The Pool in the Desert, Sara Jeannette Duncan [ebook reader with internet browser txt] 📗

And I confess it makes my little impression very vulgar and superficial.' She turned her head and a candid smile to him. 'All the same, I fancy that the people who are capable of suffering much that way are the exceptions. And--I don't care--I believe there is more cheap sentiment in this place than the other kind. What do you think I heard a woman say the other day at a tiffin-party? "No man has touched my heart since I've been married," she proclaimed, "except my husband!" AT A TIFFIN-party!'

She heard the relief in Innes's laugh and was satisfied.

'How does it happen,' he said, 'that women nowadays are critical of the world so young?'

'I shall be thirty in September, and we no longer look at society through a tambour-frame,' she said, hardily.

'And I shall be forty-three next month, but hitherto I have known it to produce nothing like you,' he returned, and if there was ambiguity in his phrase there was none in his face.

Miss Anderson made with her head her little smiling gesture--Simla called it very American--which expressed that all chivalrous speech was to be taken for granted and meant nothing whatever; and as they turned into the Ladies' Mile gave her horse his head, and herself a chance for meditation. She thought of the matter again that evening before her little fire of snapping deodar twigs, thought of it intently. She remembered it all with perfect distinctness; she might have been listening to a telephonic reproduction.

It was the almost intimate glimpse Innes had given her of himself, and it brought her an excitement which she did not think of analyzing. She wrung from every sentence its last possibility of unconscious meaning, and she found when she had finished that it was eleven o'clock.

Then she went to bed, preferring not to call Brookes, with the somewhat foolish feeling of being unable to account for her evening. Her last reflection before she slept shaped itself in her mind in definite words.

'There are no children,' it ran, 'and her health has always been good, he says. She must have left him after that first six months in Lucknow, because of a natural antipathy to the country--and when she condescended to come out again for a winter he met the different lady he thinks about. With little hard lines around the mouth and common conventional habits of thought, full of subservience to his official superiors, and perfectly uninterested in him except as the source of supplies. But I don't know why I should WANT her to be so disagreeable.

As a matter of fact, Mrs. Innes, travelling at the moment with the mails from London to Bombay, was hastening to present to Miss Anderson features astonishingly different.


Chapter 3.III.

The lady guests at Peliti's--Mrs. Jack Owen and the rest--were giving a tea in the hotel pavilion. They had the band, the wife of the Commander-in-Chief, the governess from Viceregal Lodge and one little Viceregal girl, three A.D.C.'s, one member of council, and the Archdeacon. These were the main features, moving among a hundred or so of people more miscellaneous, who, like the ladies at Peliti's, had come up out of the seething Plains to the Paradise of the summer capital. The Pavilion overhung the Mall; looking down one could see the coming and going of leisurely Government peons in scarlet and gold, Cashmiri vendors of great bales of embroideries and skins, big-turbaned Pahari horse-dealers, chaffering in groups, and here and there a mounted Secretary-sahib trotting to the Club. Beyond, the hills dipped blue and bluer to the plains, and against them hung a single waving yellow laburnum, a note of imagination. Madeline Anderson was looking at it when Mrs. Mickie and Mrs. Gammidge came up with an affectionate observation upon the cut of her skirt, after which Mrs. Mickie harked back to what they had been talking about before.

'She's straight enough now, I suppose,' this lady said.

'She goes down. But she gives people a good deal of latitude for speculation.'

'Who is this?' asked Madeline. 'I ask for information, to keep out of her way. I find I am developing the most shocking curiosity. I must be in a position to check it.'

The ladies exchanged hardly perceptible glances. Then Mrs. Gammidge said, 'Mrs. Innes,' and looked as if, for the moment, at any rate, she would withhold further judgment.

'But you mustn't avoid the poor lady,' put in Mrs. Mickie, 'simply because of her past. It wouldn't be fair. Besides--'

'Her past?' Madeline made one little effort to look indifferent, and then let the question leap up in her.

'My dear,' said Mrs. Gammidge, with brief impatience, 'he married her in Cairo, and she was--dancing there. Case of chivalry, I believe, though there are different versions. Awful row in the regiment--he had to take a year's leave. Then he succeeded to the command, and the Twenty-third were ordered out here. She came with him to Lucknow--and made slaves of every one of them. They'll swear to you now that she was staying at Shepheard's with an invalid mother when he met her. And now she's accepted like everybody else; and that's all there is about it.'

'There's nothing in that,' said Madeline, determinedly, 'to prove that she wasn't--respectable.'

'N--no. Of course not,' and again the eye of Mrs. Gammidge met that of Mrs. Mickie.

'Though, you see love,' added the latter lady, 'it would have been nicer for his people--they've never spoken to him since--if she had been making her living otherwise in Cairo.'

'As a barmaid, for instance,' said Madeline, sarcastically.

'As a barmaid, for instance,' repeated Mrs. Gammidge, calmly.

'But Simla isn't related to him--Simla doesn't care!' Mrs. Mickie exclaimed. 'Everybody will be as polite as possible when she turns up. You'll see. You knew, didn't you, that she was coming out in the Caledonia?'

