‘And I,’ said Somers Chichele, softly and quickly, ‘am on the other side.’
Even over that depth she could flash him a smile. ‘It is the business of my life,’ she gave him in return, ‘to keep this gate shut.’ I felt as if they had forgotten us. Somers mounted and rode off without a word. We were walking in a different direction. Looking back, I saw Judy leaning immovable on the gate, while Somers turned in his saddle, apparently to repeat the form of lifting his hat. And all about them stretched the stones of Kabul valley, vague and formless in the tide of the moonlight...
Next day a note from Mrs. Harbottle informed me that she had gone to Bombay for a fortnight. In a postscript she wrote, ‘I shall wait for the Chicheles there, and come back with them.’ I remember reflecting that if she could not induce herself to take a passage to England in the ship that brought them, it seemed the right thing to do.
She did come back with them. I met the party at the station. I knew Somers would meet them, and it seemed to me, so imminent did disaster loom, that someone else should be there, someone to offer a covering movement or a flank support wherever it might be most needed. And among all our smiling faces disaster did come, or the cold premonition of it. We were all perfect, but Somers’s lip trembled. Deprived for a fortnight he was eager for the draft, and he was only twenty-six. His lip trembled, and there, under the flickering station-lamps, suddenly stood that of which there never could be again any denial, for those of us who saw.
Did we make, I wonder, even a pretense of disguising the consternation that sprang up among us, like an armed thing, ready to kill any further suggestion of the truth? I don’t know. Anna Chichele’s unfinished sentence dropped as if someone had given her a blow upon the mouth. Coolies were piling the luggage into a hired carriage at the edge of the platform. She walked mechanically after them, and would have stepped in with it but for the sight of her own gleaming landau drawn up within a yard or two, and the General waiting. We all got home somehow, taking it with us, and I gave Lady Chichele twenty-four hours to come to me with her face all one question and her heart all one fear. She came in twelve.
‘Have you seen it—long?’ Prepared as I was her directness was demoralizing.
‘It isn’t a mortal disease.’
‘Oh, for Heaven’s sake—’
‘Well, not with certainty, for more than a month.’
She made a little spasmodic movement with her hands, then dropped them pitifully. ‘Couldn’t you do ANYthing?’