He—that second self—saw this stain beneath the carpet. He saw old Tristram Sahib seated where he sat—Vahana crawling out of the darkness—the uplifted weapon. He heard a woman's muffled scream—the bumping of a body falling between narrow walls—the sullen splash of water.
These things were to him actual—corporeal.
He turned with a shuddering gasp, burying his face in his arms, hiding from them, awaiting in palsied helplessness for the deliverance of the morning.
CHAPTER VII
THE PRICE PAID
Mrs. Boucicault and her daughter sat on either side of the wide-open windows and avoided each other's eyes. It was the first time that they had been alone together for many months, and they found nothing to say. Had they been total strangers they could have discussed the situation with sympathy, but they were bound together, and to the man on whose return from death to life they waited, by too many ugly memories for any superficial intercourse. They were like galley-slaves, hating each other and the bonds that manacled them to an intolerable intimacy.
There was a faint, sickening taste of ether in the hot air. It seemed to permeate everything, and to Anne, who knew nothing of the surgical side of illness, it conveyed a suggestion of mysterious suffering and horror. It affected her with the same physical and purely instinctive fear which assails most human beings in their first contact with death. It was not so much the thing that was happening as the grim, immaculate ceremonial surrounding it which terrified her. She would have been glad to have been alone, and in her heart she denied her mother the right to be present. But convention and decorum were on Mrs. Boucicault's side and against such opponents Anne felt herself powerless to make a stand. Once she glanced quickly across at her companion and saw how cruelly the daylight treated the small face now that it was without its persistent animation. Neither paint nor powder could conceal the livid pallor beneath the painful slackening of all the facial muscles. Only the mouth retained its straight, unbreakable resolution.
"One can't live as she does without paying for it," Anne thought, and did not acknowledge the little glow of righteous satisfaction which passed over her. Instead she went back mentally to the man lying unconscious at the other side of the bungalow and to her own life.
For all her painful anxiety she felt strangely content. She had the elevated serenity of one who has passed through tribulation to a well-earned happiness. For she had been very unhappy in her life. There were the days of "misunderstanding" with her father, the days in "Trichy" when she had faced the alternatives of a penniless and ill-prepared attack on the unknown world or an ignominious return to a life her whole soul condemned; there were days, even since her marriage, when she realized that the man she had worshipped was not wholly worthy of worship, that in many ways he had fallen below the standard which she set him.
But of late these things had sunk into the background. God had been very good. She had longed so much for a child, and that was to be given to her. That fact alone poured like sunshine over all the past. It seemed to her that with the beginning of that hope everything had combined together to make her happy. Her father was to be made well and strong again. Sigrid Fersen, save where a very few were concerned, had dropped out of Gaya's life into a grey seclusion, and with her the man whom she had sought to drag up the heights of her meretricious popularity. And, best of all, that very morning, when so much hung in the balance, she had regained her love, her humble, possessive adoration of her husband. He had seemed so big, so strong and invincible. The fire in his steady, absorbed eyes had thrilled her, the touch of his hand had given her a passionate, child-like confidence.