'No,' said Madeline. She looked carefully where she was going to put her coffee-cup, and then she glanced out again at the laburnum hanging over the plains. 'I--I am glad to hear it. These separations you take so lightly out here are miserable, tragic.'

The other ladies did not exchange glances this time. Miss Anderson's change of tone was too marked for comment which she might have detected.

'Colonel Innes got the telegram this morning. She wired from Brindisi,' Mrs. Gammidge said.

'Does he seem pleased?' asked Mrs. Mickie, demurely.

'He said he was afraid she would find it very hot coming up here from Bombay. And, of course, he is worried about a house. When a man has been living for months at the Club--'

'Of course, poor fellow! I do love that dear old Colonel Innes, though I can't say I know him a bit. He won't take the trouble to be nice to me, but I am perfectly certain he must be the dearest old thing inside of him. Worth any dozen of these little bow-wows that run round after rickshaws,' said Mrs. Mickie, with candour.

'I think he's a ridiculous old glacier,' Mrs. Gammidge remarked, and Mrs. Mickie looked at Madeline and said, 'Slap her!'

'What for?' asked Miss Anderson, with composure. 'I dare say he is--occasionally. It isn't a bad thing to be, I should think, in Indian temperatures.'

'I guess you got it that time, dear lady,' said Mrs. Mickie to Mrs. Gammidge, as Madeline slipped toward the door.

'Meant to be cross, did she? How silly of her! If she gives her little heart away like that often, people will begin to make remarks.'

'The worst of that girl is,' Mrs. Mickie continued, 'that you never can depend upon her. For days together she'll be just as giddy and jolly as anybody and then suddenly she'll give you a nasty superior bit of ice down the back of your neck like that. I've got her coming to tea tomorrow afternoon,' Mrs. Mickie added, with sudden gloom, 'and little Lord Billy and all that set are coming. They'll throw buns at each other--I know they will. What, in heaven's name, made me ask her?'

'Oh, she'll have recovered by then. You must make allowance for the shock we gave her, poor dear. Consider how you would feel if Lady Worsley suddenly appeared upon the scene, and demanded devotion from Sir Frank.'

'She wouldn't get it,' Mrs. Mickie dimpled candidly. 'Frank always loses his heart and his conscience at the same time. But you don't suppose there's anything serious in this affair? Pure pretty platonics, I should call it.'

Mrs. Gammidge lifted her eyebrows. 'I dare say that is what they imagine it. Well, they're never in the same room for two minutes without being aware of it, and their absorption when they get in a corner--I saw her keep the Viceroy waiting, the other night after dinner, while Colonel Innes finished a sentence. And then she was annoyed at the interruption. Here's Kitty Vesey, lookin' SUCH a dog! Hello, Kitty! where did you get that hat, where did you get that tile? But that wasn't the colour of your hair last week, Kitty!'

'Don't feel any kind of a dog'--Mrs. Vesey's pout, though becoming, was genuine. 'I'm in a perfectly furious rage, my dears, and I'm coming home to cry, just as soon as I've had an ice. What do you think--they won't let me have Val for Captain Wynne's part in 'The Outcast Pearl'--they say he's been tried before, and he's a stick. Did you ever hear of such brutes? They want me to act with Major Dalton, and he's MUCH too old for the part.'

'Kitten,' said Mrs. Mickie, with conviction, 'Valentine Drake on the stage would be fatal to your affection for him.'

'I don't care, I won't act with anybody else--I'll throw up the part. Haven't I got to make love to the man? How am I to play up to such an unkissable-looking animal as Major Dalton? I shall CERTAINLY throw up the part.'

'Don't do anything rash, Kitty. If you do, they'll probably offer it to me, and I warn you I won't give it back to you.'

'Oh, refuse it, like a dear! I am dying to put them in a hole. It's jealousy, that's what it is. Goodbye, Mrs. Jack, I've had a lovely time. Val and I have been explaining our affection to the Archdeacon, and he says it's perfectly innocent. We're going to get him to put it on paper to produce when Jimmy sues for a divorce, aren't we, Val?'

'You're not going?' said Mrs. Jack Owen.

'Oh, yes, I must. But I've enjoyed myself awfully, and so has everybody I've been talking to. I say, Mickie, dear--about tomorrow afternoon--I suppose I may bring Val?'

'Oh, dear, yes,' Mrs. Mickie replied. 'But you must let me hold his hand.'

'I don't know which of you is the most ridiculous,' Mrs. Owen remarked; 'I shall write to both your husbands this very night,' but as the group shifted and left her alone with Mrs. Gammidge, she said she didn't know whether Mrs. Vesey would be quite so chirpy three weeks hence. 'When Mrs. Innes comes out,' she added in explanation. 'Oh, yes, Valentine Drake is quite her property. My own idea is that Kitty won't be in it.'

Where the road past Peliti's dips to the Mall Madeline met Horace Innes. When she appeared in her rickshaw he dismounted, and gave the reins to his syce. She saw in his eyes the look of a person who has been all day lapsing into meditation and rousing himself from it. 'You are very late,' she said as he came up.