"You are a man and able to look after yourself. Baby needs me far more than you do."
Meredith refrained from any argument, feeling the futility of words in her distraught condition. In the darkened tent he brooded over his difficulties while his eyes strayed with jealous yearning to the slim form in the gaudy kimono. Instead of isolation in a canvas chair, he might so easily have shared her pillows while comforting her lovingly in his arms! but for the time being he was out of favour and unloved!
Shortly before sunrise, Captain Dalton motored in.
CHAPTER III
THE CIVIL SURGEON
From the moment of the doctor's arrival the tension of watching was eased; the very sight of his wide shoulders in the doorway of the tent brought instantaneous relief to Joyce whose faith, as far as her child was concerned, was material rather than spiritual. Though she had felt an instinctive shrinking from the man's society on the few occasions on which they had met, her whole heart went out to welcome him with earnest supplication. He possessed the knowledge, under God, to save her child; therefore, surely, was he Superman—a being apart, to be reverenced above his fellows.
Captain Dalton of the Indian Medical Service, and Civil Surgeon of Muktiarbad, was an unfriendly being of peculiar personality, whom no one could comprehend. Ordinarily, he was repellent to intimacies; a reserved autocrat, and content to be unpopular. Though elected a member of the Club, he had little use for its privileges. Having fulfilled his duty to his neighbours by calling on them shortly after his arrival in the Station that summer, he had retired into professional and private life, and was as difficult to cultivate as the Pope of Rome. He rarely accepted invitations, and issued none. Men who called upon him received a rigid hospitality, nothing more, so that they soon ceased to visit him at all, at which he was relieved.
That he was a gifted musician became generally known when classical strains from a grand piano were wafted through the Duranta hedge which encompassed his grounds, riveting passers-by to the roadway at some sacrifice to personal dignity, that they might listen and admire. Sometimes he was heard to sing to his own accompaniment in a voice of extraordinary richness and sympathy. The evening breeze would carry the tones of his fine baritone voice farther than the Duranta hedge; and though bungalows were widely separated by private grounds of many acres, with paddocks and lanes between, his neighbours would hang out of their windows to catch every note, and afterwards at the common meeting ground of the Club, discourse on the advantage of their proximity to the singer.
All persuasions to repeat his performances in public met with obstinate discouragement, till, reluctantly, the Station left him alone. Injured feelings were nourished, and opinions concerning his conduct and manners grew harsh and unrelenting the instant his back was turned. To his face there was no failure of cordiality, for it is not politic in a small station to quarrel with one's doctor.