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

bazaar. Mrs. Hurst said you wouldn't come, but of course that made no difference. Will you?"

"Come? No many thanks."

"I have to take part. Won't you help me?"

He looked straight into her face.

"I'd like to help you, of course. But I have my own work and, frankly, I have no room in my life for that sort of thing. Ask Hat her way."

"I think Dick would rather carry coals."

"So would I."

"My dear David!"

He laughed again, with the same easy unconcern.

"It sounds rude, I know, but I have some experience with those sort of functions, and I know I am useless. I would rather give assistance in a more satisfactory form."

Diana was silent for a moment. She stood with her hand resting on the table and gazed out of the window, her profile turned to him, but he could see that her brows were knitted. In that moment she seemed to him more lovely than ever before. The delicate muslin dress suited the simple, graceful lines of her figure, and the careless arrangement of her hair softened the classical severity of her features, which were still somewhat flushed from recent encounters with her mother's vagaries.

"David, do you know something?" she asked suddenly.

"Know what?"

"That I feel I don't know you any more. I fee quite awkward with you, as though you were a stranger."

"We see very little of each other," he suggested.

"Perhaps that is the reason. You never go anywhere. You seem to avoid everybody except the old Professor and ' that Jesuit,' as Mr. Eliot calls him. People are beginning to talk about you, David."

"Are they?"

"You don't seem very interested, but I'm going to tell you, whether you like it or not. Somebody told father that you spent the nights in the native bazaar, and that you were seen wandering about the country at all hours of the morning. It doesn't sound a bit nice, David."

"No, I quite agree. Did Colonel Chichester tell you?"

"No, he told mother. Mr. Eliot has openly hinted that you are going to the devil."

"Oh!"

There was a moment's silence. Diana stared at her companion with a grave wonder. He did not flinch, but the mouth under the short black moustache was slightly amused.

"Are you?"

"What?"

"Going to the devil?"

"Perhaps at any rate, I am going my own way."

"Somehow that sounds like a dismissal. Good-bye, David."

"Good-bye, Di."

He held the door open for her with an easy courtesy which she recognised as new in him, and for a moment she hesitated.

"You may find your own way rather a lonely way," she said, with an earnestness which she had not hitherto shown.

"That is as I wish it."

"If ever by any chance it should prove unbearable, I should like you to remember that you have one friend who doesn't care how far you have gone."

"Where, Di?"

Her eyes filled with laughter.

"To the devil."

"I believe you rather want me to go," he observed.

"It might do you good," she retorted. "At any rate, I would rather you did anything than jog-trot to heaven."

He waited until the drawing-room door had closed behind her, then he went back to his father's papers. He had discovered them in a secret drawer, and, from their methodical arrangement, he judged that no one had touched them since the night his father had gone to his death. For the most part they were old receipted bills, but here and there he came across the torn leaf of a diary, covered with a close, faded writing. David Hurst read them carefully, and laid them aside. One sheet bore the date of the day preceding his own birth.

"In a few hours, pray God, Jean will have her son and I my freedom," Walter Hurst had written with unconscious irony. "No one knows how I have striven to fulfil the destiny she mapped out for me in her loving ambition. I have gone against myself, fought down every instinct. My life has become a pitiable farce in which I play the hypocrite the make-believe hero; but now I am tired and can do no more. When she has her son she will transfer her pride to him and he will carry on for her the traditions of our name. I cannot I was not made great, or even courageous. My imagination never leaves me. I see everything I do before it is done all the consequences, all the possibilities. I am afraid of to-night's work. But I dare not show her that I am afraid. She would hate me and I love her. My God, how I love her! Her beauty and the strength of her soul upholds me. If I were only worthy of her if I could at least die worthy of her before she finds out the truth--"

This confession, scrawled a few hours before death had answered the writer's prayer, broke off suddenly. David Hurst reread it many times, as though he were committing it to memory. Then he tore it carefully into a hundred pieces. And his face was set in lines of a grim pity.

That night, contrary to custom, he dined alone with his mother. The occasion was a rare one. By mutual consent they avoided a tete-a-tete in which their total estrangement appeared in all its nakedness, but on this particular evening Hurst's manner changed their relationship. Instead of the old tentative, almost timid, affection he displayed a courteous but distant friendliness. They dined together as acquaintances, and as acquaintances parted for the night. Both retired to their own rooms. Soon afterwards Hurst summoned the servant who watched by his door.

"I am sleeping on the verandah," he said. "Wake me two hours before dawn."

The man salaamed.

"It is well, Sahib."

