While hastily demolishing his breakfast, Maurice visualised his picture in every detail: and with the arrival of his model all thought of Quita and her woes was crowded out of his mind. Yet the man was not heartless, by any means. He was simply an artist of the extreme type, endowed by temperament with the capacity for subordinating all things,—his own griefs no less than the griefs of others,—to one dominant, insatiable purpose. And according to his lights he must be judged.
Quita remained invisible till lunch-time, lying inert, where she had flung herself, upon her unmade bed.
The first tempest of misery, and rebellion, and self-castigation had given place to sheer exhaustion. For even suffering has its limitations; which is perhaps the reason why grief rarely kills. All the springs of life seemed suddenly to have run down. Her spirit felt crushed and broken by the obstructiveness of all about her. The strain of the past three weeks, following upon a severe shock, had told upon her more than she knew; and this morning's sharp revulsion of feeling brought her near to purely physical collapse.
And while she lay alone through two endless hours, tracing designs from the cracks in the whitewashed wall, one conviction haunted her with morbid persistence. Because she had not valued him in the beginning, because she had repudiated him in a moment of wounded pride, he would be taken from her, now that heart and soul were set upon him, and she would never see him again. It was useless to argue that the idea was childish; a mere nightmare of overwrought nerves. It persisted and prevailed, till she felt herself crushed in the grip of a relentless, impersonal Force, against which neither penitence nor tears would avail.
Finally, worn out with pain and rebellion, she fell asleep.
BOOK III.-THE TENTS OF ISHMAEL.
CHAPTER XVIII.
"Leave the what at the what's-its-name,
Leave the sheep without shelter;
Leave the corpse uninterred,
Leave the bride at the altar."
—Kipling.
Even in a land where danger and discomfort flourish like the ungodly, that journey from the cedar-crowned Himalayas to the white hot flats of the Derajat, with the Punjab furnace in full swing, was an experience not readily forgotten by the three who set out upon it in the dripping grey dawn of a July morning. Before them stretched two nights and three days of pure martyrdom, aggravated by that prince of evils—a troubled mind: for the Desmonds a haunting anxiety, and for Lenox the harassing realisation that his own strength or weakness during the next few months stood for no less than the happiness or misery of the only woman on earth. It is this irrevocable fusion of two lives, and the network of responsibilities arising from an act less simple than it seems, that constitute the strength, the charm, the tragedy of marriage: and a dim foreknowledge of its complexity dawned upon Lenox during his penitential progress into a land of fire and death.
Throughout their fifty mile descent to the foot-hill terminus it rained perseveringly. But toward evening the clouds parted, and an hour of sunshine set the drenched earth steaming like a soup kettle when the lid is lifted off. Desmond had ordained that Lenox and his wife should be carried down in doolies; an indignity to which they submitted under protest: and Honor, scrambling out of her prison through an opening level with the ground, passed quite gratefully from its stuffy twilight, redolent of sodden canvas and humanity, to the smell of hot wood and leather that pervaded the sun-saturate railway carriage awaiting them in Pathankôt station.