Aspasia awoke from a heavy dreamless sleep with a sense of panic. Her heart was beating violently. She sat up in bed, listening eagerly, through the hammering of her pulses.
It is the nature of such old haunted places as Saltwoods that they impress you with their stillness by day and their stirring by night. Then the old boards creak as if to the tread of forgotten steps; old echoes answer to voices long silent; there is a rustle down the narrow passages as of garments the very texture of which is forgotten; there are sighs in the night airs, and little cold blasts wandering round corners, even on the stillest night. You tell yourself that it is the crumbling brick and wood work setting ever a little more towards destruction; but it seems rather as if the years-laden habitation had acquired a sentient being of its own; that when, like the aged, it lies wakeful in the night, the memories of the past come back to it; that it laments, with sighs, lost life, lost mirth, lost dignity.
But Baby would at no time, have had, in her practical young mind, room for such fancies as these; and now, the very real well-grounded fears which were strong upon her lent every stealthy creak about her a hideous material significance, every sighing breath the echo of a present tragedy.
Supposing Muhammed were really to creep into the Runkle's room—Sir Arthur might not have locked his door. It is all very well, in a fit of rage, to wish an irritating relative disposed of; it is a very different thing to wake in the middle of the night and think of the murderer at his work. Poor old Runkle...! Or, suppose Lady Gerardine were to do herself a mischief, were to ... there are ideas to which one cannot bear to give concrete shape, even in one's own imagination.
The girl lit a candle, sprang out of bed, and huddled on a dressing-gown. How foolish, how selfish, how wicked she had been to leave the fevered woman alone with Jani—Jani, the most helpless and unreasoning of human beings!
The old house might have been in league with the evil passions it housed that night, so loudly did it seem to protest against Aspasia's interference.
Heard any one ever door so groan on its hinges, ever boards so complain under tread of light foot? What menacing shadows leapt from every corner! It was enough to scare any less courageous heart from its purpose. But on went Baby, down the little stairs, past Lady Aspasia's door (the creature snored—it was quite what Baby expected of her); round the corner of the passage, past Sir Arthur's little room. What a dead silence in there! She was afraid to listen to the suggestion, and scurried by, past M. Chatelard's room. Her aunt's door at last in sight. Baby stopped with a great start, her heart in her mouth, the candle almost dropping from her grasp—what was that black thing lying at such sinister length across the threshold? A heap of clothes? ... Jani? No—diminutive Jani could never spread to such bulk. Then what?
The thing moved slowly, reared itself to its knees, turned a wild black head, a wild black-bearded face, fierce eyes, towards Aspasia; then rose, with a spring.
Aspasia, in her mind, flung the light from her and ran into the darkness, shrieking: "The Panther, the Panther!" But Aspasia, in the flesh, stood rooted to the spot, in a paralysis of terror, unable to move a muscle.
The thing came close to her on its noiseless feet. And she saw that the panther was Muhammed. This was no surprise; she had known it.
But, under his dishevelled locks, from out of the barbaric wings of his beard, the savage being's face was gazing upon her—as it gradually filtered to her panic-stricken mind—with no sort of savageness; rather, indeed, a gentle, a pathetic anxiety.
Miss Cuningham... said the Pathan.
To her bewildered ears it was the voice of no Pathan that spoke, but the high-bred accents of an English gentleman. The girl rubbed her eyes with her left hand. ("Wake up, Aspasia, wake up. You are still asleep, and in the middle of some ridiculous dream!")
Miss Cuningham, pursued the dream-creature that was panther and Pathan, and yet looked and spoke like one of her own sober kin; "are you going to her?"
I was going, answered the girl, abandoning herself to her dream. Then she began suddenly to tremble, and with knees giving way beneath her, advanced uncertainly towards the door, all her energies bent on reaching safety within. But he, with an outflung gesture of prayer, cried to her, in that low English voice that was so amazing, yet which, in spite of its incongruity, soothed her frantic fear.
In pity, stop one second. Do you hear how she is crying within? Tell me, what is her trouble? And, as Baby fell from amazement to amazement, as even in dreams one falls, and could find no thought, much less words for answer, he went on in his pleading undertone: "Is the old man not good to her? Oh, do not stop to wonder why I should ask you! Answer me, in the name of God, as one fellow-creature to another: Whom, or what, is she mourning for?"
Aspasia saw how, between the sweep of his moustache and the great fans of his beard, the man's lips quivered as he spoke: she felt his haggard eyes imploring, compelling; and she made answer, as she was bidden, "as one fellow-creature to another," with a solemnity which she herself was scarce aware of:
She is mourning for her dead husband.
When she had spoken, Baby had a vision so swift that she had hardly time to seize it, of Muhammed's eyes lightening upon her with an extraordinary illumination. The next instant he had dropped his lids. Then he turned and, running, left her; and she heard the crazy boards creak, the stairs groan under his flying unshod feet.
Utter chaos possessed her thoughts as she turned the handle of the locked door and gently knocked, calling upon Jani; the fantastic terrors of her inexplicable experience, and the sounds of Rosamond's moans and sobs within driving her to urgency. As still in a sort of nightmare she found herself repeating her own phrase to the Pathan, and an odd speech of her aunt's, as if in answer to it: "She is mourning for her dead husband.... He is not really dead, Baby...."
Here an idea so extraordinary, so utterly impossible, suddenly tapped at her brain that, added to all the rest, a new fear of her own self came upon her.
I think I am going mad, too, said the poor child to herself. "Jani, Jani," she cried louder, "let me in!"
And Jani, hearing, did so—this time, it seemed, with alacrity.
The candles on Lady Gerardine's dressing-table had been lit, and the portrait on the panel was in full illumination.
Rosamond was crouching in bed, her head on her knees, her hair in long strands about her. She did not move upon Aspasia's entrance; she did not seem to have heard it. Now and again a moan escaped her.
Why did you not call me? cried the girl, turning angrily upon Jani.
The ayah shook her head, her face was wrinkled into a thousand lines of dismay. She made a helpless gesture with both hands.
Has she been like that all night? asked Aspasia.
All night, answered Jani, adding apologetically: "quieter now."
Quiet! echoed Baby.
Quiet! It was indeed this very quietude of suffering that terrified her. From such an extremity of pain she felt herself separated by all her own young vitality as from death itself. Here the science of her heart failed her. This inert woman, moaning like a suffering animal, seemed something horribly different from her beautiful aunt. Baby dared not touch her; she could not even find a word for her.
Speak to her, you, Jani, she whispered.
Jani obediently approached the bed and, bending towards her mistress, poured forth a flood of Hindustani. Failing to make an impression, she seized the clasped hands in her claw-like grip and shook them.
Then Rosamond raised her head and turned a vacant look. Her face was drawn beyond recognition; Baby saw a slow tear gather and roll down into the open mouth. Anything more forlorn, more hopeless, the girl thought she had never beheld. As the golden head drooped once more into its broken attitude, Baby, her own tears springing scalding to her eyes, turned determinedly to Jani:
I will get old Mary, she cried; and, seizing her candle again, pattered from the room, all her previous terrors swallowed up in the single huge anxiety. Instinctively Aspasia felt that if Lady Gerardine's reason, nay, her life itself, were to be saved, help must be forthcoming. And the only help she could think of was that of the mystic sorrow-experienced old servant of the family.
Old Mary, whose spirit seemed already a dweller of those regions where from the point of view of the eternal nothing finite can surprise, was soon ready at Aspasia's summons.
Yes, Miss Cuningham, I'll come. Eh, the poor lady! Don't you fret yourself, miss, she's in God's hands.
The very sight of her, so promptly robed in her everyday black with the white cap tied under her chin, and the familiar little shawl over her shoulders, was enough to inspire confidence. Baby's tremors were calming down into hopefulness when they entered Lady Gerardine's room together.
Eh, the poor lady, cried old Mary again, after one glance at the bed. Then she approached, and took her mistress' hands into hers: "My Lady," she said, "what ails you?"
If anything could have called Rosamond back from her deep slough of despond it was this appellation from lips that had hitherto so sweetly acknowledged her only as widow. The voice and words pierced to her brain. She reared her head quickly.
Why do you call me that?
My Lady!
The arrival of Sir Arthur Gerardine had made a distinct impression upon the housekeeper's half-dreaming mind. Lady Gerardine wrenched her hands from the withered clasp, and clapped them over her ears.
My Lady! my Lady! she cried wildly, "I am not Lady Gerardine, I never was Lady Gerardine; I am Mrs. English, Mrs. English. Don't you know it?—you of all women!"
Ma'am! ejaculated old Mary, while Aspasia nipped her arm, with warning fingers.
Oh, Mary, wailed Rosamond, and broke into a storm of sobs, "do you think he will ever understand, do you think he will ever forgive me? Oh, Mary, you who have felt his presence here, ask him—ask him if he will forgive me!"
Now Mary hardly needed Aspasia's agitated whispers; she had understood. Her blue eyes became illumined.
In God's heaven, she said solemnly, "where dwell the happy spirits who have entered into life, all is peace and understanding—there is no need to forgive. Eh, Ma'am," she went on, while Rosamond stifled her sobs to hang upon her words, "do you think these poor things of earth can hurt those that have gone before? In heaven there is no marriage or giving in marriage!"
A moment Rosamond stared with blazing eyes; then she struck at the woman with both hands.
How dare you! she cried hoarsely. "How dare you! Out of my sight! I want none of your God who can make such cruel laws, none of your heaven that can hold such coldness. Oh, Harry, Harry, Harry! Somewhere you are. Hear me—come to me. Come!"
Fiercely, as if madness were indeed upon her, she flung her glance from one to the other of the helpless watchers.
I must see him! Send old Mary away, she is keeping him from me. Send her away. Harry, Harry, come to me. Tell me you forgive me... Jani, your people can raise the dead, they say. Call him back to me. By your gods or your devils call his spirit to me. Jani, will you let your child die and not help her?
The fluent Hindustani of her childhood rushed back to her lips. Aspasia, after having huddled old Mary out of sight, stood, feeling again as if one hideous dream had been succeeded by another still more hideous; feeling, while the unknown cry rang out, and the dear voice grew hoarse and feeble, more abjectly useless herself than in her teeming energy she could ever have thought possible. All at once the ayah, who had listened at first bewildered, then with an air of darkling attention, suddenly interrupted the failing accents of her mistress by a few harsh words.
Rosamond fell back upon her pillows with a sigh of exhaustion. The Hindoo turned, and went stealthily from the room, and Aspasia sank into a chair; her limbs would no longer support her.
Rosamond lay very still, almost like death, the girl thought, her eyelids only half closed over her dulled eyes. Never had minutes seemed so interminable; never silence so charged with boding sounds, as during this span of expectation. Never would Aspasia know whether it were hours or minutes that she sat, expecting she knew not what.
At length the shuffling tread of the ayah sounded without the door, and Jani entered. She had thrown a long white veil over her head, and between her hands she held the chafing-dish in which she was wont to cook her own food. The glimmer of the hot charcoal shone fitfully on her dark intent face. A thrill of superstitious terror ran through Aspasia.
Jani, she cried, catching at the woman's veil, "what are you going to do?" She thought the black eyes were lit with an evil spark as they looked back at her:
Do my Missie Sahib's will, whispered Jani.
Baby gave a shivering cry.
Oh—but, Jani, no one can call back the dead!
Jani was crouching before the hearth. Without replying, she set her little tripod, and balanced the earthen pan on the top of it. In this lay divers herbs and other substances unknown to the watcher. A fine blue fume, with an aromatic odour, began to rise in the room.
Suddenly Jani looked up from her manipulations and spoke again. It was a belated answer to the girl's expostulation.
Who knows, said she, in her slow difficult English, "where the spirits dwell, or how close they live to us? I will pray my gods! And you, Missie Sahib, pray yours, pray hard that she may have her wish."
The aromatic steam rose and circled. Jani drew a bag from her bosom and began to shake its contents over the pan.
