"How good you are," she whispered, trying to regain her composure. "What should I have done without you?" Her unconsciousness smote him with regret and a great tenderness.
"There are plenty who will be kind to you," he answered unsteadily. "Life holds everything for you yet, my dear; peace, and happiness, and love."
Love! Did it hold his for her? he asked himself again as he walked homewards in the dark. Love! He was quite a young man still, only two and thirty, yet he had deliberately set passion and romance from him years before. Poverty had stood between him and the realisation of a dream till, with the sight of his ideal profoundly happy as some one else's wife, had come distrust and contempt for a feeling that experience showed him did not, could not last. Why, therefore, should it enter into and disturb his life at all? Friendship? ah, that was different! Perhaps the future held a time when he would clasp hands with a life-companion; a woman to be the mistress of his home, the mother of his children. But Belle! poor little, soft Belle Stuart, with her beautiful grey eyes! He seemed to feel the touch of her hand in his, the caress of her hair on his lips; and though he laughed grimly at himself, he could not master the joy that took possession of him at the remembrance. Dear little Belle! Amidst the doubt and surprise which swept over him as he realised his own state of mind, but one thing gave him infinite satisfaction,--he had saved her from the far more lasting trouble of her father's disgrace. Friend, or lover, it had been a good deed to do, and he was glad that he had done it. Nothing could alter that. And while he slept, dreaming still of his clasp on the little cold yet willing hand, an official envelope lay on the table beside him mocking his security. He opened it next morning, to lay it aside with a curse at his own ill luck, though it was only a notification that Major P. H. Marsden would carry on the current duties of the Commissariat office till further orders. He had half a mind to go over to the Brigade office and get himself excused: a word or two about his other work would do it; but his pride rose in arms against any shirking for private reasons. Besides, there might be nothing wrong in Colonel Stuart's accounts, and even if there was, he would be the best man to find it out. Yet he walked up and down the verandah a prey to conflicting desires, bitterly angry with himself for hesitating an instant. Common sense told him that it might be as well for one less biassed than he was by previous knowledge to undertake the scrutiny, that it was scarcely fair for him to go to the task with a foregone conclusion in his mind; but pride suggested that he could not trust himself to decide fairly even now. How could he, when he was bitterly conscious of one overmastering desire to save Belle? Then came the thought that if she was indeed what in his heart he believed her to be, if her steadfastness and straightforwardness were more than a match for his own, then the very idea of his refusing the task would be an offence to her. After that, nothing could have prevented him from placing himself with open eyes in a position from which, in common fairness to himself and others, he ought to have escaped.
[CHAPTER VIII.]
A few days after Colonel Stuart's death John Raby was making up his accounts in a very unenviable frame of mind, though the balance on the right side was a large one. As a rule this result would have given him keen pleasure; for though he was as yet too young to enjoy that delight of dotage, the actual fingering of gold, he inherited the instinct too strongly not to rejoice at the sight of its equivalent in figures. There were two reasons for his annoyance. First, the constantly recurring regret of not being able to invest his savings as he chose. With endless opportunities for turning over a high percentage coming under his notice, it was galling to be restricted by the terms of his covenant with Government from any commercial enterprise. Not that he would have scrupled to evade the regulation had the game been worth the candle; but as yet it was not. By and by, when his capital warranted a plunge, he had every intention of risking his position, and, if need be, of throwing it up. But for this justification he must wait years, unless indeed Fate sent him a rich wife. Heiresses however are scarce in India, and furlough was not yet due. So John Raby had to content himself with four per cent, which was all the more annoying when he remembered that Shunker Dâs was making forty out of the very indigo business on which he had tried to evade the income-tax. Sooner or later John Raby intended to have his finger in that pie, unless some more fortunate person plucked the plum out first.
The other reason for his annoyance arose from the fact, clearly demonstrated by his neat system of accounts, that over nine thousand rupees of his balance were the proceeds of écarté played with a man who had had the confidence to make him his executor. The young civilian had no qualms of conscience here either; it had been a fair fight, the Colonel considering himself quite as good at the game as his antagonist. But somehow the total looked bad beside that other one, where intricate columns of figures added themselves into a row of nothings for the widow and orphans. Not a penny, so far as the executor could see, after paying current debts. About Madame and the black-and-tans, as he irreverently styled her family, he did not much concern himself; but for Belle it was different. He liked the girl, and had often told himself that the addition of money would have made her an excellent wife; just the sort one could safely have at home; and that to a busy man meant much. The thought that Philip Marsden with his large fortune showed a disposition to annex the prize lessened his regrets for her poverty, and yet increased them. Why, he asked himself savagely, did nice girls never have money? The only gleam of satisfaction, in short, to be yielded by the balance was the remembrance that his possession of the nine thousand rupees prevented Lâlâ Shunker Dâs from absorbing it. As a matter of fact his executorship had proved a wholesome check on the usurer's outcries, and it gave the young man some consolation to think that no one could have managed the Lâlâ so well as he did. The smile raised by this remembrance lingered still when Major Marsden walked, unannounced, through the window in unceremonious Indian fashion.
"Hullo," said John Raby, "glad to see you. Miss Stuart is much better to-day."
There was no reason why this very pleasant and natural remark should annoy his hearer, but it did. It reminded him that John Raby had acquired a sort of authority over the dead man's daughter by virtue of his executorship. Neither of them had seen her since the day of the funeral, for she had been hovering on the verge of nervous fever; but the responsibility of caring for her had fallen on John Raby and not on Philip Marsden. John Raby, and not he, had had to make all the necessary arrangements for her comfort and speedy departure to the hills as soon as possible; for Mrs. Stuart had collapsed under the shock of her husband's death, and the rapid Indian funeral had made the presence of the others impossible. So Philip Marsden felt himself to be out in the cold, and resented it.
"The nurse told me so when I inquired just now," he replied shortly.
"I'm to see her this afternoon when she comes back from her drive. I've sent for Shunker Dâs's carriage."