The Daughter of Brahma, I. A. R. Wylie [carter reed txt] 📗

and the dancing couples swept past his range of vision like puppets in some gorgeous show in which he played no part. Gay uniforms, lovely dresses, bronzed faces, familiar and hated with all the bitterness of envy and, last of all, a woman's face a profile, clean-cut against the brilliant background. He knew then why he had come. But she was more beautiful than he had remembered her, or perhaps his riper judgment saw in her features that which his boy's eyes had missed character and strength.

She stood by the window, her hand resting lightly on her partner's arm, and once she looked up at him and smiled. Hurst knew the man, and hated him as he hated the rest in that moment, but with a hatred more intense because it had been sown in the bitterest hours of his childhood. The good-looking, intelligent face, the manly figure, represented for him all that he could never be, reminded him of petty humiliations silently accepted, but unforgotten. A trifling incident of his boyhood a race between Diana, this Dick Hatherway, and himself flashed back to his remembrance as something cruelly typical. He had meant to win he had strained his feeble strength till a red veil had crept before his eyes but he had not won. He had stumbled yards before the winning-post, and when they had come back, breathless and eager, they had laughed at him not unkindly, but as at something made for their laughter. The sound rang in his ear now, and he turned away, the brief moment of exhilaration dead. But it was too late. Diana Chichester stepped out on to the verandah. The light was on his face, and she recognised him with a quick, delighted exclamation. Hatherway, who had followed her, peered curiously over her shoulder.

"Why, Hurst!" he said. "What on earth are you skulking there for? Come in, man, and behave like a civilised being. You're enough to frighten the weak-minded into fits."

Hurst returned reluctantly. The loud, cheerful voice grated on his nerves; the words, good-naturedly bantering though they were, told him that he stood before them once again as the self -revealed fool.

"I am sorry if I startled you," he said. "I was on my way to the Professor, and wanted to see how you were all getting on. I had no intention of being discovered."

Diana Chiehester considered him, gravely observant.

"It seems to me you are apologising the wrong way round," she said. "You are trying to explain your presence, whereas you ought to be explaining your absence."

"I was not made for these social functions," he returned bluntly.

"Still, for my sake you might have gone against your nature, and, now that you are here, you must remain."

"In these clothes? I should cause a sensation."

"Probably. Do you mind?"

He laughed grimly.

"I am modest, and I should prefer not to see my mother's face. She is not fond of that kind of notoriety."

Diana came down the steps of the verandah.

"It's the case of Mohammed and the mountain," she said. "Dicky, go and find another partner. You can come back in half an hour, if you like. I'm going to talk to David."

"Is that fair?" Hatherway protested. "Besides, people will be asking for you."

"You can tell them I'm in the garden, talking to Mr. Hurst. You can add that I do not want to be disturbed."

Hatherway's face expressed a ludicrous mixture of disappointment and boyish mischief.

"Won't the old reputation-snatchers rejoice," he said, chuckling. "Di, I ought to warn you that your conduct is likely to give Kolruna food for nine days' most delicious scandal-mongering Kolruna, that hasn't had a scandal for a fortnight." "Then I shall be doing Kolruna a service," she retorted. "Please do as I ask, Dick."

"Of course." He leant over the verandah and tapped David Hurst on the shoulder. "Next time I want half an hour's talk with any one, I shall try your dodge, Hurst," he said, with laughing significance.

He disappeared into the crowded room, and Diana Chichester, moving serenely through the bright patch of reflected light, seated herself on the bench beneath the high palm-trees. The shadows hid her, and Hurst did not attempt to penetrate their protection. He sat beside her, his elbows on his knees, his hands linked loosely before him, striving to quiet the painful beating of his temples. She did not speak to him, and it seemed to him that the silence around them was part of himself, a throbbing, living thing, mysterious, intangible. The music had died away into the far distance. He no longer heard it, nor realised that only a few yards separated him from the overflowing life in which he had no share. For him the world had dwindled to this quiet Indian garden, his whole life to this moment of illusionary happiness. Presently she bent forward as though to look into his face.

"WeU?" she said gently.

He did not answer. Her voice belonged to his dream, but he knew that when he spoke the dream would be shattered, and he clung to it with an unavailing tenacity.

"Well?" she repeated.

He started, realising the ludicrousness of it all, and drew himself up.

"I beg your pardon it was stupid of me I think there is magic in the air."

"And I have dispelled it? But I have so much to ask you, and our time is short. Do you realise that we have not seen each other for two years?" "Two years to-night," he answered.

"Do you remember so well?"

"It was at Hurst Court," he added.

She nodded thoughtfully.

"You sat and talked to me for the whole evening, and the next morning you went away without even saying good-bye. Do you know, David, I have always felt that that incident wanted explaining. I've waited two years for the explanation, and I think I have a right to it now."