See, missie, see, she went on, her eyes fixed, "this is the good medicine. Behold, Missie Sahib shall dream, and in her dream, she shall be happy." She folded her hands, rocked herself backwards and forwards, low croonings and mutterings escaping from her lips. Now, like her who soothes a babe to rest, now with a passionate hypnotic fervour as before one of her own world-old shrines. Once she called sharply to Aspasia again:
Pray, pray!
Then Aspasia folded her hands, and obediently began to pray. Her first thought was to plead that she and her aunt be protected against what evil might be called into being by these unholy Eastern doings. She heard Rosamond turn in the bed, and saw dreamily, through the floating mists, that she was lying with her eyes fixed on the burning charcoal. Then the girl's thoughts began to wander. She would find herself earnestly petitioning for something, wanting something; and suddenly become aware that she knew not what it was. From where she sat the illumined portrait of Harry English looked down upon her: as once before in the dusk, it now, through the vapours, began to assume airs of life; seemed to smile, to frown. The lips quivered; then, she told herself, they spoke; the very words were ringing in her ears.
In God's name, tell me, who is she mourning for? It was no longer a picture, it was a living presence. Baby's eyelids drooped; her ideas grew less and less coherent. Finally it was the merest wisps of consciousness that floated through her brain. The old house seemed to hold its breath as in expectation. The stillness seemed to become palpable.
Presently, through her stupor, she felt herself called by a moaning voice and made painful clutches towards consciousness. She knew that Rosamond wanted her and struggled bravely in spirit to break the bonds that held the body.
Oh, pleaded the voice, "he is dead indeed, and it is I who have made him dead: Harry—Harry!"
* * * * *
All at once Aspasia found herself awake—a blast of cold air had rushed into the drowsy secret atmosphere. The door had been flung open and one had entered—a man who came with quick clean tread, whose face was pale, as if indeed risen from the dead, but whose eyes shone with a wonderful light of life.
The woman in the bed reared herself up with outflung arms, and, as he who entered went straight to her, she cast herself upon his breast with a great cry.
Oh, Harry, Harry, Harry!
Such a cry had the walls of the manor-house surely never held before. It might have been the voice of all the anguish and all the ecstasies it had known these centuries. It rang round the old walls; every echo took it up and answered it, as if they had been waiting for it.
Bethune had soon packed his simple baggage; then he went straight to bed, setting his will upon sleep, against thought.
But what mind perturbed can command repose? Every ugly demon of disquiet that his situation could breed took form and sat beside him on the narrow bed. Three there were of a special torment. One with the eyes of hatred that Lady Gerardine had fixed upon him that evening. A twin demon that for ever repeated in his ear: "You should have died, that he might live." And a third, whose face was veiled, whose immutable hand pointed towards the empty sandy desert of the future.
When at last, far on in the watches of the night, sleep did fall upon him, it was in trouble and confusion of mind—a dream-struggle with fate, more painful even than the reality.
He was back in the midst of the siege—one of the starving, thirst-plagued, harassed garrison. They were hard pressed, piling sandbags on a newly defiladed rampart, but his men were a leaden weight upon him. He could not stir them to activity; when he tried to shout orders or expostulation, he could bring forth nothing but a whisper. Always the barricades melted away beneath his touch, his very rifle twisted like wax when he handled it, and then there sprang into the breach Muhammed Saif-u-din, one of an endless chain of leaping swordsmen: and Muhammed stood with folded arms smiling at him ironically.
Once again the siege. They were going to bury Vane. A file of little Goorkhas were picking the grave, and he was working at it too with the shot whistling overhead. Never was grave so hard to dig. They toiled, it seemed to him, for years, and still the stones rolled back into the hole and all was to begin again. Then suddenly it was ready: they were lowering the stiff figure, rolled in a cerement of tent canvas, into the shallow ditch. And a flap of the cloth fell back from over the face of the dead. It was not the face of Vane, but the face of Harry English. Then, with the awful knowledge of the dreamer, Bethune knew that Harry was not dead. But when he tried to call out to the others to stop, again he had no voice. He saw a little brown Goorkha twist the cloth over the livid countenance. They began shovelling the stony earth upon his friend; and while he felt in his own lungs the suffocation of him that is buried alive, a voice said in his ear: "What is it to you? You, who should have died that he might live!"
The suffocation continued so intense as to drown in physical torture even the workings of the over-active brain. Then, out of the blank, dream-consciousness struggled back to him. And again it was the siege. He was on his hard and narrow couch; it was the middle of the night, there was a great anxious rumour about him; sentries were calling; the enemy were upon them. In spite of anguished struggle, Bethune remained bound, hand and foot, while never had his spirit been more vividly awake. He could hear the running footsteps of the men in the passages, the thud, thud of the soft-shod Easterns. He could hear some one break into his room, hear himself called: "Raymond, Raymond!" And with the curious double personality of the sleeper, he told himself that it was years since any one had called him by that name—long and forlorn years of solitary life.
Raymond! called the voice, and the red light as of a torch burned through his closed eyelids. "Wake, Raymond!"
He knew who it was. It was Harry; his comrade who wanted him in the danger. What shame to be sleeping at such a moment!
Bethune wrenched himself from his pillow and sat upright. The room was full of light to his dazzled eyes; and the voice, the voice of Harry English, was still ringing in his ears.
Muhammed Saif-u-din, who had been bending over the bed, one hand on the sleeper's shoulder, withdrew his touch and straightened himself. In his left hand he held a candle. The light flickered upon his dense black beard. But he was turbanless, and the tossed crisp hair was boyishly loose over his brow. His eyes were fixed upon Bethune, and Bethune stared back. Then Muhammed spoke:
Raymond, he said.
For a moment that was heavier in the scales of time than most hours of men's lives, the two plunged their gaze into each other.
My God, said Bethune, in a whisper then, "you!"
A dream! Another dream of torture! Nay, no dream this time; he was awake. The unbelievable had happened. The grave had yawned and given out a living man. Harry English was alive. He had come back from the bourne whence no traveller returns, to claim his own—to claim his wife. As in a sudden vision, more vivid than any of his troubled fancies had been to-night, Bethune saw them in each other's arms, and was himself stabbed through and through by daggers of fire—he, the man whose misery it was to love his friend's wife! ...
The dead had heard her call. He could see it all now, with horrible lucidity. All was clear to him. He himself had brought Lady Gerardine, the forgetful, back to the memory of her love. She had called, and Harry had come—from death.
And here he stood, Harry English, looking into his friend's eyes, reading his friend's soul. Suddenly Bethune grew cold to the marrow.
He would have given everything he had, his life by inches, to be able at that instant to veil those tell-tale eyes of his. But in vain; he could not drop the lids between them. At last, with a short laugh, Harry English turned away and released him, and Bethune covered his face with his hands.
Oh life, more cruel than death! These two had been closer than brothers; it was eternity itself that was giving them back to each other. And thus did they meet!
Bethune, said he that had been the Pathan, in brief decided accents which once again whirled Raymond back to the hours when all had hung upon their leader in the crucial emergency, "there is no time for explanation. Every moment just now is precious. I must have this beard off—I want scissors, razors." As he spoke he tore his long coat from his back; he caught up the razors on the dressing-table with impatient hands. "Scissors, man, scissors! And for the Lord's sake, give me some more light!"
Bethune sprang out of bed as if he had indeed gone back to that past of which he had been dreaming and his commanding officer had called upon his services.
No stranger scene had ever been enacted within the narrow limits of this antique room, nor one more fraught with vital significance: though here, perchance, life had been born, and from here, surely, life had departed.
A silence as heavy as the last doom lay between the comrades; and every second as it passed was ticked off, it seemed, by Bethune's heart. Death they had faced together often—it was at the test of life that friendship had faltered.
Swiftly the glossy wings of the Pathan's beard fell under the snipping blades. And when he had exhausted what aid he could render, Bethune sat on the edge of the bed and watched the passing of Saif-u-din and the rising of Harry English from the dead.
There was one moment of outward triviality which yet, to the looker-on, was charged with a pain almost beyond bearing; it was when English, with the lather white upon his chin and cheek, turned quickly round upon him with hands outstretched for a towel. How often had not he seen his comrade thus, in the old days, when they had lived together, marched together, laughed and fought and suffered together, and he had been so happy!
The shaving accomplished, Captain English bent forward to the mirror and occupied himself with minute care in trimming and combing the flaunting, upturned moustache of the Pathan back to the old sober limits. There was not a quiver in the strong busy hands.
Vaguely Bethune, in the chaos of his thoughts, wondered how he could ever have believed this man dead. Such as he did not die, so long as they were wanted in life.
Then it was Harry English, indeed, that looked round. If Bethune's brain had had room for any doubt, the doubt must have died at that instant. Harry English, pallid, where for years the Eastern beard had grown so close—almost as with the pallor of the cheek upon which the earth has lain—worn, not so much by these same years as by a devouring impatience sternly held: but the old leader nevertheless, with such a light in his dark eyes as had been wont to kindle there when he called his men into the heart of the fight.
He spoke suddenly, abruptly; and the other found once more the exorbitant situation heightened rather than lowered by the very triviality of the words that marked it:
I suppose, he said, "that you can lend me a coat. Where is it? In your bag?"
He could not wait for his companion to draw his wits together. In a couple of movements the whole contents of the portmanteau were on the floor, and his arm was already in the sleeve of a shooting-jacket.
This urgency of haste, under strong control though it was, awoke an answering fever in Bethune's veins. Oh, there was no need of words to make him understand! When he thought of her to whom the husband was hastening, his own heart beat to madness.
In two steps Harry was at the door, when Bethune, with an inarticulate sound, flung himself before him, stretching out his arms. So poignantly familiar did the old comrade look in the shabby shooting-jacket that his heart was all dissolved within him for ruth and tenderness.
A second English fixed his friend with cold and steel-bright glance, inquiring: then his face relaxed.
Not now, Raymond, said he, put him on one side with quick but kindly touch, and was gone.
The Captain Sahib! the Captain Sahib! cried Jani in shrill tones; and prostrated herself before the brazier, her face on the floor.
Does she think she has called him from the dead? wondered Baby. Her thoughts danced in a mist; she would have liked to have caught one and clung to it, but they kept whirling beyond all control. She sat as if tied to her chair, staring stupidly at the two who held each other clasped so close—at the black head bent upon the golden head. Then she saw how the grip of Rosamond's hands relaxed; how the whole clinging figure fell inertly, while he—man or ghost—seemed to let it slip from him as though in surprise.
He turned his head and looked at Aspasia. There was indeed, something unearthly about his countenance; in the ashen pallor on cheek and chin, in contrast to the bronze of the rest of the face, which seemed still to hold the touch of that Indian sun under which he had died. His eyes burnt with fierce light in their dark hollows. Aspasia felt that she ought to shudder with terror, that the situation, at least, ought to be one of desperate interest, but she was only conscious of a numb curiosity. She sat and stared. Then her gaze wandered from the mysterious presence to the figure lying on the bed. She saw the sharp outline of Rosamond's chin upturned, and thought, without the least emotion, that perhaps her aunt was dead. The very gold of the hair seemed lifeless, turning to ash. That cry still ringing in her ears must have been a death-cry. It had been as the cry of a soul that is passing.
She watched the man lay his hand on the still forehead, saw him look sharply about him and inhale the air with deep breath.
Suddenly, in two great strides, he was across the room. There was a noise of tearing curtains and jingling glass; and Aspasia found herself inhaling icy breaths of air in gasps. Heavily, with a sob of pain, she woke from her stupor. She seemed to be drawing this delicious coldness into herself as if it were new life. The man passed before her once again. He was holding Jani's tripod high in his hands. A trail of aromatic vapour swept against her face; and, as she involuntarily breathed it, she had a nauseating sense of suffocation, and the vanishing stupor returned upon her momentarily, like the shadow of some huge bird's wings. With an effort she turned her eyes, saw the man hoist the brazier in his hands and hurl it through the open window, saw the charcoal scattered apart like a shower of falling stars, heard a crash without. Then she knew it was no ghost.
The singular white and bronze face bent over her.
