“For some time my romantic folly brought us nothing but happiness. We invented a legend to account for her family, which, through continual repetition, we almost came to believe ourselves. No two people were ever more in love. Despite our difference in age and the racial gulf which divided us, no man and woman ever seemed more wisely mated. Apparently whatever shameful knowledge she had acquired in the temple had been blotted out by her superimposed refinement. Even to me she betrayed no hint of grossness; she appeared to be as sweet and innocent as the girl I claimed her to be—the girl I said I had surprised in the passionless tranquility of a French convent.
“Her devotion to myself was pathetic—it verged on adoration. She was continually contriving new ways of rewarding me for the horrors from which I had saved her. To me the ground she trod was sacred. I delighted in making myself her slave. We competed with each other in generosity. With each of us the other's slightest whim was law. She was unbelievably beautiful, the most mysteriously beautiful woman in India. I was more than twice her years and the envy of every man who saw her. Her beauty seemed only the outshining of her goodness. Save for an accident, I should never have known otherwise.
“We had been married two years when she bore me a child. Our dread, when we knew that she was to become a mother, was that our offspring might reveal the Asiatic strain. We took every precaution to hide the fact, if this should happen. But even this was spared us. Our boy was blue-eyed and flaxen-haired as any Anglo-Saxon. She worshiped him. He seemed to symbolize Heaven's blessing on the lie we practiced. He was never out of her sight. In her fear lest he might develop some native characteristic, she refused to have an ayah and cared for him entirely. Wherever she went, she kept him with her; he slept in our room at night. So perfectly had she drilled herself that, up to this point, I can not recall an instance in which she had fallen below the level of a well-born white woman. It was the finest instinct in her nature that proved her undoing—her mother-love that trapped her into the self-revelation which produced our tragedy.
“Our child was a sturdy little fellow of nearly two, just beginning to run about, when suddenly he died. We had a house-party at the time. His mother was playing tennis. While she was playing, he was strangled and thrown down a well by a native servant who believed he had been slighted. My wife, missing the child, went in search of him in panic and caught the native in the act of getting rid of the body. Instantly she reverted to what her mother had been before her. Snatching the man's knife, she killed him before any of her guests could restrain her. In the abandonment of her grief, she became an out and out Burmese woman, scattering dust on her hair, beating her breasts, and rending her clothes with the wildest lamentations. The fiction of her French origin was utterly destroyed. There was no longer any doubt among those who witnessed her that I was married to an Eurasian.
“Our position at once became intolerable. A halfcaste is despised the world over, but in India especially. That night every servant left. None of our friends came near us. We sat alone with our grief in a deserted house. As her calmness returned, she grew tragically contrite—not contrite from any moral sense, but because she had given away our secret. She seemed incapable of appreciating that she had done any wrong in depriving justice of its victim. When I tried to explain to her that she had committed a crime, she shook her head impatiently, insisting that she had done what any mother ought to do under the circumstances. When I pressed the subject she became persuaded that I, too, was blaming her, and then that I had never properly loved either her or her child. And yet I think I never loved her more tenderly than at that moment.
“A week later, after miserable days and nights of suspense, we received our sentence. Native sedition was running high. The Government did not dare to bring the wife of a British officer to trial. Such a course would have proved too damaging to the prestige of Anglo-Indian officialdom. I was promised that the scandal would be hushed up and I should be given a new employment, if I would agree to ship her out of India at once and to see to it that she never returned. What it amounted to for me was perpetual separation and for her perpetual banishment.
“I have often tried to arrive at a sane conclusion as to how far I am the author of what she has become. Had I shared her banishment there can be little doubt that her white blood would have kept control of her poisoned heritage. Unfortunately I had a living to earn. Professionally I was broken. My savings were inconsiderable. I had her to maintain. I was past mid-life and by leaving India would have sacrificed the pension that was already in sight. Moreover, I knew of no way of marketing my training in any country outside India. So I played safe and bowed to authority. I resigned from my regiment and was transferred to the department of military intelligence. After knowing the security of a home and wife, at past forty I became a secret agent, a spy and a wanderer, a friendless and unfriendly man, unsociable and socially unacceptable. As for my wife, aged only twenty-one, she was exiled to England, a stranger in a gray, chill country, bankrupt in her happiness, with no one to defend her, taking with her the temptation of her unusual beauty and the treacherous inheritance of her intermingled blood.
“There seemed no justice in the world for either of us. The offending cause of our punishment was the protective motherhood which had prompted her to slay the killer of our child. But, to use your terse Americanism, we were 'up against' blind angers and racial prejudices, which no amount of bucking on our part could change. So far as she was concerned, even before her life had started, she had been condemned. The initial sin had been her parents' when they had allowed themselves to create her. Before she had seen daylight, the uncharity of mankind had proclaimed her a half-caste and a pariah. From her inherited fate I had tried to snatch her when I had bought her from the temple. You may say that my recklessness was nothing more than selfishness, pharisaically parading as chivalry; in allowing her to bear me a child, I had only reduplicated the crime of her parents. Nevertheless, I had tried to rescue her and could have succeeded, had not her mother-love ensnared her. She was betrayed by the purest instinct in her nature; she was shown no more leniency than if it had been the basest. There lay the cruelty that rankled. She was judged not by motives, but by results. She would have been pardoned and applauded, had she been a full-blooded white woman.
“In spite of all these accumulated injustices, I believe she would have retained the strength to go straight had there been any limit to our separation. There was none. For all the comfort that I could be to her, I might just as well have been dead or divorced from her. I was all that remained out of the ruin that had overtaken her, yet the most to which she could look forward, save for brief meetings at long intervals, was that I would be restored to her in my useless old age, when the glorious floodtide of her youth hud receded. You see I am sufficiently unbiased to be able to plead her case.”
The Major rose and, going over to the window, stood with his back toward Hindwood, gazing out into the night. Some minutes had elapsed, when he turned quietly.