The case dragged on through appeal, and the decision of the lower courts was not reversed. The day this became known the fact also transpired that poor Prendergast would never live to complete his ten years’ term of imprisonment. He went to prison with hardly more than one lung, and in the most favourable physical condition to get rid of the other. Mrs. Prendergast wept a little over the installation, and assured Frederick that it was perfectly absurd; they were certain to get him out again; people always got people out again in America. She took him grapes and flowers once a week for about a month, and then she sailed for Europe. She put it about that her stay was to be as brief as was consistent with the transaction of certain necessary business in London; but she never came back, and Madeline Anderson had taken her place, in so far as the grapes and flowers were concerned, for many months, when the announcement of his wife’s death reached Prendergast in an English paper published in Paris. About a year after that it began to be thought singular how he picked up in health, and Madeline’s mother and sister occasionally romanced about the possibility of his recovering and marrying her after all—they had an enormous opinion of the artistic virtue of forgiveness—but it was not a contingency ever seriously contemplated by Miss Anderson herself. Her affection, pricked on by remorse, had long satisfied itself with the duties of her ministry. If she would not leave him until he died, it was because there was no one but herself to brighten the long day in the prison hospital for him, because she had thrown him into the arms of the woman who had deserted him, because he represented in her fancy her life’s only budding towards the sun. Her patience lasted through six years, which was four years longer than any doctor had given Frederick Prendergast to live; but when one last morning she found an empty bed, and learned that Number 1596 had been discharged in his coffin, she rose from the shock with the sense of a task fully performed and a well-developed desire to see what else there might be in the world.
She announced her intention of travelling for a year or two with a maid, and her family expressed the usual acquiescence. It would help her, they said, to ‘shake it off’; but they said that to one another. They were not aware—and it would have spoiled an ideal for them if they had been—that she had shaken it off, quite completely, into Prendergast’s grave.
This was the curious reason why Miss Anderson’s travels were so long postponed.
Chapter 3.II.
It was Madeline’s fancy to enjoy the contrast between West and East in all its sharpness, so she and Brookes embarked at San Francisco for Yokohama. Their wanderings in Japan were ideal, in spite of Brookes’s ungrateful statement that she could have done with fewer eggs and more bacon; and Madeline prolonged the appeal of the country to her sense of humour and fantasy, putting off her departure for India from week to week. She went at last in March; and found herself down with fever at Benares in the middle of one particularly hot April, two months after the last of her fellow travellers had sailed from Bombay, haunted on her baking pillow by pictorial views of the burning ghat and the vultures. The station doctor, using appalling language to her punkah-coolie, ordered her to the hills; and thus it was that she went to Simla, where she had no intention of going, and where this story really begins.
Brookes has always declared that Providence in sending Miss Anderson to Simla had it in mind to prevent a tragedy; but as to that there is room for a difference of opinion: besides I can not be anticipated by Brookes.
‘It’s the oddest place imaginable, and in many ways the most delightful,’ Madeline wrote to her sister Adele, ‘this microcosm of Indian official society withdrawn from all the world, and playing at being a municipality on three Himalayan mountaintops. You can’t imagine its individuality, its airy, unsubstantial, superior poise. How can I explain to you elderly gentlemen, whose faces express daily electric communications with the Secretary of State, playing tennis violently every single afternoon in striped flannels—writing letters of admonition to the Amir all day long, and in the evening, with the assistance of yellow wigs and make-up sticks from the Calcutta hair-dresser, imagining that they produce things, poor dears, only a LITTLE less well done than is done at the Lyceum? Nothing is beyond them. I assure you they are contemplating at the moment ‘The Second Mrs. Tanqueray’. The effect of remoteness from the world, I suppose, and the enormous mutual appreciation of people who have watched each other climb. For to arrive officially at Simla they have had to climb in more ways than one...It is all so hilarious, so high-spirited, so young and yet, my word! what a cult of official dignity underlying! I saw a staff-officer in full uniform, red and white feathers and all, going to the birthday dinner at the Viceroy’s the other evening in a perambulator—rickshaw, you know, such as they have in Japan. That is typical of the place. All the honours and dignities—and a perambulator to put them in—or a ridiculous little white-washed house made of mud and tin, and calling itself Warwick Castle, Blenheim, Abbotsford! They haven’t a very good hold, these Simla residences, and sometimes they slip fifty yards or so down the mountain-side, but the chimneys (bad pun coming) are never any more out of drawing than they were before.
‘Yet—never forget—the queer little place has a nobility, drawn I suppose from high standards of conduct in essentials.
‘...This matter of precedence is a bore for an outsider. I am very tired of being taken in to dinner by subalterns, because I have no “official position.” Something of the kind was offered me, by the way, the other day, by a little gunner with red eyelids, in the Ordnance Department, named McDermott—Captain McDermott. He took my declining very cheerfully, said he knew Americans didn’t like Englishmen, who hadn’t been taught to pronounce their “g’s,” but hoped I would change my mind before the rains, when he was goin’ down. Of course I sha’n’t. The red eyelids alone...I am living in a boarding-house precisely under the deodars, and have “tiffin” with Mrs. Hauksbee every day when neither of us are having it anywhere else. And I’ve been told the original of “General Bangs,” “that most immoral man.” You remember, don’t you, the heliograph incident—I needn’t quote it. It really happened! and the General still lives, none the worse—perhaps rather greater. Quite half the people seem materializations of Kipling, and it’s very interesting; but one mustn’t say so if one wants to be popular. Talking of materializations, I saw the original of Crawford’s Mr. Isaacs, too, the other day. He used to be a diamond agent among the native princes when Crawford knew him. When I saw him he was auctioning off his collection of curios and things. These types of novelists look wonderfully little impaired; I suppose it’s the dry air.