You are better, Miss Cuningham? said a voice. She knew that voice, too; she smiled lazily.
Now I know you, she said. "You are Muhammed."
He smiled back at her, a fugitive smile, mixed sweetness and sadness.
By-and-by you will know me better—by-and-by, he said. "Now try and wake up, if you can, and help me."
He had left her and was again at the bed. Aspasia did as she was bidden. She shook herself from her torpor and stood up, somewhat dizzy, somewhat sick, but yet herself.
The man, Muhammed or another, she did not allow herself to think out the matter further, was hanging over Rosamond's inanimate form. Now he laid down the hand he held and bent his dark head to her breast. Baby flung one look of horror at the rigid upturned chin.
She's dead! she screamed.
He raised himself abruptly, his countenance grey even under the bronze.
She is not dead, he answered her quickly, with a gesture that forbade her words, "but I have been too sudden with her, and Jani has been playing devil's tricks with her drugs. Is there any brandy——?" He wheeled round as he spoke, for the door had opened and old Mary's figure appeared.
The Ancient House was now full of rumours. Old Mary's blue eyes were fixed in a stare of uttermost ecstasy. Her trembling hands were lifted as if in invocation; all at once she stretched them out, with an inarticulate cry of exaltation. Then her voice faltered into homely accents:
My lamb! she stammered.
Oh, Mary, said the man, and his tones rang with boyish note. "Mary dear, brandy! Mary, if you love me, quick."
He sat down on the side of the bed chafing Rosamond's fingers. Silently Aspasia held up a bottle of essence, taken from the dressing-table. He nodded, and she began to lave her aunt's temples, not daring to let her thoughts or eyes rest on the waxen face, on the ominous air of irrevocable repose about the long relaxed figure. She wished the silent lips did not wear that mysterious smile. Determinedly arresting her mind on those strong words: "She is not dead," she felt that so long as she could hold this confidence it would help to keep the dread angel at bay.
I was too sudden with her, said the man again, "but when I heard her call me, I think I went mad—I had waited so long!"
Then it seemed to Aspasia that, from the first moment since he had spoken to her in the passage to-night, she had known him.
You are Harry English, she said. And saying this, she began to cry. She looked down at the piteous fixed smile. He had waited so long! Was it not now too late?
Oh, she said aloud, sobbing, "is it now not too late?"
Then he flung himself on his knees beside the bed, and she drew back, for none should come between them. He gathered the inanimate form into his arms; his lips were close to the deaf ear, and he was speaking into it.
Rosamond, my wife, Rosamond, I have come back to you—come back to me. Rosamond, beloved!
The room was suddenly full of people.
Was it possible, Aspasia asked herself, that between that cry of Rosamond and this gathering of the inmates of the house so short a time had lapsed. She felt as if she had lived a span of years.
My goodness, cried Lady Aspasia. "Who was screaming? Any one hurt? I never heard such a scream in my life!"
Then speech and movement alike left the eager lady. Gazing at the bed, she stood open-mouthed with stupefaction—an odious inclination to laugh barely stifled, for decency's sake, in her throat.
Sir Arthur also had halted on the threshold. His eyes were fixed, as if he could hardly credit their evidence, upon the figure of the man in the shooting-jacket who knelt at the side of the low bed, almost covering the unconscious body with his embrace. And, indeed, Sir Arthur's eyes at the moment were playing him false.
Bethune! ... he exclaimed. "Major Bethune!"
Not a thought, not a glance had he for the death-like stillness of his wife's face against the crisp black head—to him that head appeared sleek, close-cropped, indefinitely brown. He cried out again loudly:
You infernal scoundrel... and caught the intruder roughly by the shoulder.
The kneeling man merely turned his head.
What ... what ... the devil!—— The words died on Sir Arthur's lips. His eyes protruded. "Who the devil are you, sir?"
Who is it? came Lady Aspasia's whisper, more penetrating than natural tones.
Oh hush, hush, said Baby, rebuking she knew not what spirit of sacrilegious curiosity. "Hush! It is Harry English, uncle!"
Slowly the man got up from his knees and looked round; then his eye came back to Sir Arthur.
Harry English! repeated Lady Aspasia's lips, voicelessly.
Her mind leaped; an irrepressible lightning satisfaction wrote itself on her harsh, handsome face; then her glance swept over the bed, and the corners of her mouth went down in a grimace. There lay Death—Death already, or very near, or she had never seen it. A double release! This double release was unnecessary—nay, a complication. Fate played such tricks at times! But Sir Arthur had staggered and reeled, and Lady Aspasia, ever practical, had to postpone thought for action. She caught him firmly by the elbow:
Hold up, Arty; be a man.
The Lieutenant-Governor's first impulse had naturally been to deny the monstrous thought, to wither Aspasia for her impious suggestion. Then a look at the black and white portrait over the dressing-table, fitfully but vividly illumined by the flames of the draught-blown candles—a look from that strong presentment to the pallid-faced, black-haired man by the bed, brought an overwhelming conviction. He faltered under it. For a while he could collect no words, no thought; but presently, as the tide of blood began slowly to recede, eddying, from his brain, broken phrases escaped him, almost in a whisper:
Your—your conduct is infamous, sir, he babbled, "ungentlemanly—ungentlemanly in the extreme!" ...
Harry English, with one hand on Rosamond's quiet breast as if mutely claiming his own, spoke then, his eyes on the creature who had robbed him.
Your place, sir, is no longer here, he said. His voice was very low, but it contained an authority which Sir Arthur instinctively felt with a fresh spasm of indignation and self-pity, trembling upon tears. "Your place is no longer here," repeated English. "Leave the room."
The Lieutenant-Governor fairly suffocated:
How long has she known it? cried he, panting, as he pointed to the bed. "No wonder I thought her mad. You have killed her!" he exclaimed acridly, upon another revulsion of thought.
Had you not better have a doctor? came Lady Aspasia's dispassionate accents. "If it's not too late," she added cynically.
Baby called out as if she had been struck, and burst into fresh tears.
The inert figure on the bed was all the girl had of home, all she had of certain love. This marble woman, no longer kin to her, had lavished on her more than a mother's care; from those lips, now so silent, except in the last sad days of trouble, Aspasia had never heard an ungentle word.
She must not die, sobbed she.
She will not die, said Harry English.
He shifted his hand till it rested over Rosamond's heart. Then he looked down at the face, with its faint smile of secret joy, pitifully exposed to all these eyes; and his own countenance took an expression of tenderness so infinite that weeping Baby, catching sight of it, held her breath. He moved and stood with his back to the bed, to shelter in some measure the unconscious woman from the violation of curious looks.
I must beg you all to go, he said.
Sir Arthur, who had been gradually growing, within and without, to the purple stage of fury, now exploded. Portrait or no portrait, the story was preposterous. This fellow was an impostor!
Turn me out! ... 'Tis you, sir, I'll turn out. I'll have you committed, sir, I'll——
Please, said a voice from the door, "if any one is ill, let it not be forgotten that I am a doctor. I offer my services," said Monsieur Chatelard.
Monsieur Chatelard, compact in self-possession, precisely attired, as if he had not been called from slumber at the worst hour of the night by a sense of mortal emergency! And yet a very different Chatelard, either from the eager traveller or the genial raconteur and table companion they had known: this was Chatelard the physician—the world-renowned specialist.
There was a weighty professional seriousness about him as he advanced into the room, fixing his spectacles with thumb and forefinger; an air of confident responsibility. He wasted not a second upon curiosity at the singular group by the bed, but sent his keen direct gaze straight to the patient.
She's killed herself, was his first thought. "Poison," he murmured aloud, and his gesture was enough to clear the bedside for his own approach.
No, said a voice close to him. "Not poison-shock."
M. Chatelard looked up quickly, and immediately became aware of a stranger's presence.
Monsieur? he exclaimed. He, too, had instantly concluded that the second man in the room must be Bethune. He was shaken into surprise. "In the name of Heaven, who are you?"
I am her husband, whom she thought dead. I took her by surprise; she fainted.
M. Chatelard formed his lips for a noiseless whistle. Affairs, at one bound, had complicated themselves with a vengeance. Incredibly interesting! ... But the emergency claimed him. He bent over the bed, and there was silence all through the room.
Even Sir Arthur, recalled from his undignified attitude, was stilled; not so much indeed from the sense that a human life was trembling in the balance, but from the demands which the presence of a new witness made upon decorum.
The doctor raised himself and held out his hand.
A candle, he said briefly.
It was given to him, and again the silence reigned.
M. Chatelard, with deft and gentle touch, lifted the heavy eyelid, passed the flame before it, and peered for some seconds into the fixed pupil, abnormally dilated. Then he handed back the light. Harry English took it, and held it aloft while the doctor once more consulted pulse and heart.
Muttering that he would never travel without his stethescope again, M. Chatelard laid his cropped head on the fair bosom. Again the seconds ticked by with nightmare slowness. The brown hand that held the candle was shaken with slight tremor. At last M. Chatelard straightened himself with the final air of one who pronounces a verdict.
This is no mere syncope, he said. "This is brain trouble. Shock, as you said, sir," with a grave inclination of his head towards Captain English.
Old Mary, back from her errand, here proffered some brandy in a glass.
What is that? cried the physician, sharply. "Brandy," he said, sniffing. "Heaven preserve us, 'tis well I am here! Above all things she must not be roused. Mon cher Monsieur," he went on, turning again to Harry English, "here all our efforts must be to help nature, not to oppose her. Let all those lights be extinguished," he added authoritatively. "We must have darkness and quiet. How come all these people in the room?" He spoke with the doctor's immediate irritation at surroundings injurious to his patient.
There are situations passing the endurance of human nature, especially when it is the human nature of a person of high political importance. Here was M. Chatelard actually addressing yonder infernal interloper as the leading person!
I call you to witness, M. Chatelard, Sir Arthur cried excitedly, "that this is some conspiracy that I by no means acknowledge——"
Old Mary interposed, subdued yet urgent.
Oh, sir, it is indeed my master!
Hush, Arty, come away now! whispered Lady Aspasia; and once more clasped his elbow with strong sensible hand. "There will be plenty of time for all this by-and-by."
Unless you want to kill her altogether, Sir Gerardine, said Dr. Chatelard, gravely, "you will make no scenes here."
Harry English stood sentinel by his wife's bed, disdaining speech.
Unless you want to kill her, had said the doctor. As the words had been spoken Sir Arthur looked quickly at her whom he had called wife. "Better she should die," thought he. The whole measure of his love for the woman in whose beauty he had gloried was in that mean thought. Better she should die, since her existence was no longer an honour but a shame to him, Sir Arthur. He had loved her as part of himself; no longer his, what was she to him? Nothing more than the amputated limb to its owner, a thing to hide out of sight with all speed, a thing to bury away.
I beg of you again, resumed Dr. Chatelard, in tones of restrained impatience; "I can have no one remain."
A couple of servant girls, who stood huddled whispering in their corner, slid away one after the other.
Lady Aspasia, by some moral force and a good deal of muscular pressure, succeeded in dragging the protesting Sir Arthur in their wake. The doctor looked at old Mary—she dropped her curtsey.
I might be of use, sir.
He considered her a second in silence.
You may stay, he said.
And I? said Aspasia, her pallid tear-stained face was thrust pleadingly forward.
You will do better to go, my child, said the Frenchman, paternally.
Doctor ... she will not die?
Assuredly not this night at least, he replied, evasive yet consoling. From the door she flung back a piteous look at English, and once again his eyes answered her: "She will not die."
Harry English took the last unextinguished candle and laid it on the floor. Outside, the yellow grey dawn was breaking.
I want hot bottles, ordered Dr. Chatelard of Mary; and when she had left the room, he turned to the strange man who had called himself Lady Gerardine's husband.
You, too, sir, he said. "You must leave us."
Harry English started. For the first time, that evening, discomposure laid hold of him.
I? ... but I cannot go. She will want me.
