CHAPTER VII.
"God uses us to help each other so,
Lending our lives out."
—Browning.
Before May was out Honor met her unpromising acquaintance several times, by chance. But nothing beyond formal greetings passed between them. Twice she happened to be riding alone with Lenox; the third time, her husband was with them: and on every occasion Quita's companion was James Garth,—the only one among them all who enjoyed the situation. Quita herself found a perverse satisfaction, unworthy of her best moments, in thus emphasising her indifference to her husband's presence; ignoring, with characteristic heedlessness, the fact that a two-edged weapon is an ill thing to handle: and Lenox, accepting her unspoken intimation au pied de la lettre, steeled himself to half-cynical, half-stoical endurance.
He had returned heartened, and fortified by a week of stirring sport, and by closer contact with a personality wholesome and invigorating as a hill wind; a sympathy of the practical order, that found expression in matter-of-fact service and good fellowship, rather than in speech. He had given up all thought of leaving the station; had decided to set his teeth, and go through with his ordeal, sooner than disappoint these new-found friends, who seemed already to have become a part of his life. Such rapid intimacies are a distinctive feature of a country where a guest may come for a night, and stay for a month; where all white men are brothers, in the widest sense of the word.
And Eldred Lenox did not hold with half measures. Since he stood his ground in order to please the Desmonds, he held himself ready to fall in with any joint plans they might choose to make. Thus, he agreed to share in their arrangements for the June camp, at Kajiar,—a natural glade hid in the heart of Kalatope Forest: and even accepted, without demur, Colonel Mayhew's proposal to preface the 'week' with a two days' house-party at the Chumba Residency;—a picturesque house, whose garden of lawns, and roses, and English trees falls sheer to the eddying river below. The two sportsmen had spent a couple of days here on their way back, the Resident being down in Chumba on State business; and his suggestion had been the natural outcome of Desmond's keen interest in the book which was his hobby of the moment.
"I must be down here then," he explained, "for the Minjla Mèla, a superstitious ceremony by which we test the luck of the State for the coming year. An unfortunate buffalo is flung into the Ravee, just above the rapids; and if he succumbs, or scrambles out on the far side, the gods will not fail us. But if he lands on the town bank, they won't trouble their heads about us till next June. Naturally we do our best to prevent such a catastrophe, in spite of our conviction that the matter is settled by the will of the gods! As far as I know, the ceremony is peculiar to Chumba; and this would be a good chance for you to see it, if you don't mind a trifle of heat, and if your wife would care to come too, so much the better."
"She'll come like a shot, thanks," Desmond answered heartily.
"Good!—We'll get up a native dinner at the Palace in honour of the occasion. My little girl has set her heart on the plan, rather to my wife's dismay. The Maurices want to come too; and we may have to include Garth, on her account; though I confess I wanted her for myself! She's worth talking to, that girl. There's a touch of genius in her composition, and a touch of the folly that's apt to go along with it; or she would never give the gossips a chance to couple her name with Garth's. If he is in earnest, so much the worse for her.—We may count on you, Lenox, I hope?" he added, turning to the impassive man at his side, whom he had unwittingly smitten between the joints of his harness.
Lenox's muttered assent was a trifle indistinct, owing to the thick pipe-stem between his teeth, and rising deliberately, he passed out of the smoking-room into the wistaria-shadowed verandah, where the turbulent voice of the river seemed to echo his own mood. It was well for himself, and for James Garth also, that he ran no risk of meeting the man at that moment.
The thought of that first fortnight in June unnerved him. For Colonel Mayhew's words had done more than turn the knife in an open wound. Lenox was blest, or curst, with that most pitiless of mentors, a Scotch conscience. Whatever Quita's failings, or her attitude to himself, there could be no shelving the fact that he was her husband:—the guardian of her good name, the one man on earth who could claim the right to criticise her conduct. Her probable repudiation both of his criticism, and his right to offer it, did not, in his view, justify him in standing aloof, if need for speech should arise. Possibly passion, smouldering at the heart of duty, urged him towards the desperate experiment. But if so, he would not admit it, even to himself. He merely decided—with an access of fastidious disgust at the whole situation—to accept this fate-sent opportunity for judging how far her behaviour warranted Colonel Mayhew's kindly concern. For he knew enough of Garth and his methods to feel certain that, in his case, to covet an invitation was to procure it.