The Pool in the Desert

by Sara Jeannette Duncan

‘The letter will tell me,’ said Madeline to herself, fingering it. ‘Enough, Surnoo.’

The man went away, and Madeline closed and locked the door of her sitting-room. The letter would tell her—what? She glanced about her with dissatisfaction, and sought the greater privacy of her bedroom, where also she locked the door and drew the muslin curtain across the window. She laid the letter on the dressing-table and kept her eyes upon it while she unfastened, with trembling hands, the brooch at her neck and the belt at her waist. She did one or two other meaningless things, as if she wanted to gain time, to fortify her nerves even against an exhibition before herself.

Then she sat down with her back towards the light and opened the letter. It had a pink look and a scented air. Even in her beating suspense Madeline held it a little farther away from her, as she unfolded it, and it ran:

‘Dear Miss Anderson—What will you say, I wonder, and what will Simla say, when you know that Captain Drake and I have determined to DISREGARD CONVENTIONALITIES, and live henceforward only for one another! I am all packed up, and long before this meets your eye we shall have taken the step which society condemns, but which I have a feeling that you, knowing my storm-tossed history, will be broad-minded enough to sympathize with, at least to some extent. That is the reason I am writing to you rather than to any of my own chums, and also of course to have the satisfaction of telling you that I no longer care what you do about letting out the secret of my marriage to Frederick Prendergast. I am now ABOVE AND BEYOND IT. Any way you look at it, I do not see that I am much to blame. As I never have been Colonel Innes’s wife there can be no harm in leaving him, though if he had ever been sympathetic, or understood me the LEAST LITTLE BIT, I might have felt bound to him. But he has never been able to evoke the finer parts of my nature, and when this is the case marriage is a mere miserable fleshly failure. You may say, “Why try it a third time?”—but my union with Val will be different. I have never been fond of the opposite sex—so far as that goes I should have made a very good nun—but for a long time Valentine Drake has been the only man I cared to have come within a mile of me, and lately we have discovered that we are absolutely necessary to each other’s existence on the higher plane. I don’t care much what Simla thinks, but if you happen to be talking about it to dear Lady Bloomfield, you might just mention this. Val has eight hundred a year of his own, so it is perfectly practicable. Of course, he will send in his papers. WHATEVER HAPPENS, Val and I will never bind ourselves in any way. We both think it wrong and enslaving. I have nothing more to add, except that I am depending on you to explain to Simla that I never was Mrs. Innes.

‘Yours sincerely,

‘Violet Prendergast.

‘P.S.—I have written to Horace, telling him everything about everything, and sent my letter off to him in the wilds by a runner. If you see him you might try and smooth him down. I don’t want him coming after Val with a revolver.’

Madeline read this communication through twice. Then quietly and deliberately she lay down upon the bed, and drew herself out of the control of her heart by the hard labour of thought. When she rose, she had decided that there were only two things for her to do, and she began at once to do them, continuing her refuge in action. She threw her little rooms open again, and walked methodically round the outer one, collecting the odds and ends of Indian fabrics with which she had garnished it.

As the maid came in, she looked up from folding them.

‘I have news, Brookes,’ she said, ‘that necessitates my going home at once. No, it is not bad news, but—important. I will go now and see about the tonga. We must start tomorrow morning.’