My dear sir, said the other, his tone softening into compassion (here was one who loved as few love, or he knew not how to read countenances), "this affair is very strange, but I, as doctor, am here to judge of nothing but the good of my patient. She has had a shock, and the shock has been caused by you. I repeat, all I can do here is to aid nature—nature demands repose. She is as one who has had concussion of the brain. That brain must rest. Call her back to thought, you may call her to death."
I would sit in a corner of the room—she would not know.
Ah, said the doctor, "one never can tell. That is a fallacy I have long since seen through. So long as the soul is there, my dear sir, many things take place inside the body that we know naught of."
Then Harry English submitted. He went forth with bent head.... He who had waited so long! lint, even as Aspasia had done, he halted to question:
If she comes to consciousness?
She will not come to consciousness, perhaps, for days.
If she wants me——?
My dear sir—immediately, of course.
When she comes to consciousness, will she——
Ah, interrupted the doctor, "who knows? We may have brain trouble—an illness we will surely have."
Then Harry English, who had so confidently said she would not die, looked at the other mutely inquiring yet further.
Ah, my dear sir, said the Frenchman in his quick apprehension, and shrugged his shoulder. Then he added, compassionately, turning his head towards the bed:
She is young.
Harry English closed the door and sat down in the dark passage, cross-legged after the habit that had grown second nature, and there remained. Waiting.
Suddenly he rose to his feet again; he had heard the handle of the door click. M. Chatelard stood on the threshold.
The Indian woman, he whispered, "she makes a noise. She must go."
Jani, crouching in a hidden corner within, had set up a moaning. The sound of her wail caught Harry English's ear: a creeping chill passed over him; that Eastern lament that had nothing human in its note, but was as the despair of the animal that mourns without understanding, how familiar it was to his ear! So did the women there, over seas, wail only over death. He, who had held himself in such strength hitherto, was shaken to his soul. He could not form the words that rose to his lips.
You know how to deal with these persons, pursued the Frenchman, absorbed in his thoughts, and in the dusk unable to read the other's countenance, "I beg you to remove her at once. But, chut, chut, attention, please, not to disturb my patient!"
English drew his breath sharply. Had he been of those who weep, he might have burst into tears then. It is the instant of relief that catches the strong-fighting soul unawares. He clenched his hands till the nails ran into the palm, and followed the doctor on noiseless feet into the room.
One glance at the bed! It was all in shadow; but even in the deliberate dimness there was evidence that a practised hand had already been at work. He could see that his wife had been settled among her pillows with care. The white of a bandage lay across her brow. A screen was set between the bed and the banked-up fire. Old Mary was seated in a high chair, within the glow, composed and watchful, the very picture of what a nurse should be. The light of the shaded candle illumined but one thing—the white hand that hung slightly over the edge of the bed; it scintillated back from the gems of the ring that guarded the narrow wedding circlet. His rings!
M. Chatelard pulled him by the sleeve. Harry English turned sharply. He had told Sir Arthur "that his place was not here," and must now realise in his turn that neither was his place here. There was bitterness and anger in his eyes as he bent over the ayah.
She looked up at him, terror on her face. He pointed to the passage, and she crawled out, on hands and knees, whimpering to herself like a dog. Without another glance towards Rosamond, Harry retired also, and closed the door behind him. Old Mary followed him with her eyes, and folded her hands; her lips moved as if in prayer.
* * * * *
In the passage Jani dragged herself towards her old master, and clutching his ankles, laid her head upon his feet.
Sahib! ...
Harry looked down at her a moment, without speaking. So intense was the bitterness that welled up within him, even towards this poor wretch, that he was ashamed of it. Thus, when he spoke, it was with an added gentleness.
Ah, Jani, he said, "you knew me, here, from the beginning." ...
This miserable pawn on the chess-board of life, had she not worked against him, how different all might now have been!
Jani once more lifted her face. In the livid dawn it looked grey with fear. Then she was gone from him with a scarcely perceptible rustle, a whisper of soft garments, like some stealthy-winged thing of the night. Harry English sank back into his squatting attitude; to wait again. Never had fate so completely veiled her countenance from him.
Years he had endured. He had clung tenaciously to life, had borne, at the moment of hope renewed, the cruellest and most insulting buffet that could strike a man, and still had fought, still had held to a determined purpose. Had it all been to this hour only?—false servant, failing friend, lost wife! No, not lost. So long as the faintest breath flickered between those silent smiling lips.
* * * * *
Harry English turned to God, with a great cry of his soul. It was no cry of supplication, but a call upon the Infinity. Because of Power, because of Justice, because of Goodness, she must not die.
M. Chatelard sat down by the bed and laid his finger on the slender wrist. A hardening pulse. Fever. He had anticipated fever, he almost welcomed it as the natural course.
Would she live? These nervous creatures are as tough as cats. But, poor soul, were it not perhaps best for her were she to pass? What a situation! Great gods, what a situation! There was not one of these searchers after psychological enigmas, not one of these implacable exponents of the weaknesses of the human heart, not a Maupassant, not a Mirbeau, not a d'Annunzio who could have devised the story of this impasse. To die would be too absolutely commonplace a solution. If he, Chatelard, could help it, she should not die, were it only for the proper working-out of the problem.
Propping his chin on his hand and his elbow on the bed, the savant leaned forward, gazing at his patient, till his keen eyes, piercing the gloom, were able to trace the lines of the unconscious face.
It is not that she is so beautiful—there are many in this country who possess the same incredible purity of outline, the same delicate wealth of feminine charm—but c'est une ensorceleuse! Did I not say it to the young man? One of those women who create passions that become historic. One of those whose fate is to make havoc as they go. The three men here—they are mad of her, each in his different way. The poor Gerardine, he could have cried like a child, as we turned him from the room ... and the sly, quiet, relentless Bethune, that man of granite ... the lover, he's devoured; the very stone wastes in the furnace. How thin he has grown since that Indian night! And the third—the most surprising of all—the real husband! Oh, the strange story! the husband—the first husband par dessus le marché, as though matters were not sufficiently entangled already! Ah, ?a! mais d'où sort-il, celui-là? C'est qu'il faisait pitié—c'est encore lui le plus atteint des trois! One could feel the frenzied soul under that air of calm command. ...
Then enthusiastically following the trail of his own Gallic deductions, M. Chatelard began to reconstruct, con amore, the threads of the drama.
Un beau gaillard, malgré sa paleur de revenant.... Avec lui, sans doute, elle a appris ce que c'est que l'amour. Ils se sont aimés jeunes et beaux.... Ils se valaient bien l'un l'autre, certes! Idylle parfaite, heures parfumées! Then comes the cyclone. He is swept from her by relentless duty. He dies, a hero in war as he was a hero in love. She is alone, desolate. She mourns. At the psychological moment, enters upon the scene the handsome, rich, powerful Sir Gerardine. He offers her ease, position, comfort, a home, his protection. She turns to him as a child to a father. She places her hand in his. And thereafter follows the inevitable. The years have gone by; she becomes more and more a woman; the demands of her nature expand; and the old husband who is—and I don't blame him—not content to be father.... Sapristi, how he bores her, the old husband! Then arrives the man, the young man, the man of her own age. (He has loved her already as his friend's wife, in the secret of his own soul, all in honour and loyalty.) He seeks her now, knowing that his hour has come. ...
L'oublierai-je, jamais telle qu'elle était ce soir-là, au moment de la première tentation? Ruisselante du feu vert de ses émeraudes; superbe dans sa beauté, sa chasteté insolente; mais couvant déjà sous la neige de sa blanche beauté, le feu destructeur de la passion renaissante. Elle a lutté. Oh, oui, celle-là a lutté! Son ame et son corps se sont entredéchirés.... Mais, poursuivie jusque dans cette solitude même par l'implacable qui l'a traquée comme le tigre sa proie, la fin est inévitable!
Et au moment suprême où, femme au zénith des a gloire, elle cède à la seconde passion—voilà l'objet de la première qui rèsuscite, et vient la rèclamer! Ah, dieux, quel cri! Les oreilles m'en tintent encore. Jamais je ne l'oublierai, ce cri d'un coeur qui s'effondre....
And the resuscitated man? The devil! where does he come from? Springing up in the old house in the middle of the night. Another tragedy there! He misdoubts, as yet, nothing. Strong in his right, in the memory of their love, he comes to claim her of the old husband—Of the third, of the lover, he has no suspicion. My God, with what eyes of trouble and wonder did he not look at me when I bade him leave her! Unhappy fellow, why 'tis his very existence that's killing her! How long will it be before he finds out the truth, finds out that, at the very moment of regaining his treasure, he has been robbed, robbed by him who was his friend? And the friend, then, that man of granite, how will he bear himself? Will even his relentless determination stand before that terrible double knowledge of his own unconscious treachery to his comrade and of the mortal danger to his beloved? A stronger man, even than he, might well go mad! ... As for the pitiable second husband, the old man, who counts for so little in the midst of these three young lives, and is yet so stricken in all he holds most dear—his dignity, his honour, his pathetic senile confidence and affection—what of him? Oh, antique, silent house, what palpitating drama do you not hold, this desolate dawn! Those three men, each with his passion and his claim—his just claim—and the woman there, lying so still! ...
So M. Chatelard mused, with ever and anon a keen eye to the patient, a stealthy touch on the pulse.
A pale shaft of light pierced in between the curtains, and, like a slowly shifting finger, moved straightly till it pointed to the bed. M. Chatelard started, rubbed his eyes, adjusted his spectacles, and stared again. The heavy, half-loosened tress that lay across the sheet shone silver in the light—the tress that had been so richly golden, crown of that haughty head, only the evening before.
I have heard of such a thing, said the doctor to himself, "but it is the first time that I have seen it with my own eyes." He bent over the pillow and curiously lifted the strand of hair. There was no illusion about it. Rosamond's glorious hair was white.
I think you had better get your uncle a little whisky, or something, said Lady Aspasia to Baby, as, upon their ejection into the passage, she guided the poor gentleman's vague footsteps towards her own room. "Come in here, Arty; there's a good fire."
Sir Arthur turned his eyes upon her with a vacant look, catching at surprise.
Yes, my room. But, Lord, I don't think any of us need mind the convenances to-night!
She gave a dry laugh. At least, whatever rules were transgressed now—they only regarded him and her: the thought came with sudden and exceeding pleasantness upon her; and that heart of hers, atrophied by long disuse, was stirred. She looked at the helpless, dazed creature, sinking into her armchair, with a softness that, even in his most gallant youth, his image had not evoked. "Good fellow" as she was, Lady Aspasia was yet a woman in the hidden fibre.
Young Aspasia, shuffling about in her slippers, yet still fleet of foot, broke in upon their silence with the decanter. Shivering, partly with fatigue, partly with the chill of the dawn, she stood, vaguely watching the elder lady administer a stiff bumper to Sir Arthur.
Complete as was the turmoil in her own mind, deep as was her distress and anxiety anent Rosamond, Baby's sense of humour was irresistibly acute: the vision of Lady Aspasia, incompletely attired under her motor coat, her loose coiled hair (divested of the dignity of her "transformation") presenting a strangely flat appearance, bending with such solicitude over so reduced a Runkle, brought a hysterical giggle in her throat.
Pray, said Lady Aspasia, wheeling round upon her, "don't begin to cry here, my dear! One is as much as I can manage."
I'm not crying, retorted young Aspasia, as indignantly as her chattering teeth would allow. "I'm laughing."
Then that's worse, responded the other, succinctly. "Take some whisky, too. Go to bed."
Sir Arthur, gulping down the potent mixture provided for him, extended a forbidding left hand:
One moment, he ordered; then choked and coughed. But the stimulant was working its effect, his backbone was notably stiffer. The native dignity, not to say pomposity, was returning to his support. He regarded his niece with eyes, severe, if somewhat watery. "How long, Aspasia, have you known this—this—disgraceful state of affairs?"
He rolled his suffused gaze from the girl to his distinguished relative, seeking a kindred indignation.