"It's a very simple one." He turned a little so that she saw the dim outlines of his face. "On that evening I made up my mind to have another try at the Indian Civil. I hadn't meant to it was almost a disgrace even to think of it at my age but I had to do something after I had been with you."

"Then you were working all those two years?"

He nodded, his lips drawn into a straight line.

"Yes for eighteen months I put everything else out of my life."

"And?"

"I failed."

He looked at her with a directness that was almost brutal. But even though half darkness hid her expression, he knew that she had not flinched.

"It was inevitable," she said quietly.

"You mean because I am a fool?"

"Perhaps because you were not made for the life of a bureaucrat, at any rate because you were too heavily handicapped."

"By what?"

"By things beyond your control. I remember even out here in Kolruna you were too delicate to work, and in England you were often ill. If you failed, it was not your fault. You were physically out of the running."

"Yes, but that was my fault not in the ordinary sense, but in a true sense, nevertheless. Don't you see that to be a physical weakling is just as bad as being a fool or a good-for-nothing? You can call it bad luck, or Fate, or the will of God, if you like, but it comes to the same thing in the end. If you make a man responsible for his vices or for his talents, you must hold him equally responsible for his deformities."

"That sounds like one of Mrs. Hurst's theories," she observed.

"Yes, it is. My mother is quite clear on the point, and, after the first shock, I learnt to agree with her. She dislikes me as she would dislike me if I had turned out a reprobate, and with the same right. And at the bottom most people feel the same, though it isn't Christian to admit it." Suddenly he rose to his feet and stood looking down at her, and she felt that he was trembling. "Di, I want you to think it out for yourself then you'll see that what I have said is true. Look at me: I am lame, I can't do any of the physical things people English people admire. And I'm not clever. I've failed all round. I'm not good to look at. Di, you wouldn't marry me, would you?"

"No," she answered directly.

"You despise me as my mother despises me?"

"No in my own particular way, as I despise hundreds of very admirable people."

He set his teeth hard. The drumming in his ears had ceased. He heard the music again, and it sounded loud and blatant and trivial. Suddenly she put her hand on his arm.

"David, that sounded horrid--worse than I meant it. I have a nasty, arrogant, exacting character, and I've shown you a little bit of it perhaps on purpose. I didn't want you to spoil things for either of us. Have I hurt you very much?"

He shook his head.

"You have paid me the compliment of being honourably frank," he said. "It has done me good. And you needn't be afraid; I shan't spoil things. I won't pretend. If I had been another man yes, perhaps then but I'm not, and there the matter ends." His tone was calm, eminently practical, and he changed the subject without apparent effort. "Are you glad to be back, Di?" he asked.

"Yes." Even in the monosyllable he heard a new note of warmth, almost of passion. "I have always wanted to come back," she went on. "It was as though the East called to me, and never ceased to call, though I tried to stifle its voice in a wild round of English pleasure. That was why I was so glad to see you to-night somehow you belong to all these old memories these old memories, which always seem to be so full of sunshine and bright, warm colours."

"Yes, I know," he said. "It is a world of dreams."

She seemed scarcely to hear him. She was leaning forward with her elbow on her knee, her chin supported in the palm of her hand, and he could see that she was smiling dreamily.

"One thing always stands out in my mind," she went on. "Do you remember the night when you got lost, and all the wonderful tales you told about the Temple and the Hindu baby-girl and the human sacrifices? I shall never forget how you stood there and stammered, and how Mr. Eliot stared at you with his little pig-eyes. I don't know why I was half inclined to believe it all. It appealed somehow to my child's imagination. And to-night out here it seems so possible so real."

He was silent. He did not look at her any more. His eyes were fixed sightlessly ahead into the darkness.

"Won't you tell me what really happened?" she asked suddenly. "What made you think of such strange things, David? Were they all fancy?"

He lifted his head as though he were listening to something beyond her voice and beyond the music.

"I don't think I could teU you," he said. "It lies so far back twelve years back it has gone out of my life--" His voice died away; he seemed to have forgotten that he had been speaking.

"You called her Sarasvati, daughter of Brahma," she went on, still plunged in her recollections. "It was a strange name to have sprung from a boy's brain. Had any one talked to you about her?"

"No I found hereout all by myself, in a dream."

He was smiling now, and all the hard, tense lines in his face had vanished, leaving a haggard, pathetic youthfulness. But the darkness hid the change from her.

"Yes, it was a dream," he went on, half to himself, "but I'm beginning to think that it was the only beautiful thing in my life. I had forgotten it in these twelve years but it has come back to me a little--"

He stopped again. He had heard footsteps, and suddenly he bent over her and took her hand.

"Hatherway is coming," he said quickly. "I don't want