‘Are you quite serious—do you mean it?’
‘Indeed I do.’
‘And in less than a fortnight you will not go out of one’s life. You will stay on—you summer day! It’s hard to believe in luck like that. I sent a poor devil of a sepoy a reprieve last week—one knows now how he must have felt about it.’
‘Does it make all that difference?’ Madeline asked, softly.
‘It makes a difference,’ he answered, controlling his words, ‘that I am glad you can not conceive, since that would mean that your life has been as barren as mine.’ He seemed to refrain from saying more, and then he added, ‘You must be careful when you plant your friendship that you mean it to stay, and blossom. It will not come easily up by the roots, and it will leave an ugly hole.’
He was helping her out of her rickshaw, and as they followed the servant who carried her wraps the few yards to the door, she left her hand lightly on his arm. It was the seal, he thought, of her unwritten bond that there should be no uprooting of the single flower he cherished; and he went back almost buoyantly because of it to the woman who had been sitting in the sackcloth and ashes of misfortune, turning over the expedients for which his step might make occasion.
By the time the monkeys began to scramble about the roof in the early creeping of the dawn among the deodars, Madeline had groped her way to a tolerably clear conception of what might happen. The impeding circumstance everywhere, it must be acknowledged, was Frederick Prendergast’s coffin. The case, had convict No. 1596 been still alive and working out his debt to society, would have been transcendentally simple, she told herself. Even a convict has a right—a prospective right—to his wife, and no honest man should be compelled to retain a criminal’s property. This was an odd reflection, perhaps, to be made by Madeline Anderson, but the situation as a whole might be described as curious. And there was no doubt about the coffin.
Chapter 3.VI.
The veranda of which Miss Anderson’s little sitting-room claimed its section hung over the road, and it seemed to her that she heard the sound of Mrs. Innes’s arrival about ten minutes after breakfast.