You mean, how long I have known that Aunt Rosamond wasn't married at all? Oh, Lord, what am I saying?—that she's got two husbands—gracious, I can't help being muddled. Who could? Anyhow, that she's not married to you? I——
The premises are by no means established, interrupted Sir Arthur, with not unsuccessful reaching after his old manner. "But how long, I ask, have you known of the presence in this house—or in this neighbourhood—of the person, impostor or no, who dares to present himself as Harry English?"
Well, as a matter of fact, said Baby, hugging herself in her dressing-gown, the warmth of the fire, the heat of her reawakening antagonism, getting the better of her chill tremors; "as a matter of fact, you have known him a good deal longer and more intimately than I have."
Lord, child, how you bandy words! said Lady Aspasia, disapprovingly; "let her go to bed, Arty. Surely, you'll have plenty of time by-and-by for all this."
But the Lieutenant-Governor waived the interruption aside with impatience. Miss Cuningham did not await further questioning. It would be scarce human to feel no complacency in the power to impart weighty information. And Baby was among the most human of her race.
You went and fished him out yourself, she cried. "Your own particular, private secretary."
And still Sir Arthur was all at sea.
Private secretary, he repeated blankly, hastily running over in his mind all the members of his staff within recent years. Nonsense! Preposterous! There was not one who bore the faintest resemblance to this black-avised, domineering intruder.
Lady Aspasia whistled under her breath to mark her displeasure at the inopportune discussion, and mixed herself a companion bumper to Sir Arthur's.
The native spring, not quite so native as we all fancied, Runkle. Muhammed Saif-u-din. My goodness, cried the girl, clasping her hands, and struck with a new aspect of the situation, "no wonder I thought him queer! ... No wonder, Runkle, he looked at you as if he could murder you! Lord, it's just too romantic! To think of his being with you all these days and weeks, and of his being here, alone with us—waiting, waiting all the time."
Muhammed... ejaculated Sir Arthur, and sat in his chair as if turned to stone.
Then suddenly:
Muhammed! he cried again, in a high shrill voice, and bounded to his feet. "The damned black scoundrel," foamed the Lieutenant-Governor, "the wretched nigger. The miserable beggar, whom I took from the gutter and admitted into my household, and treated as a gentleman—a gentleman, begad! By the Lord, he shall smart for this! It's a hideous conspiracy! No, no, Lady Aspasia, you don't know the race as I do. It's trickery, it's a piece of monstrous Indian jugglery. I tell you, it's a conspiracy between them all."
Of course, cut in sarcastic Baby, trembliog again, this time with anger, "it's all a conspiracy, merely to annoy the Runkle. Captain English has simply plotted not to have been killed, and poor Aunt Rosamond lies at death's door out of sheer aggravation—that's part of the conspiracy also."
And pray, said Sir Arthur, unheeding anything but the opposition of her tone, and turning furiously again upon the girl, "will you have the kindness to answer me at last? You, you, my niece, how long have you been in the business? A nice set of vipers I've been nourishing! Oh, my God!"
He put his hand to his forehead and reeled; then stretched out his arm, gropingly. Promptly, Lady Aspasia popped the glass she had destined for herself into the vague fingers; and, as if mechanically, it was instantly conveyed to his lips.
I've been in the business no longer than you, yourself, Runkle.
Young Aspasia, between anger, scorn, and her sense of humour, was now perilously near the hysterics dreaded by her namesake.
Now look here, said the latter, catching the small figure by the elbow and turning it towards the door, "you get out of this in double-quick time; I'll manage your uncle."
Master Muhammed will find he has made a little mistake—a little mistake, said the great man, spurred once more to his normal vigour of intellect.
He was standing, legs wide apart, on the hearthrug, and glared at his niece as she wheeled round on the threshold for her usual Parthian shot.
It's rather a pity that he does not happen to be Muhammed any more; isn't it, Runkle? she cried spitefully; "that he never was Muhammed, but always Harry English, Harry English, Harry English, who never was dead at all!"
She closed the door with a slam upon a picture of her uncle's suddenly stricken face, of Lady Aspasia's swift advance towards him with outstretched hands.
She'll manage him! said Baby to herself, with a sobbing giggle, as she ran down the dark passage.
The Old Ancient House lay in silence—a sinister silence, Bethune thought—after the rumours and alarms of the night. The dawn was breaking yellow over a grey, still world. What did it herald? he wondered, as he looked out of his dormer window under the roof.
One thing it was bringing, he told his sullen heart—the new day of the new life of Raymond Bethune. Raymond Bethune, the disgraced, who had failed his comrade.
When that wild cry had rung out into the night, "Harry, Harry, Harry!" it had sounded, in his ears, like the death-cry of his honour; a parting from all that he had held dear; a parting from his highest and closest, than which no parting between soul and body could be more bitter.
He had sat on his bed, and listened—listened, expecting he knew not what. What, indeed, had he now to expect? He had heard the running of feet, the opening and shutting of doors, all the busy noises of a house alarmed. Was she dead? Dead of her joy, in that supreme moment of reunion? Would there not be a heaven, even in his anguish, for him who could thus take her dying kiss!
By-and-by he had roused himself; and, after a look of horror upon that bed of dreams, mechanically dressed for his departure. To go away—that was all that was left to him—the last decency. He put a grim control upon his nerves as he wielded the razor and the brushes that Harry English's fingers had so recently touched.
Harry English ... out of the grave!
Bethune could not yet face the marvel of the situation. He had yet no power over his dazed brain to bring it to realise that for so long he had been living near his old comrade in the flesh, and had not known—he who had not passed a day, since their parting, without living with him in the spirit! Still less could he speculate upon the reasons of English's incognito, upon his singular scheme, his recklessness of his own reputation; nor by what miracle he had been saved from death; nor by what freakish cruelty of fate he had been buried from their ken till the irreparable had been worked on other lives.
No; Bethune had no single thought to spare from the overwhelming fact of what he had himself done.
How silent was this house, now, in the dawn! And how much worse was silence than the most ominous sounds. Was it not his own silence that had betrayed both himself and his friend?
He packed deliberately, feeling the while a fleeting childish warmth of comfort in the thought that Harry wore his old shooting-jacket—that Harry had still something of his about him. He folded the discarded babu garments with almost tender touch. Then he paused and hesitated.
There were the papers—the damnable, foolish papers that had started all the mischief; and these he must sort. Some must be destroyed; some, not his to deal with, must be laid by before he could leave the place.
He stole to the door, carrying his portmanteau. There was no fear of his meeting any of those whom he dreaded; for, in the rambling old house, his floor had a little breakneck stairs to itself which landed him in a passage outside the hall.
There was a stir of life and a leap of firelight behind the half-open door of the kitchen; but, in a panic, he passed quickly out of reach of the voices lest he should hear. Was she dying ... or dead? Or, since joy does not kill, was she happy in a sublime egotism of two? He had no courage for the tidings—whatever they might be.
The little room where he had worked with such fervour was filled with a grey glimmer that filtered in through the mist-hung orchard trees. The fire had been set but not yet lit. He put a match to it; he would have much to burn. Then he sat down by the table and drew forth his manuscripts. The last line he had written—that line set only yesterday from a full heart—met his eye:
English was then in the perfection of his young manhood—a splendid specimen of an Englishman, athletic, handsome, intellectual, a born leader of men, and withal, the truest comrade ever a man had.
Out of the half-finished page, the past rose at Raymond Bethune and smote him in the face. So had he written, so had he thought of Harry English yesterday, when he believed him dead.
A man of more sanguine temperament, of more imaginative mind, might well have comforted himself with explanatory reflections, with reasons so plausible for his own behaviour, that he must end by believing in them himself, regarding his own act in a gradually changing light, till it assumed a venial, not to say meritorious, aspect. But Raymond Bethune, with his narrow conception of life, with his few, deep-cut affections, had this in him—virtue or deficiency—that he could not lie. And now he knew the naked truth. He knew that, when his only friend had come from out the dead and laid claim upon him, in the overwhelming surprise of the moment he had betrayed friendship—that some unknown base self had sprung into life. He had not been glad—he had not been glad ... and Harry had seen it. Harry had read into his heart—and there had read, not gladness but dismay.
The sweat started again upon Bethune's forehead as he re-lived that moment and again saw his failing soul mirrored in the wide pupils of English's eyes.
* * * * *
Outside, upon the grey-brown twisted boughs of the apple-tree nearest the window, a robin began to sing. The insidious sweetness of the little voice pierced the lonely man to the marrow, with an intolerable pang of self-pity. He looked out on the bleak winter scene of the garden, where the mist hung in shreds across the sodden grass, over the bare boughs. It was an old, old orchard and the trees were leprous with grey lichen. It seemed as though they could not bear flower or fruit again. Vaguely, for his brain was not apt to image, he thought: "In some such desolation lies the future for me." And if the robin sang—oh, if the robin sang—its message never could be for him!
His eye wandered back into the room. Here had he worked so many days, in austere, high ardour of loyalty. Aye, and yonder, in the armchair, had she sat; and he had judged her from this same altitude of mind. Now he knew himself better, saw the earthy soul of him as it really was. All his anger, all his scorn, all his antagonism, from the very first instant when her pale luminous beauty had dawned upon him, had been but fine-sounding words in his own mind to hide the thing, the fact—his passion for Harry English's wife!
He took some of the manuscript into his hands, rough sheets as well as neatly typed copy; and, standing before the now leaping fire, began slowly to tear it, page by page, and fling it into the blaze. He smiled as he watched the red twists fly up the chimney. There was subtle irony in the situation. Major Bethune calling upon his friend's widow to wake from her sleep of oblivion, forcing her back to the sorrow she would fain forget, sparing her no pang, watching her as the warder watches the convict to see that not a jot of her task escape her; seeing, as he watched, the old love reclaim her with strong hands, so that, wooed once more and once more won, she was ready, as surely no woman was before, to greet the dead returned! ... "Harry, Harry, Harry!" He would never get that cry out of his head.
He let himself fall into the chair upon the hearth, his hands resting listlessly from their task. How was he to endure life, how carry out the most trivial business with this sick distaste of all things upon him?
* * * * *
Aspasia opened the door and looked in. She gave a cry of pleasure as she saw him.
How cosy! she said, and came over to the fire.
Then she stood, gazing down at him, with a small smile trembling on her lips. She had evidently been crying, and the curves of these same lips looked softer and more childish than ever. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes darkly shadowed.
Bethune sat motionless. After a pause she spoke, still staring reflectively at the flames.
I wondered where you had been all this dreadful night. You know what has happened? Of course you know.
I know.
Nothing in his voice or manner struck her—she was so full of the tremendous occasion.
Ah! she cried, suddenly flashing upon him, "I think I'm sorry you already know. I should have liked to have been the first to tell you. For you—for you, at least, it's all glorious. Oh, how glad you must be! What it must mean to you!"
He sat like stone: she was worse than the robin. He had thought he had suffered to the fullest capacity; but the girl, with her clear voice and her honest eyes, was tearing his heart to pieces. Then she became conscious that in his silence, though she had known him ever as a silent man, there was something almost sinister.
What is it? she asked him. "Oh, I suppose you knew all along? No—you didn't, you couldn't!"
He shook his head.
Ah! Her bright face clouded. "It is because of her, of poor Aunt Rosamond—of him, rather? You think he has come back to her too late, only to lose her?"
He resumed the tearing up of his manuscript with fingers clenched upon the page.
What are you doing? she cried, quickly diverted. "Oh, Major Bethune, why? Don't tear up all that beautiful life—all you've been working at so long. Oh, what a pity—what a pity!"
He crumpled a mass of paper violently together and flung it into the flames, thrusting it down among the embers with his hand. He felt the startled amazement growing upon her, and forced his pale lips to speak.
He would hate it.
Saying this, he tried to smile. Aspasia contemplated him for a while, her eyes wondering. Then she stretched out her hand and touched his timidly.
