"You looked miserable the last time you were here," wrote the lady, "and you looked as if you had something very serious to say to me. I am bored to death by the General's hangers-on—he is much too kind to the nobodies who besiege us here—and I hardly ever know what it is to be alone. But if you will come to-morrow, I will take care to keep other people out. I shall pretend a headache, and deny myself to everybody. You must walk boldly in by the garden, contrive not to meet any of the servants, and you will find me sitting in the colonnade. It will all seem accidental. When the General comes to his afternoon tea, he will find you there, and we shall tell him how you wandered in, and forced the consigne. You are such a favourite that he will smile at a liberty from you which he would be the first to resent in any one else."
Bothwell sat in his corner of the railway-carriage, meditating upon this letter in his breast-pocket. How hard and cruel and false and mean the whole tone of the lady's correspondence seemed to him, now that the glamour of a fatal infatuation had passed from his brain and his senses; now that he was able to estimate the enchantress at her real value; now that his newly-awakened conscience had shown him the true colour of his own conduct during the last three years!
Three years ago and a stroke of good fortune had happened to Bothwell Grahame one day in the hill-country, when he and his brother-officers had gone out after big game. It had been his chance to save the life of one of the most distinguished men in the service, General Harborough, a man who at that time occupied an important official position in the Bengal Presidency. Bothwell's presence of mind, courage, and rapid use of a revolver had saved the General from the jaws of a leopard, which had crept upon the party while they were resting at luncheon, after a long morning's bear-shooting. General Harborough was the last man to forget such a service. He took Bothwell Grahame under his protection from that hour, introduced him to his wife, Lord Carlavarock's daughter, and one of the most elegant women in the Presidency.
Favoured by such friends, Bothwell Grahame's life in India became a kind of triumph. He was good-looking, well-mannered, a first-rate shot, and an exceptional horseman. He could sing a part in a glee or duet, and he waltzed to perfection. He was supposed to have a genius for waltzing, and to become master of every new step as if by a kind of inspiration. "What is the last fashionable waltz in London?" people asked him; and he showed them the very latest glide, or swoop, or twist, as the case might be. His friends told him all about it in their letters, he said. He always knew what was going on in the dancing world.
Such a man, not too young nor yet too old—neither a stripling nor a fogey—chivalrous, amiable, full of verve and enjoyment of life, was eminently adapted to the holiday existence at Simla; and it was at Simla that Bothwell Grahame became in a manner the fashion, looked up to by all the young men of his acquaintance, petted by all the women. Nor did it appear strange in the eyes of society that Lady Valeria Harborough should be particularly kind to him, and should have him very often at her bungalow, which was the centre of all that was gay, and elegant, and spirituel in the district. All the Simla jokes originated at the Harborough bungalow. All the latest English fashions, the newest refinements in the service of a dinner-table or the arrangement of afternoon tea, came from the same source. Lady Valeria led the fashion, gave the note of taste throughout that particular section of Indian society.
No, there was nothing exceptional in her kindness to Captain Grahame. In the first place, he had saved her husband from being clawed and mangled to death by a wild beast, a service for which a good wife would be naturally grateful; and in the second place, Bothwell was only one of a court of young men who surrounded Lady Valeria wherever she happened to be living—but most of all up at the hills. She always spoke of them as "boys," and frankly admitted that she liked their admiration on account of its naïveté.
For some time she talked of Bothwell Grahame as a "nice boy," in spite of his six-and-twenty years. She herself owned pensively to seven-and-twenty. Tergiversation would have been vain, since the Peerage was open to all her friends, with its dryasdust record, "Valeria Hermione, born 1854."
She was twenty-seven years of age, strikingly elegant and interesting, if not actually handsome, and she had been two years married to a man who had lately celebrated his sixty-eighth birthday. She had accepted the General, and his splendid settlements, meekly enough. There had been no undue persuasion, no domestic tyranny. Her suitor was a thorough gentleman, wealthy, distinguished, and she was told that he could give her all good things which a woman need care to possess. She would spend two or three years with him in India, where he had an important official appointment; and then she would return to England, where he had two country seats—one a villa near Plymouth, the other a castle in Scotland—and a house in Grosvenor Square. As one of four sisters, it became her to accept the fortune that had fallen into her lap. She was, or she seemed to be, of a temperament that could be happy in an union with a man old enough to be her grandfather. She seemed one of those women born to shine and to rule rather than to love. No one who knew her intimately feared any evil consequences from her marriage with the elderly soldier.
"Valeria will make General Harborough an admirable wife," said the matrons and ancient maidens of the house of Carlavarock, "and she will be a splendid mistress for that fine old place in Perthshire."
Valeria had never known what passionate feeling meant till she gave her friendship to Bothwell Grahame. She had never thrilled at a man's voice, or listened for a man's footstep, till she began to start at his voice and listen for his tread. The fatal love came upon her like a fever, struck her down in the strength of her proud womanhood, made her oblivious of duty, blind to honour, mastered her like a demoniac possession, and from a spotless wife she became all at once a hypocrite and an intriguer.