The Plague of the Heart

by Francis Prevost

She watched him now, with her shoulder pressed against the yellow chunam wall and her head drawn back in order not to be seen, wondering how a man of his dominant authority could wait impassively at such a moment the arrangements of a subordinate.

Her eyes, dry and hot, seemed almost to repudiate resentfully the tears which she had shed; a pulse throbbed like the flutter of a moth at her throat; her uneasy fingers seemed to crave to be closed, and yet when she clenched her fist they ached to be opened. She longed to tear about, to give orders, to rouse enthusiasm. She would have liked to ride beside Terrington to the Palace and carry a flag: and the thought of how he would regard such a proposal moved her not to a sense of its humour but to renewed irritation with the man who could ride as indifferently to death as he would to a dinner.

Her whole being was in disorder owing to the uncertainty of her husband's fate. At the first shock and accepted inference of his death tears had burst from her in the weak wretchedness of bereavement, the sense of widowhood, and grief at the dying of one so near to her in the pride of his youth. It was perhaps the very nearness of death's-knife, the cutting off of the one who was one with her, who had scarcely gone from her arms, which gave her the keenest shudder. The sword which had been thrust through him seemed almost to have pricked her breast. Not that she feared for her own safety; she never imagined that it was compromised. She had the supreme British scorn for her country's foes, and thought it was only a question of policy whether Terrington with his handful of men would not at once burn the Palace to the ground, carry off the Khan in chains, and ravage the whole country with sword and fire.

It was death in the shadow which had stabbed and was gone which made her shiver. A thing so swift, so sudden, so unforeseen mocked the comfortable security of life.

But with the fitting out of the expedition and speculation on the possible safety of those in the Palace, her emotions became dreadfully perplexed. She had perforce to cease mourning a husband who might be still alive, and with the disappearance of a reason for her sorrow she began to wonder what had caused it.

Had she cried because she loved him or because he was killed? She had not a doubt while she thought him dead, but the chance of his being alive seemed to have altered everything. Last night she would have disowned indignantly the idea that she did not love him. She had accepted him as naturally in the order of needful things as food and clothing. He was her husband and so had everything that husbands have, did everything that husbands do. She had never thought about it as a personal matter. One had a husband as one had a cold in the head; one didn't always quite know why; but having him one accepted him for the sort of thing he was.

Lewis had taken her from a life already wearily dull, and with every prospect of becoming duller. He had come suddenly into her existence—a quite unlooked-for excitement; and had transplanted her into surroundings more exciting still; full of men, and dangers, and pageants and great affairs. It was so full indeed, that in the press of things to do he was a good deal crowded out. His work, his fresh appointments—for he had been tremendously in demand—gave him rather the air of continually arranging new scenes and effects in which she played the leading lady.

She didn't in the least so consciously regard him; she had not even noticed how much his work kept him out of the occasions which she most enjoyed; he seemed just a part of the delightful movement, a sort of dashing high-spirited hot-tempered ambitious concentration of it all. He was the man who had made it all possible for her, being her husband. That was how, gratefully, she most often thought of him.

His death wrenched her by its treacherous horror; but it had put no awkward questions. The questions came with the doubt if he were dead. How much did she care for him? Did she care for him at all? Had she ever cared for him as a husband? Right on the heels of that, answering it to her astounded perception, came a shrinking of disgust that she had lived three years with a man as his wife without loving him; without even discovering that she did not love him. It was that which seared the tears in her eyes, and left her with a sense of shame and self-disdain and loneliness indescribable.

It was that too in a curious reflected fashion which increased her anger at Terrington's quiet indifference to the ways of Fate. She could picture Lewis Chantry's raging vehemence under a like provocation.