Don't be unhappy—let me tell you; I think I understand. Oh! I'm sure I understand, for we have been friends a little, too, have we not? You think it's worse for him to come back. You think he had better be dead, if she is to die. But she won't. Aspasia nodded confidently. "I tell you she won't die. I've just seen Dr. Chatelard; he's quite satisfied. I have seen him—Captain English—too. I said to him: 'She won't die.' And he said to me: 'I know it.' He is there outside her room—so strong and patient. Now," said the girl, and was not, in her innocent wish to comfort, aware how tenderly she spoke, "now you will let yourself be glad for yourself, since you've got him back, will you not?"
Bethune suddenly turned and caught the gentle hand that touched him in both his. He broke into sobs—a man's difficult, ugly, tearing sobs, that surprise no one more than him whom they overtake. For an instant Aspasia was terrified. But for that desperate clutch she would have fled. The next moment, however, all the woman in her awoke.
Oh, don't cry! she said, as if she were speaking to a child, and laid her free hand upon his close-cropped hair.
And then—neither of them knew how it happened—her arm was round his shoulder, and his head was lying upon her tender breast. The dry agony that shook him passed; and tears that fell like balm rolled down his cheeks.
Baby, carried quite out of herself in this astounding whirl of events, began to weep, too, quite softly, to herself. And, as he lifted his face to hers and drew her down to him, their lips met upon the bitter of their tears, and yet in sweetness undreamed of. At the touch of that child-mouth and at her voiceless surrender, Bethune knelt before her in his heart and consecrated himself to her for ever. Closed henceforth for him the magic casement on "perilous seas" of passion, "on fa?ry lands forlorn." Gone those visions, exquisite and deadly! A faithful loving hand, a child's hand, had been held out to him in his moment of utmost misery; it had lifted him from the deeps; it he would clasp and go to meet life's duty, content—aye, humbly grateful—that his winter should have harboured a robin after all; ready to open his heart to its song of spring.
* * * * *
Afterwards, he knew, he would blame himself for that moment of weakness which had won him, unworthy, so true and unsuspecting a heart. But the deed was irrevocable, and he would not have been human not to rejoice.
* * * * *
The secret of the sorrow that had given to Aspasia the man she loved, she would never know. And even her frank lips could never seek the story. As sacred as the memory of their first kiss, she would hide in her heart the memory of those strange and terrible sobs.
Wiser than Psyche she would light no lamp, but keep this first mystery of love in unprofaned shadow.
Bethune and Aspasia quickly parted.
Love had come as a messenger of comfort; but to linger under its wings in anything that approached to joy, in that stricken house would have seemed desecration. Bethune, moreover, was glad to be alone. His own trouble was too strong upon him. He felt as if he must have the cold clean air upon his face, gather the winter solitude about the nameless confusion of his thoughts. He wanted to meet himself face to face and have it out with Raymond Bethune; Raymond Bethune, who had gained an unlooked-for love, but had lost—everything else. He went forth into the orchard—seeking himself in those barren spaces, that, but a while ago, had seemed to hold the image of his future.
But he was no longer the shamed, hopeless man of that hour of dawn, with his eye fixed on some near death, as the savage instinct of some sick wild creature is fixed upon the hole that shall hide the last struggle. Henceforth he would be no longer alone; and if the thought of the gentle comradeship brought solace, it brought also its own serious responsibility, almost its terror—the weight of another life, the loss of his soul's freedom....
Presently, as he tramped up and down the drenched grass, a chill and numbing touch seemed to be laid upon him and to invade him with the blankness of the universal winter sleep. The recurrent waves of a lover's exaltation that had seized him at each reminiscence of the young bosom beneath his cheek, of the tear-wet face pressed so close to his, died down within him; and died, too, those spasms of horror over that moment when, by a single evil thought, he had betrayed the true facts of a lifetime.
His mind seemed to become nearly as dull as the sky above him—iron grey, flecked with meaningless wrack; his heart to grow cold, like the inert sod beneath his feet. And he let himself go to the respite of this mood. The robin was silent. He was glad of that. There was no sound but the drip of the boughs as he passed. Disjointed visions, foolish tags of memory, flashed through his brain—the echo of Baby's thrumming, the picture of the Eastern palace room, with its English illusions, as he stood waiting; Lady Gerardine, in the rosy radiance of the Indian evening, fitting her slender hand into the imprint of the queens' death-touches on the stone; her smile upon him over the languid Niphotis roses in the narrow varnished cabin, the open port-holes and the green sea-foam springing up across them in the lamplight, the mingled smell of the brine and the flowers; Aspasia dancing on the frozen grass, brown and red like a robin; Muhammed standing before him in his soldier-pride, the ironic smile on his face—son of the East, with the winter-lichened boughs of the English orchard above him!
At the end of his beat Raymond wheeled round and looked down the moss-grown avenue where that day the red-turbaned Eastern had met his gaze; and now, with the fantastic effect of a dream, he beheld the selfsame square-shouldered figure swing into sight between the grey boles with their ghostly look of age. Advancing with quick strides, it was bearing straight upon him.
Bethune stood as if held by a resistless force. He knew life would have no more crucial moment for him; yet his heart beat not a stroke the faster. He turned his face towards the inevitable. After all, a man can but endure. The illusion of Muhammed had quickly passed, as the steady step drew closer, into that reality that was stranger than any fantasm.
Harry English, with head bare to the tart airs, with strong line of clean-shaven chin catching the bleak light, and deep eyes lit with a very human lire—the old comrade in the flesh! He halted within a pace, and the two looked at each other for a second's silence. Then, while Bethune's countenance remained set in that iron dulness, the other's face was suddenly stirred.
What the devil is the meaning of this? cried Harry English, in a loud voice of anger. "I see your portmanteau packed. Do you think for a second that you can leave me now?"
The deepest reproach, the utmost note of sorrow or scorn, could not have touched Bethune so keenly as this familiar explosion. A thousand memories awoke and screamed. How often had not his captain rated him with just such a rough tongue and just such a kindly gleam of the eye! All the ice of his cold humour of reaction was shivered into bits under the rush of upheaving blood.
Harry! he stammered. "Harry ... I ... my God!" ...
He saw, as before, in that hideous moment in the little bedroom, but now blessedly, a reflection of his own thought on the face opposite to him.
Harry English put out his hand and clapped him on the shoulder.
My God! said Bethune again. He turned his head sharply away and his jaw worked. The cry broke from him. "I ought to have died for you! Would to Heaven I had died for you at Inziri! ..."
The grasp of his shoulder was tightened. English shook his comrade almost fiercely.
Old man, you were never one of the talkers. Hold your tongue now.
Bethune drew a deep breath. The intolerable weight rolled from his heart. English's hand dropped. It was over and done with; the two friends had met again, soul to soul.
In silence they turned and walked towards the house, side by side, steps together, as so often—God, so often!—in the good old days of hardship.
Let us go in, said English, at the door. "They tell me that there can be no change, up there, and she's in good hands, thank Heaven, but I cannot find a moment's peace out of the house. Come, we'll have a cup of tea together."
The sun had risen just clear of the moor line into a space of clarity, and shone, a white dazzling disc, sending faint spears into their eyes. It shone, too, pale yet brisk, through the open window of the little dining-room, where, as yet, the board was but half spread, where an ill-kindled fire had flickered into death. (What self-respecting servant could do her work as usual when the family is in affliction?)
Just see to the fire, Ray, said English, and went out of the room.
Bethune, with the bachelor's expediency, had recourse to a candle culled from a sconce, and produced a cheerful, if somewhat acrid flame, to greet his friend when he returned, black kettle in one hand, brown teapot in the other. Soon the hot fragrance circled into the room.
If we'd had a brew of this up at Inziri, those last days, it would have made a difference, eh? said the master of the house.
They drew their chairs to the hearth and sat, each with his cup in his hand, even as in times bygone, with their tin mugs before the camp fire at dawn. In spite of the sense of that hushed room above and the suspense of its brooding over them, Bethune had not felt so warm in his heart these many years.
Man! he exclaimed suddenly, reverting unconsciously to the Scotch idiom of his youth, "why in the name of Heaven did you do it?"
Harry English, staring at the red coals, answered nothing for a while. Not that he had failed to understand the train of thought that ended in the vague-seeming, yet comprehensive question—but that the answer was difficult if not painful.
You see, he said slowly, at last, without shifting his abstracted gaze, "there was so much to find out and so much to consider...."
To find out?
I had to be sure.
Bethune laid his cup on the hob and leaned over towards his friend, his fingers lightly touching the arm of the other's chair. After a while: "I think I understand," he said, knitting his rugged brows.
English gave him a fleeting smile of peculiar sadness.
When one has been dead eight years, it is wiser, before coming to life again, to make sure that one's resurrection will be a benefit.
Bethune fell back into his place, with a grey shade about the lips. English dropped his eyes and there came silence between them. After a pause, he began to mend the fire from the scuttle; and, placing the lumps of coals one by one, he spoke again:
It was all a story of waiting, you see, from beginning to end.
Rajab—Rajab is gone, by the way, poor old chap. He swore he'd seen you fall, more dead than the prophet himself, said Bethune, with the harsh laugh that covers strong emotion. "And from the fort, through the glass, we watched those devils chucking the bodies into the torrent—dead and wounded, too. We thought the great river was your grave with many another's! Never a bone could we find of all the good chaps."
Harry English straightened himself and laughed, too, not very mirthfully. Then he pulled open the loose collar of his shirt and laid bare a jagged scar that ran from the column of the throat across the collar bone.
I'm confoundedly hard to kill, you know. Just missed the jugular. I must have been spouting blood like a fountain. And then I got a blow on the head from a hilt that knocked me into nothingness. Rajab was about right—I was as dead as the prophet for the time being. If I had not had nine lives——
Again the silence. Then Bethune inquired, casually, fumbling in his pocket for a pipe:
And how is it you weren't chucked overboard with the rest?
Old Yufzul had a fancy for keeping me alive. Ah, if he could have caught the chap that cut me down, he would not have left much skin on him. He'd given stringent orders to spare mine. The old beggar took a notion that I was a sort of mascot, or something, that I carried luck—that it was the influence of my precious person kept things going so triumphantly at the fort.... You may remember he was always sending envoys to me with flattering offers? By the Lord, Ray, I believe it was half to get me that he stuck to the business so long. So much for my carrying luck!
The speaker smiled, with a bitter twist of the lip, and poked the fire unnecessarily.
Remember, he added, "that business about the flag on the roof, when the bullets were going so lively? It seems our friend was watching and was much struck to see that I was not."
I remember, answered Bethune's deep bass.
Did he not remember? Had he been of the nationality of M. Chatelard, with what a hand-clasp, with what a flow of rhetoric would he not now emphasise his vivid recollection of that hour!
English, lying back in his armchair, with his head resting on the top, closed his eyes wearily. His face looked very pallid and sharp-featured thus upturned and relaxed from its usual stern control; and Bethune shot many an anxious look at it as he sat silent, the pipe he forgot to draw hanging loosely between his teeth.
Presently the other resumed, in low, reminiscent tones:
I became the Khan's fetish. So long as he had me he was sure of his luck. He thought himself safe. In the end, I think, he thought he could not die.
Well? said Bethune, as the pause grew over long.
Well, that's all. I was a fetish, very well looked after. Too well. God! said the man, sitting up, a sudden passion on eye and lip, "I was kept prisoner, if you like. For five years, Raymond Bethune, I was chained to that old Khan's carcase, night and day."
For five years, echoed Bethune, stupidly; "and what were you doing?"
English did not answer till the silence seemed to have obliterated the question. Then he said slowly:
I was waiting.
Then?
Then the old devil died—and I escaped. Oh, you don't want me to spin you that yarn now! You can imagine it for yourself, if you ever imagine anything, you old dunderhead. There was blood spilt, if you care to know. I had waited a long time, you see.
But, objected the Major of Guides, after some minutes devoted to calculation, "that was three years ago."
Aye, laughed English, good-naturedly contemptuous, "but a man doesn't walk off the Karakoram on to the English lines in a day, especially if he's an Afghan captive. I had to take a little round through Turkestan, and back through Baluchistan—on foot, Raymond, every yard of the way—as a dervish."
Good Lord! said Bethune.