Hurst changed from his evening clothes into a rough suit of drill, then flung himself down upon the loungechair outside. The night was stifling. Hot waves of air rose from the parched ground and hung like a quivering mist about the tops of the peepul-trees, whose pointed leaves fringed the dark sapphire of the night-sky. The moon had not yet risen. David Hurst lay with his hands behind his head and watched the uneasy flickering of the stars until sleep overtook him. At about three o'clock the native servant glided out of the shadows of the bedroom and touched him lightly on the shoulder.

"It is time, Sahib," he whispered.

Hurst rose instantly, and, without a word, went down the steps into the garden. At the gate he collided with a man, who seemed to have been standing waiting, and in the recoil he recognised, by the faint light hanging mysteriously over the valley, the broad shoulders and placid face of the unexpected apparition.

"Judge!" he said sharply. "You here!"

"I believe midnight strolls are free," the judge returned without embarrassment.

"By all means. The time is admirable for those who wish to be alone."

"Do you wish to be alone, David?"

"I confess yes."

The two men considered each other in silence. Hurst's tone had been cold to the point of insolence.

"Nevertheless, I should be glad if you would allow me to accompany you a little on your stroll. I have something I wish to say to you."

"Then you came out here to see me?"

"I came out to see if certain rumours were based on fact."

"In other words, you were spying on me?"

"In a certain sense yes."

Hurst began to walk along the road away from Kolruna. The judge kept at his side. The difference in age, the long-standing friendship, had ceased to play a part between them. A smothered yet fierce antagonism of wills had taken the place of the old understanding. "Might I ask your authority and your object?" Hurst asked with a flash of cold resentment.

The judge coughed. He was breathing hoarsely and irregularly, but he did not slacken his long stride.

"My authority, David? I don't suppose I have any My object is to prevent you making a mess of your life."

"You are very kind. I was not aware that the matter was anybody's concern but my own."

"There is your mother."

Hurst threw back his head and laughed.

"Was it she who set you on your new hobby?"

"No. I took it up on my own behalf. I heard ugly stories about you, and I meant to find out for myself."

"It would have been simpler if you had come to me direct."

The judge laughed grimly.

"If the stories had been without foundation you would have been indignant, and if they had been true you would have lied," he said.

"Most wise judge! Might I ask how long you have been outside waiting?"

"Since eight o'clock," was the imperturbable answer.

"Six hours! Good heavens! "Hurst stood still and repeated his short, ironical laugh. "All this for love of the prodigal!"

A shaking hand rested on his arm. In the dim light Hurst caught a glimpse of a face ashy with physical suffering.

"There is your mother, David. You bear her name she is very proud of it. It would break her heart if you dragged it in the mud."

"It was for my mother's sake, then!"

The grasp on his arm tightened. The judge's voice grew suddenly very quiet.

"David Hurst, you are a cur if you mock at something which I have kept hidden for thirty years," he said simply.

Hurst did not answer for a moment. When he spoke again his manner had undergone a change.

"I have been blind," he said. "I am young and the young see only their own troubles."

"Not only the young," the judge answered.

"But at least I have been discourteous and ungrateful I did not understand. Forgive me."

"There is nothing to forgive only go home, David. It's all I ask for her sake."

Gently but firmly Hurst loosened the hand that held him.

"Do you remember an afternoon some twelve years ago, when my mother told you that she hated me?"

"Good God! you heard?"

"Yes. It has taken me twelve years to digest it all, but now the process is at an end and you'll understand, Judge I'm infernally indifferent to the wishes of people who hate me. That's natural, isn't it?"

The judge nodded. He seemed to have sunk together, like a man who had received a blow.

"Yes, d ned natural, David. I haven't any more to say except, for your own sake--"

"I don't care very much for myself either just enough not to wreck my life against a rock, as others have done before me. That's what I nearly did do but I saved myself in time. I'm free quite free responsible to no one." He turned and looked about him. "Our ways part here, Judge."

"Where are you going?" "To a woman."

"David! Then it's true--"

"Quite true. But she has never spoken to me or seen me. Tell that to Kolruna, and see what they make of it. Good night."

He received no answer. The judge stared after him until the night engulfed his shadow.

BOOK II_CHAPTER VI (THE AWAKENING)

UNCHANGING as the grim-faced idol which stared over her head into the awakening day, she knelt amidst the flowers, her hands folded upon her lap, her lips parted in the same unspoken, unsatisfied longing. So she appeared to him as he stood quietly at the shrine's entrance, and so she had appeared to him, morning after morning, since that first dawn when he had seen her in all the perfection of her sleeping womanhood. Until now he had never wished it otherwise. In his dreams she