Each day life flickered more uncertainly in the great gaunt frame; and on the morning when Chundra Sen, with a dapper little doctor, set his face towards Darkót, Zyarulla, kneeling beside his unheeding master, bowed his head upon his hands.
"It is the will of God," he muttered. But the formula carried no conviction to his heart, that whispered rather: "It is the work of Sheitan, the accursed."
[1] String-bed.
CHAPTER XXXV.
"Why was the pause prolonged, but that singing should issue thence?
Why rushed the discords in, but that harmony should be prized!"
—Browning.
Quita Lenox lay back in a long low chair, lost in thought, her hands clasped behind her head, the folds of her dull-blue tea-gown trailing on the carpet. A cushion of darker blue threw into stronger relief the brighter tints of her hair; and at her throat three rough lumps of Tibetan turquoise—recently sent by Lenox—hung on a fine gold chain. His last letter, full of the discovery of his Pass, lay open on her knee,—read and re-read till its contents were stamped upon her brain; and it seemed to her high time that a fresh one came to take its place. But the days slipped by—uneventful days, in which the long chair played a definite part—and no envelope in his hand-writing came to cheer her.
Yet she was far removed from unhappiness. Her increasing pride in him, and in his achievement, prevented that. Only there were moments when the inner vision was too vivid; moments between sleep and waking when pictures trooped unbidden through the corridors of her brain; when neither sleep nor effort of will could shield her from that awful visualisation of the dreaded thing, which is the artist's penalty in the day of trouble. At such times, the fear that he might slip out of her life without knowledge of the great fact, that no amount of repetition can minimise, nor custom stale; without knowledge that through his long love and constancy she had attained to the 'greatest creative art of all,' had almost dragged her out of bed at midnight to begin the letter that should carry the word to him amid the sublimity of his glaciers and eternal silences. But always something stronger than fear had restrained her; so that the weeks had dropped away one by one, like faded petals, and the secret that was to be the crowning glory of their new life together still lay hidden in her heart.
The cheerful round of festivities common to an Indian Hill season had passed her by; and she was content to have it so. Between her canvas and her unpractised needle, between the companionship of Michael, and of the Desmonds—while they were 'up'—her days had gone softly, yet pleasantly and profitably in more respects than one. For it is in the pauses between times of activity and stress that the still small voice of God speaks most clearly to the soul; that power is generated and garnered against the hidden things that shall be. It is in the pauses that we can, as it were, stand back a space from our own corner of the picture we are so zealously making or marring, and catch an illuminating glimpse of the proportions of the whole.
Thus it had been with Quita Lenox. In these four months of seeming inactivity, the large, underlying forces of life had been silently at work in her, touching the impressionable spirit of her to 'fine issues' that the sure years would reveal. Nor had her time of quiet been lacking in immediate results. A completed picture stood to her credit; and a drawer full of surprising achievements in the way of needlecraft; achievements so pathetically small that at times the sight of them brought tears to her eyes.
But this afternoon neither brush nor needle tempted her. In spirit she was with her husband, trying by concentration of thought to bridge the space between. But always her thoughts ended in one cry: If only—if only—he could get back in time!