I flatter myself I know more of the Karakorams and the Turkoman frontier than any white man yet. And I can speak the lingo of every tribe that calls Ali chief. Aye, and I know their tricks and customs, their very habit of thought. There was not a camp or hut where they did not take me for one of themselves. It was just a year after Yufzul's death that I landed at Kurrachee.
Oh, Harry, cried his friend, impulsively, "why did you not come to me?"
Have I not told you already? answered English, after one of his deep pauses. "I had things to find out first. Where is your canniness? If live men have to go slow, what about dead men? ... No—no." The bitter smile came back to his lips. "I lay low, and lived in the bazaar, as good a servant of the prophet as ever salaamed to the East; and then"—his voice changed—"oh, then—I got all the news I wanted!"
Bethune dared not raise his eyes.
More than I wanted, added Harry English, with his bleak laugh. "You don't need to be told why I remained a Pathan, do you?"
When Bethune once more found courage to speak to his friend, it was because the stillness, pregnant with so much meaning, seemed intolerable.
Well? he queried hoarsely.
Well, then, said Harry English, "I waited—again." ...
And his comrade felt more than this he was never to know of the hardest moment of all the man's hard life.
I dare say, resumed English, his old air of serenity coming back to him, "you wonder why I did not extend that botched business as far as the jugular this time, and have done with it. But, you see, there was just a chance, I told myself; and so," he repeated, falling back into his significant formula, "I waited. I got work with an old babu; and by-and-by my opportunity came, and I took it."
Good Lord! exclaimed Bethune, shifting restlessly in his chair. "It was the maddest business!"
Perhaps, said English, a shade of pain sweeping across his face. "But I had to know. Any other course was too dangerous. Oh, I am not speaking of myself—think how dangerous!"
But, man—man, cried the other, "it need not have taken you all that time! When you'd seen with your own eyes, when you had found that the old fellow was killing her, when you were here in this house, and had seen her in her sorrow—then——"
English flung one lightning glance upon the speaker.
And even then, he said slowly, "I had still to know—more."
A moment Bethune stared at him open-mouthed; then his own unclear conscience pointed the otherwise inconceivable idea to his slow-working wits. He felt the dark blood mount to his forehead.
Now I've told you all, said Harry English, and got up from his chair.
Thank you, said Bethune.
* * * * *
Aspasia's bright presence was suddenly with them. English wheeled round; but her smiling face was reassurance sufficient.
I've come as I promised, she said, "to give you the last report. Dr. Chatelard says all is going as he wishes. He will be down immediately for some breakfast, and then he will tell you himself. Isn't he a darling little man?" she went on. "I am sorry I said he had a pink head! What should we do now without it? By the way, some one must send a wire to Melbury Towers for his luggage."
Let me go, said Bethune, starting forward.
Let him go, echoed Baby, saucily, turning to Captain English.
With such new happiness before her, the natural buoyancy of her nature was triumphant over all present doubt and anxiety. Bethune put out his hand, and she slipped her own confidingly into it.
Harry, said he, and the girl wondered and was highly flattered at the sudden emotion that shook his voice, "you see how things stand between us?"
Again English flashed that glance of vivid scrutiny. This time his friend met it steadily, though again with a heightening colour. Then, after a perceptible pause:
I am glad, said Captain English, simply.
And Bethune dropped the girl's hand to meet the strong clasp held out to him.
He knew that from henceforth all misunderstanding was swept away from between them. If he had felt before for his friend that love closer than a brother's, it was cemented now by the strongest bond that can exist between generous natures—that of forgiver and forgiven. He was forgiven with the only real forgiveness—that which understands.
Have they not brought breakfast? cried Baby, the housekeeper, very bustling all at once, to cover her pretty confusion. She sprang to the bell, then checked herself, with finger on lip, and tripped from the room, pointing her feet and laughing over her shoulder, as if to her happy years even that sad precaution of quietness must have its mirthful side.
Both men looked after her indulgently. Then Bethune's face clouded.
She is but a child, after all, he said doubtfully.
Nay, said Harry, "it seems to me she has a woman's heart."
She is as true as steel, asserted her lover.
When the girl returned, English went restlessly forth. He would wait for M. Chatelard, he said, in the hall. The newly betrothed were alone; and, for a second or two, eyed each other shyly. Then Bethune's face softened in the old, good way; and yet with something, too, that had never been there before, something which made Aspasia drop her lids.
Well, Robin? said he, and beckoned. She came to him sidling.
It would always be thus between them. He would beckon and she would come. Had the impossible happened, had that mistress of his hidden ideal condescended to him, he would have gone far to crave the least favour, and always with a trembling soul. But the life that touches the transcendent joy, the rare ecstasy is fated to know but little happiness. Providence, perhaps, was not dealing unkindly with this man.
Why do you call me Robin? she asked.
He was not of those who explain. With a kiss on her hand he told her simply that she was like a robin.
Then I hope you'll remember, sir, she said, briskly disengaging herself, "that the robin is a bird that makes music in season and out of season."
Bethune went off in the cart, at the best speed of Aspasia's pony, carrying a second telegram, more weighty than that concerning M. Chatelard's luggage. This was a summons for a London specialist.
Although unaware that the Frenchman had himself a world-wide reputation for such cases, English, with his habit of quick judgment, had decided to trust the proffered skill. But, in the course of their conversation, he had tentatively touched upon the advantage of a consultation; and the suggestion was accepted; with so much alacrity, indeed, that a more livid pallor spread over the husband's countenance.
M. Chatelard saw the impression he had unwittingly produced. With fat forefinger thrown out in emphasis, he promptly endeavoured to remove it.
In cases of obscure diagnosis, two heads are always better than one, said he, kindly. "Yet your great Farrar will, I have no doubt—so much confidence have I in myself, my dear sir—merely confirm my treatment—a treatment, in parenthesis, purely negative. Paradoxical, yet true, sir, the slower our fair patient recovers the better."
To himself, as he sat down to his coffee, the genial physician remarked complacently, that it would be du dernier intérét to see ce fameux Farrar at work.
M. Chatelard was entirely satisfied with the situation, as far as it concerned himself. He kept Harry English at his elbow, and, while enjoying the excellent fare (les émotions, ?a creuse!), discoursed learnedly upon the brain, that terrible and fragile organism which he had made his own especial study. His insatiable curiosity the while was anticipating with gusto the moment when it could gratify itself upon the enigmatic personality of his new-found host.
Fate played into his hand. For, ere he could insinuate the first leading question, there entered upon them Sir Arthur. M. Chatelard was forthwith made witness to a scene between the "two husbands" which was to give him, in the most dramatic manner, all the information he desired.
There they stood opposite each other—the old and the young. The most complete contrast, perhaps, that it was possible to imagine. Harry English, erect, square-shouldered, extraordinarily quiet, with head held high and pendant arms, in an attitude not unlike that of the soldier in the orderly-room, the oriental composure of his countenance occasionally contradicted by a flash of the eye and a twist of the lip. Sir Arthur, swinging between bluster and authority, both equally futile, painfully conscious of a hopelessly ungraceful position. It is only the young that the stress of passion becomes. When a man is past the prime of life, every emotion that shakes him from the dignified self-control of his years betrays him on to senility.
Here, then, do we behold his Excellency as he is, thought the judicial looker-on. "Without toilet, without what milady Aspasia so brutally calls 'grooming'; without the support of a commanding position—here stands the natural man. And he is an old man, impotently angry—a sorry spectacle, while the rival—ah, belle jeunesse!"
To the elderly Frenchman Harry English, still in the thirties, was to be reckoned among the youthful. Sir Arthur began the interview by a renewal of his last night's threat of the police. Harry English smiled, and the smile instantly worked havoc upon the Governor's assumption of confident authority. Rage broke forth.
Look at him, Chatelard! There's a pretty fellow to call himself an Englishman. Look at the colour of his skin; look at his hair! By God, man, he yelled, "look at his teeth! The trick's been done before, sir. The wily servant, with his thieving knowledge of family secrets, playing the part of his dead master. This is a new Tichborne case, and the babu Muhammed will find what comes of such tricks."
Muhammed! interrupted M. Chatelard, rising from his seat, "Muhammed! dites-vous? Ma parole!"
His fingers flew up to steady his spectacles; his shrewd eyes fixed themselves upon English with a gaze in which admiration contended with amazement.
Muhammed! ... Ah, what the devil—a wonderful disguise! Even now I hardly recognise, save, indeed, that he has worn a beard recently, as is revealed by that pallid chin and throat—I protest I do not even recognise Muhammed now in Captain English. No wonder, thought the Frenchman, in a rapid parenthesis, "that we French were as children in India compared to these English. English he remains," he chuckled, playing on the name, "and yet, to suit his purpose, he can assimilate himself to the black devil."
Ha, we've had a Tichborne case! repeated Sir Arthur.
The silent man opposite looked at him, still silent, still smiling; but into his eyes there crept a shade of pity. There was, indeed, something pitiable in this pomposity so fallen, in this tyranny so powerless—in Sir Arthur, brandishing his rag of defiance, standing the while in all the nakedness of his cause.
You are witness, Chatelard, he was insisting.
M. Chatelard, pinching the wire of his glasses, lifted his gaze to inspect the portrait which hung in the panel over the mantelpiece; then brought it solemnly back to Harry English's countenance. He turned and spoke, not without enjoying the consciousness of the weight of his own adverse verdict.—Expect no bowels of mercy from one whose life-work is the study of other people's brains.
Alas! my excellent Sir Gerardine; I fear there above hangs a witness with a testimony more emphatic than ever mine could be.
Sir Arthur rolled his bloodshot eye towards the picture—another of those infernal daubs! From the first instant he had set eyes on them, all over the place, he had thought it in bad taste—in confoundedly bad taste. Last night, in the bedroom, the sight of one of them had put him off his balance altogether. But he had been, then, in a nervous state. He knew better now.
Pooh! He tried to laugh, but his mouth twitched down at the corners, with a childish tremble. "If every black-haired man is going to claim to be my wife's first husband——"
But everything was against Sir Arthur this morning. Who knows how far he might have gone in convincing the inconvenient English that he could not possibly be himself, if that objectionable person, Bethune—it was most reprehensible of Rosamond to have received the fellow in her husband's absence—had not marched in upon them.
The Major of Guides stood a second, with beetling brows, measuring the situation. Then, without a word, he strode across the room and took up his post beside his comrade, so close that their shoulders touched. It was mute testimony, but more convincing than spoken phrase.
M. Chatelard experienced one of those spasms of satisfaction which the discovery of some fresh trait characteristic of the race under his microscope never failed to cause him.
Those two silent ones, with what force they imposed themselves! "Voila bien, l'Angleterre—sa morgue, son arrogance! She steps in—her mere presence is enough. She disdains argument, she stands passive, massive, she smiles—she remains. As for my poor Sir Gerardine, he represents here the enemy. Ah, sapristi, it is not astonishing if it makes him enraged."
Sir Arthur, in truth, turned to an apoplectic purple, stammered wildly, shook his balled hand—the telling retort failed him. Upon this, at last, Captain English spoke:
Sir Arthur, said he, "believe me, you will, in due time, be furnished with every proof of my identity that you can desire to see. Meanwhile you will be wise if you accept the evidence of"—he paused, and there was a subtle alteration in the clear steady voice—"the evidence of all that has occurred this night—of my friend here, Major Bethune, and of the old servant of my house."
Sir Arthur turned sharply and met the vindictive stare of Bethune's pale eyes.
I have recognised my friend, Captain English, said Bethune, with harsh decision.
Sir Arthur's glance went quickly from one to the other. It was typical of the man that, for the moment, the secondary irritation of having a pair of twopenny-halfpenny Indian officers brow-beating him—browbeating him, egad! the Lieutenant-Governor of the Province—for the moment, almost outweighed the fact that his own huge personal tragedy was being irremediably established.
You are a witness, are you? he snarled.
Bethune nodded.
