The Native Born; or, the Rajah's People

by I. A. R. Wylie

All the night following the momentous meeting of the Marut Diamond Company Mrs. Cary had kept to her room, the door locked against her daughter, and had sobbed and wailed in a manner befitting the victim of a hard and undeserved fate.

But in reality hers was the rage of a clumsy workman who has cut himself with his own tools. Her own child, her partner and co-worker, had upset the erection of years. She saw themselves cast out of Marut; she saw the desolate wandering over the earth's surface, this time without the consolation and protection of wealth. For she knew that Beatrice's confession was to go further. Beatrice had made the announcement of her plans quietly but firmly as they had driven home from the club-house.

"To-morrow everybody shall know everything there is to know," she had said, and had remained obdurate to all her mother's commands and pleadings. "I do consider you. I consider you even now. I mean to save you and myself. But this time it must be in another way. Your scheming has only brought us into deeper trouble. We must start afresh."

"But how? But how?" her mother had said, wringing her hands in uncontrolled despair. "Where are we to start? How are we ever going to make people believe in us, now we have no money?"

"It does not matter what people believe," Beatrice had replied. "With our money and our lies we have been building mud-hovels, and now we are going to build palaces. That's all that matters."

Mrs. Cary had not understood. She thought Beatrice had gone mad, and knowing that with madness, reasoning is in vain, she shut herself up in her room, pulled down the blinds, and believed by this ostrich-like proceeding that she could keep off the inevitable moment when they would have to be pulled up again and the cold, pitiless reality faced.

But Beatrice went her way undeterred. From Stafford's bungalow she drove to the Travers'. The place was little more than an ill-cared-for shanty, the garden overgrown with weeds, the rooms damp, ill-aired and badly furnished, its reputation for misfortune phenomenal. Travers had taken it as the only bungalow to be had for such a short period as he intended to stay in Marut, and Lois had made no objection. Her energy and determined striving after everything that was graceful and beautiful was systematically crushed out of sight. She never protested, never laid any difficulties in Travers' path. She seemed to shrink into herself and live an invisible life of her own, leaving him to go his way. She could not help him. She could build up nothing on a character whose foundations were of shifting sand.

And never had she been more fully convinced of her own powerlessness and of his absolute independence than after their brief and stormy interview before Stafford's entry. She had felt how for a moment their two diametrically opposed natures had faced each other. She had felt a brief joyful satisfaction in at last coming to a hand-to-hand struggle with him; but then, as usual, with a smile and an easy word he had eluded her. So it had always been—so it would always be. Too late she realized that she had thrown away her life upon a man who had no need of her devotion. Too late she realized that all sacrifices are wasted unless the ennobling of the sacrificer's character be considered. For true happiness, true content and goodness can not be given. They must be self-won, or they are no more than hothouse plants which shrivel together in the cold blast of an east wind. Lois had sacrificed herself to bring true happiness and content and goodness into Travers' life, and had failed. She had failed all the more signally because she had never loved him. She had loved Stafford—extraordinary and terrible as it seemed to her, she still loved him. She could not root him out of her life, and though his image was overshadowed by a greater and more noble figure he retained his place.

The glance they had exchanged had pierced down to the very center of her being, and if it had revealed nothing to her it had also revealed everything. For she knew now that the strange bond which had linked them together from the beginning united them still. Some reckless and unscrupulous hand had sundered them outwardly, and her instinct, guided by a hundred significant incidents, told her whose hand it had been. She fled to her little gloomy sitting-room, with its worn-out, tasteless furniture and drab walls, and fought her sorrow and despair single-handed and in her own way. She had a man's dislike for tears—though, being a woman, they came all too easily to her—and she fought against them now with all the strength at her command, with all the pluck which in happier days had made her so splendid a partner in a "losing game." She had made a disastrous mistake in her life, but it was not too late.

The cathedral should go on in its unseen growth, and every conquered tear, every brave smile was a fresh stone bringing it nearer to perfection. God be thanked for the fetishes with which the less fortunate of us are still allowed to adorn the barren walls of our life! The cathedral, the imaginary "sheltering-place for others," was Lois' fetish, and the thought of it and of the strong-faced man with whom she worked in spiritual partnership was a deep, inspiring consolation. It stood at her right hand and helped partly to overthrow the weight of dread and evil presentiment which had borne down upon her all too sensitive and superstitious temperament as she had left her husband and Stafford alone.