The Pool in the Desert

by Sara Jeannette Duncan

Captain Gordon heard her account of herself with complacence, and declared, wiping his moustache, that a similar experience had befallen him only a fortnight before.

‘Did you ever hear the story of that absent-minded chap, Sir James Jackson, who went to the RIGHT dinner-party by mistake?’ he asked, ‘and apologized like mad, by Jove! and insisted he couldn’t stay. The people nearly had to tie him down in his—’ Captain Gordon stopped, arrested by his companion’s sudden and complete inattention.

‘I see a lady,’ interrupted Madeline, with odd distinctness, ‘curiously like somebody I have known before.’ Her eyes convinced themselves, and then refused to be convinced of the inconceivable fact that they were resting on Violet Prendergast. It was at first too amazing, too amazing only. Then an old forgotten feeling rose in her bosom; the hand on the stem of her wine-glass grew tense. The sensation fell away; she remembered her emancipation, the years arose and reassured her during which Violet Prendergast, living or dead, had been to her of absolutely no importance. Yet there was a little aroused tremour in her voice as she went on, ‘She is on the General’s right—he must have taken her in. Can you see from where you are sitting?’

‘These narrow oval tables are a nuisance that way, aren’t they? You don’t know who you’re dining with till the end of the function. Oh! I see—that’s Mrs. Innes, just out, and fresh as paint, isn’t she? The Colonel’—Captain Gordon craned his head again—‘is sitting fourth from me on this side.’

‘Mrs. Innes! Really!’ said Madeline. ‘Then—then of course I must be mistaken.’

She removed her eyes almost stealthily from the other woman’s face and fixed them on the pattern of the table-cloth. Her brain guided her clearly through the tumult of her perception, and no emotion could be observed in the smiling attention which she gave to Captain Gordon’s account of the afternoon’s tandem racing; but there was a furious beating in her breast, and she thought she could never draw a breath long enough to control it. It helped her that there was food to swallow, wine to drink, and Captain Gordon to listen to; and under cover of these things she gradually, consciously, prepared herself for the shock of encounter which should be conclusive. Presently she leaned a little forward and let her glance, in which no outsider could see the steady recognition, rest upon the lady on the General’s right, until that person’s agreeable blue eyes wandered down the table and met it. Perhaps Madeline’s own eyelids fluttered a little as she saw the sudden stricture in the face that received her message, and the grimace with which it uttered, pallid with apprehension, its response to a pleasantry of General Worsley’s. She was not consummate in her self-control, but she was able at all events to send the glance travelling prettily on with a casual smile for an intervening friend, and bring it back to her dinner-roll without mischief. It did not adventure again; she knew, and she set herself to hold her knowledge, to look at it and understand it, while the mechanical part of her made up its mind about the entrees, and sympathized with Captain Gordon on his hard luck in having three ponies laid up at once. She did not look again, although she felt the watching of the other woman, and was quite aware of the moment at which Mrs. Innes allowed herself the reprieve of believing that at the Worsley’s dinner-party at least there would be no scandal. The belief had its reflex action, doing something to calm her. How could there be—scandal—she asked herself, and dismissed with relief the denunciations which crowded vague but insistent in her brain. Even then she had not grasped the salient points of the situation; she was too much occupied with its irony as it affected her personally; her impressions circled steadily round the word ‘twice’ and the unimaginable coincidence. Her resentment filled her, and her indignation was like a clear flame behind her smiling face. Robbed twice, once in New York and—oh! preposterous—the second time in Simla! Robbed of the same things by the same hand! She perceived in the shock of it only a monstrous fatality, a ludicrously wicked chance. This may have been due to the necessity of listening to Captain Gordon.

At all events it was only as she passed Colonel Innes on her way to the drawing-room and saw ahead of her the very modish receding back of Mrs. Innes that she realized other things—crime and freedom.

It was the reversion of power; it brought her a great exultation. She sat down under it in a corner, hoping to be left alone, with a white face and shining eyes. Power and opportunity and purpose—righteous purpose!

The circumstances had come to her in a flash; she brought them up again steadily and scrutinized them. The case was absolutely clear. Frank Prendergast had been dead just seven months. Colonel Innes imagined himself married four years. Violet Prendergast was a bigamist, and Horace Innes had no wife.

That was the marvellous transcendent fact; that was what lifted her and carried her on great pulsing waves that rolled beyond the walls of the little fripperied drawing-room and its collection of low-necked women, out into her life, which had not these boundaries. She lived again in a possible world. There was no stone wall between herself and joy.