to lay her arm lightly about Cyprian's bowed shoulders.
"There has been enough in the past," he said. "Why should Fate have picked me out for this extra bruising?"
Thought Ferlie of the declaration that whom the gods love they chasten.
"Perhaps, Cyprian, because you are so worth while to try and teach things to."
But this was cold and cryptic comfort and she knew it.
In the night she heard him restlessly passing from room to room till, finally, his footsteps paused on the verandah. She slipped a wrap about her shoulders and went to him where he leant against the open trellis-work of the porch, astir with shivering leaves.
His face, clear-cut against a sheet of trembling moonlight, was drawn and ghastly, and when she touched his arm his whole body started violently.
"Cyprian," said Ferlie sharply, "Can't you take your medicine like a man?"
The taunt stung him to an effort of self-control.
"It's that damned frangipani," he told her apologetically, "And it is part of Burma—and so of my life henceforth—eternally."
She slipped a hand in his and drew him down the garden-walk till they stood beneath the trees, stiff with their own sweetness.
"You have got to face that scent, here and now. You have got to think of it for what it is: a rich passionate fragrance embodying all that was generous and brave and joyous in the spirit of Hla Byu. That is what she would have wished, Cyprian. That is what she is wishing now."
The velvet glory of the night was musical with faint sound and every flower and shrub raised a deified shadow to the searching purity of the inscrutable stars. Now and again a delicate moth rippled by, like the ghost of some dead blossom, on an unknown quest into the Unknown.
"And there, God rest her soul!" said Ferlie, presently.
The man at her side felt the Amen he could not bring himself to utter.
What he did reply was, "My dear, I love you. It's all right now because of that.... It will be all right."
* * * * * *
At the Club a few days later...
"Did you hear that Mrs. Clifford has adopted her brother's Indiscretion?"
"Lord! ... Wonder what he told her?"
"Maybe, that the lady represented the mourning and destitute widow of some mining accident."
"Mourning and destitute widow of your grandfather! Haven't you seen the kid?"
"I have. Never imagined anything so uncanny. The eyes, you know. Same old delphinium blue—but that might be explained away as a freak of Nature. Not much the identical trick of screwing 'em up and blinking at you! That's what betrays the whereabouts of Pussy."
"I don't care what he's told her. She's been married and is certainly no fool. She must be a good sort."
And, in that capacity, Ferlie found herself welcomed by the male population of the station when she, perforcedly, began to drift in and out of social gatherings. She was inclined to regret the precious hours thus wasted outside the borders of their Kingdom.
"We have so much past unhappiness to overtake, as yet, Cyprian."
But a whole year had slipped by and he decided that it was wiser that she should make friends with people now that she had no longer any excuse for isolation.
She had received a curious epistle from Clifford, through Aunt Brillianna, to whom he had sent it under the impression that Ferlie was occupying some Villa of hers in Italy.
"I hope you will agree," he wrote, "that I have, at least, proved myself no dog-in-the-manger. The only thing which might make it necessary for me to worry you with divorce proceedings would be if anything happened to John.
"You see, granted that you are right in considering the Greville-Mainwarings a decadent lot, it remains my job to carry on the line somehow, and the heirs would have to be legitimate. I am not actually apologizing for any lurid behaviour (as you might describe it) of the last four years, but I have notions of fair play and we are not living in the reign of the lady who wept to wear a crown. I might have more reason to weep if she were wearing it now.
"Mercifully, matrimony is not, these days, the shackled and testamentary thing it was reckoned to be before the Jews originally lost Jerusalem. If ever you outgrow your mysterious ideas and want to marry again, let me know and I'll see what I can do for you. For myself, I am content with the present position so long as there is John to carry on the title some time or other.
"I wish you well, Ferlie, and, if it comforts you, I do not think it would do any harm if you occasionally prayed for my unregenerate soul."
Ferlie laid this sheet before Cyprian, without comment.
"Swine," was his exact expression.
"Do you really feel like that, or is it only pose?"
"Pose? How do you suppose any average man would feel?"
"You're not the average man."
At the moment neither was his face good to look upon. She removed the letter and deserted the subject. And prayed quite a lot more for Clifford's weakened soul.
At the beginning of the next Cold Weather her mother died.
"We had drifted apart since my marriage," she told Cyprian, remorsefully tearful, "But, at the end of the first year, when I realized that things were hopeless and that Clifford and I must separate, I could not conquer the feeling that she should have been capable of protecting me instead of selling me to a title that had existed too long. After all, I was so very young to throw in my lot with any man."
"I got no thanks for trying to protect you from this one," said Cyprian.
She smiled up at him with wet lashes.
"Poor Mother! I see now that she thought she was doing her utmost for me."
Soon after, a happier species of news came from Peter.
Peter had qualified smartly and accepted a hard-worked job in a mental institution, which had offered him scant opportunity for leisurely experiment and involved very considerable strain on nerves already somewhat stretched by exams.
That old friend of the Carmichaels, Colonel Maddock, had now made him the unique offer of a free trip on his yacht which, he declared, had, like himself, entered on a very new lease of life. He was determined as a "Last Kick" to sail it again in Eastern waters, and required the attendance of a qualified medical man on this somewhat, at his age, hazardous undertaking. Peter, he pointed out, would be none the worse for a sea-trip, combining business with pleasure, and he would be able to find time for a certain amount of useful reading.
Peter gave details of their tour, adding that he was not sorry to get the chance of inquiring into the methods by which lunacy was treated in the East, and, also, that he was beginning to be "rather keen" on leprosy, the most common disease ever cured by psychical, or "miraculous," powers of old. He studiously refrained from mentioning Cyprian but, from the fact that his letter came direct to Ferlie, it would appear that Aunt B. had entrusted him with some sort of outline of the true facts.
"He was always rather a delightful person," said Ferlie, "But I am not sure that, in his present phase, he is likely to be particularly sympathetic."
"Peter! Why, I always imagined him at the head of the newest Communistic Party: his hand against every settled law of man or nature, from birth and vaccination to death and burial."
"That was Peter at twenty, seeking the freedom of the Universe. Peter at twenty-five, is a martinet for the regulations of taxes by Cæsar and of emotions by the Church through the Seven Sacraments."
"Never heard of them!"
"That is your loss, Cyprian," Ferlie assured him.
"I admit to having hoped," he said, ignoring the snub, "that you would think yourself out of that particular creed towards which circumstances forced you. The majority of your priests, in this country especially, hardly inspire me to follow, as an unquestioning disciple, in their footsteps."
"Nor me, as a rule," she owned calmly, "But what have the priests to do with the creed?"
"It is a priest-ridden creed. The Protestant section, at least, leave one to deal direct with the Highest Authority."
"Have you studied the teaching of either party?"
"I have not. There is no need. One judges the tree by the fruits. The Roman version of the law produces bigots; the Protestant produces——"
"Agnostics."
He laughed, and they left it at that. He knew himself to be soaked in prejudice and dreaded lest they should try to influence her against the visions which kept her at his side—those Men in Black. Had they not delivered over one of their, since acknowledged, girl-saints to the stake and its flames for seeing visions and dreaming dreams in which their own uninspired blindness could not share?
Infallible? Infallible!
He knew nothing of that other Cyprian, with whose condemnation she was familiar. He only knew that, having Ferlie, he meant to hold.