“Well, I am!” said Mrs. Gilderoy honestly. “Afraid for my husband, if not for myself. Can’t we get more news out of this creature? Make him speak, Chum, for goodness sake, or I shall kill him with kourbash! My riding-crop is heavy!”
“Tell us more,” said Mrs. Lewin briefly to the native. “Are any matz (dead) of this ra?” (blood). She mixed up Malagasy and English in her desperation.
“Many, Missus, the soldiers charge, and the people fall. But they kill one baas—yes, an officer!”
“Who? Who was it? What was his name?” Mrs. Gilderoy, like a leaping fury, had seized him by the shoulder and shook him in a frenzy of fear, so that he could only chatter and jabber at her incoherently. She was suddenly transformed to a mad woman in her anxiety. Beneath all her worldly wisdom and ironical remarks on the married state, she loved one man, and that was Wray Gilderoy. It was strange how this bitter-tongued couple had kept the sweetness of their union beneath all their jeering at other people’s matrimony. Leoline felt it a real and consequently a precious thing, while she gently disengaged the native from Mrs. Gilderoy’s clutch.
“You are only frightening him—he cannot speak to tell you,” she said. “Now think, Zanzalaky—what is the name of the officer who is—who is—killed?”
“’Milton Gourney, Missus!”
“Gourney—Gurney! Hamilton Gurney! Oh, poor young fellow!”
She remembered the one thing that people always did distinguish in Gurney’s vapid individuality—his voice. All the soul of the man seemed to lie in that good gift, and a lump rose in her throat at the memory of the songs that were hushed for ever. It seemed as wicked to have shot him as to shoot a nightingale.
But Mrs. Gilderoy had dropped into the nearest chair, and was moaning hysterically in her relief. The women she had laughed at for a too-demonstrative attachment to their husbands could have taken an ample revenge could they have seen her then. But Mrs. Lewin felt only the deeper side of it, and saw no bathos in the rocking, undignified figure, tortured with being a woman and impotent while the man she cared for was exposed to danger in the proper course of things. They seemed to her to have left self-consciousness behind them and the shame that dogs an exhibition of real feeling, so that Vohitra always appeared in Leoline’s memory as a little stage and scenic effects to the intensity of two or three figures—her own and Mrs. Gilderoy’s at the present moment.
She had no time to think of herself and her private anxiety during the next few hours, through which it seemed to her she felt neither heat nor tire, but pushed the frightened useless black servants aside and packed her friend’s belongings for her with capable hands. It was only when Mrs. Gilderoy had stumbled away down the hillside, hardly guiding her pony for the first time on record, that she had the leisure to face her own intolerable dread. Her cheek was wet where Mrs. Gilderoy had kissed her, but not with her own tears. She had no open right to cry, but she looked at the letter which had seemed only a new dismay a few hours ago, and thought that it might be the last she should ever receive in that handwriting....