DEAR MISS TEMPEST,—I dare say you have quite forgotten me. I was the youngest griffin, just before the old Colonel's death. I hope you will not think it a great impertinence in me to write like this to you; but my leave is up in a week or so, and I don't like to leave England without having seen your father's daughter again. I can never forget how kind he was to me—and your mother too. It made all the difference to me; such a young fool as I was, and so new to India and everything. I find I know some of the fellows at Fort Monkton, and I'm going to stop there a few days. May I call—and if so, when? Yours sincerely, HARRY ENGLISH. P.S.—I've only just found out where you are.
To Rosamond—most unwilling inmate in a household where, if she was not actually a burden, the smallness of her pittance rendered her certainly no material gain—this letter had brought a sort of vision of the past, a gleam of bygone light which made the present even more intolerable by contrast. It had been something to her to think that she should meet some one at last belonging to her old life, some one who had known her in those glamorous years of her happiness, some one straight from the magic shores that had held her in her happy years.
From eight to sixteen had Rosamond Tempest spent her life between the little hill station, the refuge of their hot season, and the historic old northern town where her father's duty lay—a sort of little Princess Royal, with a hundred devoted slaves and a score of gallant young courtiers, the imperious favourite of the whole station, native and white alike.... Oh the rides in the dawn! oh the picnics by moonlight! the many-coloured, vivid days that went with such swing, where every man almost was a hero, where the very air seemed full of the romance of frontier fights, of raids, and big game hunts, of "Tiger, tiger, burning bright" in jungle haunts! ... It had been surely the cruellest stroke of fate that had thrust the little spoilt girl, the beloved only child, from this pinnacle of bliss and importance!
Between one day and another Rosamond had become the penniless orphan, whom nobody wanted ... whom it was so kind of Major and Mrs. Carter to escort back to England, whom it was almost superhumanly good of Uncle and Aunt Baynes to admit into their family.
"A self-centered child," said Mrs. "General Baynes." "A cold-blooded little wretch," opined her cousins. Well, it was a fact that, during the four years that elapsed between her departure from India and the receipt of Captain English's letter, Rosamond had not given a human being one word, one look in confidence....
Late April on the Hampshire coast, with the gorse breaking into gorgeous yellow flame, honey-sweet in the sunshine; with the white clouds scurrying across a blue sky, chased by the merriest madcap wind that ever scampered; with the waves breaking from afar off, dashing up a thousand diamonds falling over and over each other in their race for the beach, roaring on the shingle in clamorous good-fellowship, the foam creaming in ever wider circles. And, across the leaping belt of waters, green and amber and white, the island, flashing too: the windows and roofs of the happy-looking town throwing back the sun glances, set in smooth slopes, mildly radiating green, like chrysoprase and peridot....
* * * * *
Rosamond had dropped the letter from her hand; again she was dreaming. Not the plaint of the November wind round the gable roof of Saltwoods in her ears, but the chant of this April chorus on Alverstoke beach. Not the monotonous ting of Aspasia's finger exercise from the room below, but the irregular boom and thud of gun practice far out at sea, brought in by the gust. And the voice that fell into silence so far away between the wild Indian hills was speaking to her again. And she heard, heard for the first time....
Rosamond Gerardine, virgin of heart through her two marriages, was being wooed! And the virgin in her was trembling and troubled, as womanhood awoke.... He held her hands and looked into her eyes. His cheeks were pale under their bronze, his lips trembled—"Could you trust me? Do you think me mad? I've only known you four days, but I've dreamt of you, all my life.... Rosamond!"
The sea wind was eddying round them, the grasses at Rosamond's feet were nodding like mad things in the gusts. Her hair was whipped against her face. So, on this English shore, with the taste of the salt in their mouths, with the wild salt moist winds all about them—this Englishman wooed this English girl, to come away and be his love in the burning East. Yes, she could trust him. Who could look into his true eyes and not trust him? But then it was the thought of the East, the East of her lost childhood's joy, that won her. Now, back in England's heart, from an East abhorred, to the loathing as of blood and cruelty, it was the lover, it was the love!