At length she raised her eyes to her husband, who still stood with folded arms and ghastly pale, looking silently down on her. She rose from the music stool and quietly picked up, one by one, the broken fragments of the ivory box which had been so precious to her. Gathering them in the folds of her muslin gown as a child might guard its treasure, she hurried away and went up-stairs, leaving her husband standing motionless and silent.
When she reached her room she sank down under the light of the lamp as if she meant to examine the broken fragments. Instead of doing so she sat holding them covered up in her lap, for there was a greater tragedy gripping her heart than the ruin of the box. Her thoughts were involuntarily following the same train as Mr. Worsley's when in his pity for the young wife he had remarked to her friend, "What a vista of misery lies before her!"
Yes, it was some glimmering of this vista which Hester was seeing now more clearly than she had ever done before. Was it to be in a succession of such scenes that she was to pass all her earthly years till death released her? They might be many, for she was young and strong of body. What would it matter now if to-morrow her husband were to greet her gaily and seemingly forgetful of the wounds which he had inflicted on her heart, or even if he expressed himself penitent and desirous to atone for his fit of demoniac fury? Could he efface by a light word, a manufactured smile—as he flattered himself he was able to do—the recollection of his blighting words and deeds?
Love for him was dead, but Pity was now knocking gently at the door of her tender heart. A true compassion for that disordered soul came creeping in. Surely this desperate pass made a stronger claim for her to put forth every effort to help her husband. She might perhaps, when he was calmer, be able to show him the misery which he was inflicting on both their lives by these ungoverned outbursts. She must be more brave and firm for the right than she had been in the past. Other disordered lives had been won over by patience; and was not the great patient Love of One the source of all hope and trust? To that never-failing Love she carried her burden now and found there the promised peace.
Unfolding her muslin dress, she drew forth the pitiful fragments of the shattered thing of beauty, and opening her almirah, brought out an old box which had been one of the treasures of her childish days. Into it she reverently laid the relics, wrapping them in a fold of paper on which she wrote the words: "The True," and the date of the tragedy. She stowed the box safely away, fearing lest even her ayah should discover it and marvel at the fate of the much-prized treasure.
CHAPTER XXX.
Joy and bustle reigned supreme in the corner house of Salamander Street, Vepery. Even its shabby exterior, with patches of chunam peeling off, disclosing its flimsy walls of lath and mud, was sharing in the dawn of coming prosperity. For had not its tenant, Mrs. Baltus, received a letter from Mrs. Matilda Rouat, her well-to-do widowed sister-in-law in Calcutta, announcing that she was desirous of paying her a lengthened visit as a paying guest? The impulse which prompted the decision was an unselfish one in the main. Rumours had lately reached Mrs. Rouat that her sister-in-law was in straitened circumstances. Being a shrewd and not unkindly soul, she decided that she might lighten the domestic burden and at the same time break the monotony of her days in Chandrychoke, the Eurasian quarter of the city where she had lived all her life.
Mrs. Rouat had even been thoughtful enough to forward "an advance"—without which important adjunct it is well nigh impossible to set the wheels of labour moving among Eastern artizans. A basket-work mender squatted in the verandah splicing the dilapidated bamboo chairs which formed the principal furniture of the bungalow rooms. Another was deftly patching the rattan-matting on the floors in case Aunt Tilly's ponderous form should be laid prone by reason of its many dangerous slits. The butler, a newly enlisted functionary—having been dismissed from higher service owing to the discovery of clumsy pilfering—was flying about in a crumpled tunic, a relic of better days, his turban all awry, trying to impress "missus" with his zeal in her service. On the little gravel sweep with its border of burnt-up grass, stood a miscellaneous collection of furniture, almirahs, cots, washstands, all receiving, at the hands of a scantily clad coolie, a coat of liquid which he called "Frenchee polishee," but which was really a cheap decoction that, in spite of the strong sun-rays, would retain its stickiness till it proved the object of much vituperation to all whose fingers came in contact with it. Mrs. Baltus, however, was charmed with its rejuvenating effect on her ancient furniture, and stepped about briskly trying to get her money's worth out of the various workers, while her daughter Leila sat darning rents in the muslin curtains, and pondering as to what were her most pressing needs and desires when she got Aunt Tilly to open her purse at the drapery counter of Messrs. Oakes & Co.
Mrs. Rouat was a great contrast to her lean, brown-skinned sister-in-law. She was almost blonde in colouring, her cheeks were ruddy, and her suffused watery eyes distinctly blue; while her treble chin, stout figure, and condition of well-to-do preservation suggested that she belonged to one of the lower orders of the British race rather than to one who had any admixture of Oriental blood. Being considerably upset by her three days at sea, Mrs. Rouat at first was quite satisfied to recline in a long bamboo chair while she listened to her sister-in-law's narrations concerning the hard times they had undergone, or was entertained by her niece playing a jingling tune on the wheezy old piano.