Ignoring the unbecoming and extraordinary situation of having a command issued to himself in such imperious tones from his wife's lips, Sir Arthur moved in high dudgeon towards the door.
"I insist upon your taking an effervescing draught at once. And to-morrow I shall certainly call in Saunders to see you. Jani, your mistress must go to bed."
The door fell back. Rosamond sank down once more on the settee and sat, with her elbows on her knees, her chin on her clasped hands, staring at the marble floor, long, long into the night, while Jani waited and never even moved a finger.
CHAPTER VII
If sleep came at all to Rosamond that night, it came with no refreshment of forgetfulness, but rather with an increase of inner struggle. Hour merged into hour until even the noisy Indian town fell into some kind of silence; but the voices in her troubled soul ceased not their clamour.
Why should she be made to do this thing, she who had asked so little of life; who had, indeed, deliberately fashioned life for herself so that it should give her but one boon—quietude? Her pulses throbbed as if with that fever which the solicitous husband had prognosticated. How dared they?
Then, reason took the cold grey eye, the cold reproachful tone of Major Bethune, to ask her, Had she the right to refuse? And fate seemed to assume the kindly handsome smiling countenance of Sir Arthur, to assure her that it must be. Who knew as well as she that it was vain to struggle against any fiat of his? And then, once more, every fibre of her being, every energy of her soul, started in revolt.
The tom-tom beat below in the town a mocking refrain to her anguish. And, without the walls, the pariah dogs howled and fought, snarling, and wrangled, growling. She slid into snatches of horrid slumber, in which the contending elements in her soul seemed to take tangible form. But with the dawn a change came upon her. She awoke from one of these interludes in which she had after all glided to unconsciousness; the tension had become relaxed; there was one clear purpose in her mind:
She would not do it!
Reason now no longer appeared under an enemy's shape, but came like a friend to her pillow and whispered words of soothing. They had no right to ask it of her. No power on earth could force her to it. All that the world had the claim to know about Harry English, his comrades, his friend, those that had been beside him in his glorious fight against destiny, could give to it. What concerned the man, apart from the soldier; what concerned that inner life, had been hers alone. What sense of justice could there be in the demand that she should break through the deliberate seal of years, stultify the intention of a whole existence, at the bidding of an overbearing young man, of a pragmatic old one? Once, for a little while, life had held for her mysterious possibilities—sweet, but no more unfolded than the bud in the narrow sheath. Was she now to tear apart these reserves, close-folded, leaf upon leaf, dissect the "might-have-been" till her heart's blood ran? No, a hundred times! And then, upon the strength of this decision, the habitual long-cultivated calmness came floating back to her. She lay and gazed at the shafts of light as they filtered in through the blinds and fell in crosses and bars upon the marble floor. From their first inroad, when they had seemed but the laying of shadow upon shadow, to the awakening of colour in and under them, she watched them with wide-open yet dreamy eyes.