Then, cried Sir Arthur, springing to his feet and thumping the table so that all the china rattled, "you are a witness, sir, to as peculiar a business as I think has ever been heard of in his Majesty's service. Captain English, I think—since it is agreed that this man is Captain English—will find some little difficulty in explaining his proceedings all these years."
You have heard of people being held prisoners, said English, quietly.
Yes, screamed Sir Arthur, "but what about this disguise—this Muhammed business?"
I don't expect you to understand my reasons, pursued the other, in the same manner; while, beside him, Bethune kept his taciturn watch. "But you have, I recognise, the right to be told of them. I had to find out if my wife was happy."
You had to find out if—— Sir Arthur pouncing upon the new suggestion, to lay bare its folly, was suddenly arrested midway by a glimmer of the other's meaning and its extraordinary bearing upon himself.
If you wish, I shall put the matter clearer, said the first husband, incisively. "I had to find out if your wife was happy."
If my wife was happy!
A vision rose before Sir Arthur—his wife, the wife of Sir Arthur Gerardine, the wife of the Lieutenant-Governor, her Excellency, Lady Gerardine, queen of her world, flashing in the glory of his diamonds and emeralds, treading palace rooms, herself the centre of a court—his wife petted, adulated, envied, the object of his chivalrous attention, of his lavish indulgence, his constant solicitude—not happy! He broke into boisterous laughter.
Not happy! For that was your conclusion, I suppose?
Still laughing, he flung a glance at M. Chatelard—eloquent. "Did you ever hear such an absurdity in your life?" it said, in all languages.
M. Chatelard unaccountably dropped his eyes before that triumphant appeal; and a dry cough of unwonted embarrassment escaped him. Sir Arthur's mirth changed from its first genuine note of sarcastic fury to something that rang hollow and forced. Abruptly withdrawing his eyes from the unresponsive Frenchman, he caught sight of his own countenance reflected, in all the cruel morning light, by a mirror that hung between the two windows. He stood staring. For a second he could not recognise himself—an unkempt old man, with yellow trembling cheeks and vacant mouth.
In such moments the body works unconsciously. Had Sir Arthur had proper control over himself, the swift look at his rival, the immediate comparison, was the last thing his vanity would have condescended to. But his treacherous eyes had done their work before self-esteem could intervene. And, for once, Sir Arthur Gerardine saw.
The braced figure of Henry English, with its noble lines of still young manhood; the romantic head, refined, not aged, by suffering and endurance, the vital flame in the eye. What a contrast! Sir Arthur swayed, fell into a chair, and covered his face with his hands. Acrid tears of self-pity were burning his lids. This is what they have brought me to!
Of the other three in the room, there was not one who could find a word. To see the strong suffer may be a painful yet inspiring sight, but there are tragedies of the weak, before the sordid pity of which the mind instinctively recoils.
And you thought it honourable and gentlemanly to come into my house and eat my bread and—and spy? said the Lieutenant-Governor, raising his head at last, turning dull orbs upon his whilom secretary.
The blood raced into Harry English's face.
Here, thought Chatelard, scarcely breathing in his quiet corner of observation, "here it is the old one scores at last."
I could not choose my methods, Sir Arthur.
The ancient Chippendale clock, with a sigh between its ticks, measured half a minute of heavy waiting. Then English spoke again, decisively, vigorously, stepping to the table with the air of one determined to put an end to an unbearable situation.
Useless, all this. You shall have full evidence, as I said, in due time. Meanwhile, here is a house of sorrow, and your presence in it adds grievously to its burdens.
A gleam lit the watery depths of Sir Arthur's eyes.
Here is a house of sorrow. He was suddenly reminded of what, in the absorption of his own misery, he had well-nigh forgotten—that the woman lay in danger of death.
Were she to die now—who had committed this inconceivable indiscretion—the situation might yet be saved. If she were to die, the affair could be hushed up. He jumped to his feet.
Well, and what do you think of her state, doctor? cried he.
The greedy glance was a revelation. The whole mind of the man was laid bare in its odious pettiness. With a dignified gesture the physician refused answer.
But the soul of Harry English leaped forth in wrath, as the blade leaps from the scabbard.
Out of my house! said he, his arm flung wide, pointing to the door. Voice, gesture, look, spoke of a passion so intense that for a second Sir Arthur quailed before it as one may before an unexpected flash of lightning.
He retreated hurriedly a few steps, then wheeled round, his natural combativeness reasserting itself.
Your story is strange, singularly strange, Captain English, he sneered. "I shall consider it my duty to report it in proper quarters without delay. You will have to produce some better explanations there, sir, I fancy, than those which seem to satisfy a couple of silly women and an ignorant foreigner—I mean," his old habit of courtesy tugging against the impulsiveness of his irritation—"I mean a foreigner ignorant of our customs." (M. Chatelard had an indulgent smile for the correction.) "I shall report you, sir, and your accomplice there."
A withering look included the stolid Bethune in this last indictment.
Raymond, see that he goes, said English, "that he goes at once—and quietly."
Ah, yes, I beg, interposed the doctor, with gravity. "Quiet is imperative, Sir Gerardine."
English walked over to the window and began to drum on the pane. Dr. Chatelard removed his spectacles, and put them into his pocket.
One is reminded of the history of the judgment of Solomon, he remarked genially, as he followed Bethune to the door. "Permettez, cher capitaine? I return to your wife."
They're going! said Bethune, triumphantly. "Their fellow has patched up the motor; it will take them as far as the station at least."
Harry English, pacing the little study much after the manner of Muhammed the night before, halted abruptly.
They ought to have gone an hour ago, he answered. And, when he looked like that, for a certainty Captain English wore no pleasant countenance. "What has he been doing?"
The relaxation of the muscles, which was Bethune's usual substitute for a smile, came over his face.
First, he's been trying to persuade Aspasia to go away with him. And secondly, he's been reproaching her for her unfilial behaviour in refusing to leave us; and thirdly, he has been bestowing his avuncular curse upon her and repudiating her for ever and ever. All this naturally took some time.
A flash of pleasure swept across the other's gloom.
So the girl sticks to us. That is right, he said. Then the frown came back. "You've warned them to be quiet, I hope, with their infernal car?"
I've told the chauffeur if he makes a sound more than he can help, he'll have me to deal with. I made the fellow swear to wait for them halfway down the avenue. Lady Aspasia's a good sort too, take her all in all—has her head screwed on the right way. She'll keep the old man in order.
English took a couple of turns again, and halted, his head bent. There were voices passing in the hall without: Sir Arthur's querulous tones, Lady Aspasia's unmistakable accents, strident even under her breath. Bethune went to the window.
There they go, said he, presently. "She's giving him her arm. By George," he went on, "she, for one, won't be anxious to dispute your identity, Harry!"
The other had sat down by the fire and was gazing into the flames after his old attitude. Bethune, at the window, remained gazing upon the departure of the undesired guests. In a second or two he broke forth again:
The motor's jibbing! Good Lord, they'll have it into the gate—now into the apple-tree! He gave a single note of mirth. "Lady Aspasia is holding down Sir Arthur by main force. Of course he wants to teach the chauffeur how to do it. But she knows better. By George," ejaculated Bethune, in a prophetic burst, "she's the very woman for him! Ah, here comes Miss Aspasia, hatless, to offer her opinion. I'd give something to hear her; she does not want them back upon us—I warrant." There was a pause. "They're off! Thank God, they're off!" Still the man lingered by the window.
Aspasia was waving her handkerchief ironically after the departing company, as the car proceeded down the avenue, fitfully, at a speed which (as she subsequently remarked) "would have made any self-respecting cart-horse smile."
When she turned to re-enter the house, Bethune had the vision of her rosy face, all brightening with smiles. The interchange of mute greetings, the swift impression of her fair light youth as she flashed by, left him lost in a muse.
Harry English stirred in his chair and, on the moment, his friend was at his side.
They're gone, repeated he, rubbing his hands.
The other made no direct reply; but, stooping forward, picked up one of the fragments of paper that had escaped Bethune's hand in the morning's work of destruction.
He looked at it for a few seconds, abstractedly, and then laughed.
So you were writing a life of me, old man? said he.
Bethune stood, looking as if he had been convicted of the most abject folly. And English lightly flicked the scrap into the blaze:
The life that counts is the life that no other soul can know, said he.
But he had no sooner said the words than he corrected himself, and his voice took that altered note which marked any reference to his wife.
At least, he said, "no other soul but one."
Those friends, who were so much to each other, in speech communicated less than the most ordinary acquaintances. Bethune stood, in his wooden way, looking down at the armchair. Just now he had something to say, and it was difficult to him. At last, pointing to the hearth, as if he still beheld the fruit of his labour of friendship being consumed in it, he spoke, awkwardly:
It did its work, though.
English flashed an upward look, half humorous, half searching.
What did its work?
The—my—oh, the damned Life!
The other man pondered over the words a little while. Then, with a smile that had something almost tender in it, he looked up at his friend again:
I am afraid you will have to explain a little more, Ray.
Bethune shifted his weight from one foot to the other. The colour mounted to his face. He stared down at English, wistfully.
It's a bit hard to explain, he said, "yet I'd like you to know—that diary, those letters of yours, I had to have them, extracts of them, for the work, you see.... Well——"
Here came a pause of such length that English was fain to repeat:
Well?
Then Bethune blurted it out:
She had never read them——
Ah!
She never wanted to read them. Oh!—quickly, "it's not that she didn't care."
You need not explain that.
English's head was bent. His voice was very quiet, but Bethune's whole being thrilled to the tumult he inarticularly felt in the other's soul. He half put out his hand to touch him, then drew it back.
Go on with your story—with your own part of the story, said Harry.
She did not want to read them, said Bethune. "I made her."
The husband offered no comment; and, drawing a long breath like a child, his friend went on:
And when she read at last—oh! even I could see it—it was as if her heart broke.
Still the bent head, the hands clasped over the knees, the silence. Bethune could bear it no longer, and took courage to lay that touch of timid eager sympathy upon English's shoulder.
Harry, I'm such a fool, I can't explain things.
Oh, I understand, answered English then, in a deep vibrating voice. He rose suddenly and squared himself, drawing in the air in a long sigh. "Do you think I could misunderstand—her?"
Their looks met. There was a wonderful mixture of sweetness and sorrow on the face of him whom life and death had equally betrayed.
Suddenly they clasped hands, for the first time since their parting in the Baroghil passes. Then they stood awhile without speaking. Harry English once more fixing visions in the fire, and Bethune looking at his comrade.
For most of his years he had known no deeper affection than his friendship for this man. He had mourned him with a grief which, now to think on, seemed like a single furrow across the plain field of his life; and there he stood!
Captain, my Captain... said Raymond. His rough voice trembled, and he laughed loud to conceal it.
The other flashed round upon him with his rarely beautiful smile.
Ah, said he, "it's like old times at last to hear you at your rags and tags of quotation again!"
There fell again between them the pause that to both was so eloquent.
Then, from the far distance, into their silence penetrated a faint uncouth sound: from the moorland road, the motor, carrying for ever out of their lives him who had had so much power upon them, and was now so futile a figure, seemed to raise a last impotent hoot.
Sir Arthur Gerardine was gone. Raymond rubbed his hands and smiled as since boyhood he had scarcely smiled.
It is good, cried Harry, then, boyishly in his turn, "to see your nut-cracker grin once more, Ray. As Muhammed, I've looked for it many a time in vain—I thought I had lost my old sub."
* * * * *
But there's one thing we must remember, said Bethune, suddenly earnest again, in the midst of the welcome relaxation. "We must remember the old fellow's threat. You will have a bit of a job to keep out of trouble with the powers that be, won't you, after Sir Arthur's meddling?"
The anxiety on his countenance was not reflected upon English's face.
I shall have my own story to tell, he said, "and I think that I have knowledge of sufficient value to make me a persona grata in high quarters just now. They will be rather more anxious, I take it, to retain my services rather than dispense with them—in spite of Sir Arthur."
He broke off, his brow clouded again. He sighed heavily.
But what does that matter? he cried; "just now there is only one thing that matters in the whole world."