"You seem to forget I can go alone." And alone she went, while her partner shrieked with noisy laughter, avowing that he loved a spice of the devil in a girl.
Philip moodily chewing the end of his cheroot ere turning in felt that the rebuff served him right, though he could not restrain a smile as he thought of Belle's victorious retreat. By that time, however, subsequent facts had enlightened her as to Philip's possible meaning, and the sight of her former partner being inveigled away from waltzing to the billiard room by the senior subaltern, made her turn so pale that John Raby, on whose arm she was leaning, thought she was afraid.
"He won't be allowed to come back, Miss Stuart," he said consolingly. "And I apologise in the name of the committee for the strength of the champagne."
Belle's mouth hardened. "There is no excuse for that sort of thing. There never can be one."
He looked at her curiously.
"I wouldn't say that, Miss Stuart. It is a mistake to be so stern. For my part I can forgive anything. It is an easy habit to acquire--and most convenient."
Belle, however, could not even forgive herself. She lay tossing about enacting the scene over and over again, wondering what Major Marsden must think of her. How foolish she had been! Why had she not trusted him? Why had he not made her understand?
Being unable to sleep, she rose, and long ere her usual hour was walking about the winding paths which intersected the barren desert of garden where nothing grew but privet and a few bushes of oleander. This barrenness was not Dame Nature's fault, for just over the other side of the wide white road John Raby's garden was ablaze with blossom. Trails of Maréchale Niel roses, heavy with great creamy cups, hung over the low hedge, and a sweet English scent of clove-pinks and mignonette was wafted to her with every soft, fitful gust of wind. She felt desperately inclined to cross the intervening dust into this paradise, and stood quite a long time at the blue gate-posts wondering why a serpent seemed to have crept into her own Eden. The crow's long-drawn note came regularly from a kuchnâr tree that was sheeted with white geranium-like flowers; the Seven Brothers chattered noisily among the yellow tassels of the cassia, and over head, against the cloudless sky, a wedge-shaped flight of cranes was winging its way northward, all signs that the pleasant cold weather was about to give place to the fiery furnace of May; but Belle knew nothing of such things as yet, so the vague sense of coming evil, which lay heavily on her, seemed all the more depressing from its unreasonableness. A striped squirrel became inquisitive over her still figure and began inspection with bushy tail erect and short starts of advance, till it was scared by the clank of bangles and anklets as a group of Hindu women, bearing bunches of flowers and brazen lotahs of milk for Seetlâs' shrine, came down the road; beside them, in various stages of toddle, the little children for whom their mothers were about to beg immunity from small-pox. Of all this again Belle knew nothing; but suddenly, causelessly, it struck her for the first time that she ought to know something. Who were these people? What were they doing? Where were they going? One small child paused to look at her and she smiled at him. The mother smiled in return, and the other women looked back half surprised, half pleased, nodding, and laughing as they went on their way.
Why? Belle, turning to enquire after the late breakfast, felt oppressed by her own ignorance. In the verandah she met the bearer coming out of the Colonel's window with a medicine bottle in his hand. Did her ignorance go so far that her father should be ill and she not know of it? "Budlu!" she asked hastily, "the Colonel sahib isn't ill, is he?"
The man, who had known her mother, and grown grey with his master, raised a submissive face. "No, missy baba, not ill. Colonel sahib, he drunk."