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

"It looks pretty," the judge admitted. "What's the damage?"

"Thirty rupees." She looked laughingly into his face, but he did not flinch.

"It's a bargain," he said, and produced his purse. "Diana, where is Mrs. Hurst?"

"Somewhere in the marquee. An old civilian has got hold of her. You had better go to the rescue."

"Thanks. After that doubtful compliment, I think I will. Won't you come too?"

She shook her head.

"I must give the poker cigar-box another chance. Besides, Dick Hatherway is coming over for me in a few minutes."

"Humph!" said the judge. Without further observation he pocketed his purchase and made his way briskly across the path that separated the bungalows from the marquee. In spite of his buoyant bearing, he looked unusually ill and haggard as he stood beneath the artificial light, gazing over the heads of the dancing couples as though in search of some one. The unbroken, stifling heat had told upon him, as it had indeed told upon most of the gay, seemingly unwearied crowd; but, like them, he gave no sign, and his step, as he laveered across the floor, was light with vitality. He found Mrs. Hurst seated in a flower-banked alcove which opened out into the garden, and on the judge's arrival the bald-headed Commissionary who had been entertaining her took a somewhat hasty departure. The judge's manner, in point of fact, had been courteously discouraging, and he now accepted the vacated chair with an air of conscious victory.

"I have always possessed the knack of getting people to go," he said. "You don't mind, Jean? You see, I'm a privileged person to-day, and consider I have a right to be officious. Say you're pleased to see me."

She nodded, her eyes fixed absent-mindedly in front of her.

"Of course I am. Why are you so late?"

"A crowd of natives stopped me a piteous-looking crowd, and not particularly friendly. There's a whole swarm of them outside in the compound, watching. I wonder what they think of it all."

Mrs. Hurst glanced over the barrier of flowers into the darkness. Everywhere there was a noiseless, indefinable movement, and once a sharp, shrill cry rose above the satiating sweetness of the valse. She winced as though the sound hurt her, but her face returned instantly to its normal composure.

"Think of what?" she asked.

"Of our European ideas of charity," he said. "They are famishing, and they see us dance. The contrast no doubt strikes them."

"You think the business a mistake?"

He nodded.

"It blots out years of self-sacrificing, even heroic labour on their behalf. They are like children. They hate the doctor who cures them, and they have no understanding at all for our European compromises between virtue and pleasure. The fact that we are eating and drinking for their future benefit is not clear to them. They are hungry that is the salient feature in their logic."

Mrs. Hurst remained silent for a moment. A faint, sarcastic smile played about her lips.

"One day their logic will improve," she said; " but I doubt if their opinion of our methods will alter much. They will see that our charity is a mask for pleasure- seeking or self-glory; that we who teach them Christian love hate each other as cordially as do their hundred and one sects, and when they have made that and a few other discoveries our prestige will not be worth a breath." She made a little careless gesture. "I live in a glass house and throw stones," she said. "But I am at least frank about my own fallibility. I am not charitable or particularly Christian." "No," the judge admitted. She laughed with a genuine delight. "I ought not to be flattered by such an unqualified agreement. Of whom or of what were you thinking?" "Of David," was the grave answer. Her face hardened. "What of David?"

"He knows you hate him. He told me the other day that he heard what you said to me some twelve years ago, and I know that it cut deep. He's your own son, Jean, and I have every reason to fear he is going wrong."

She drummed impatiently with her fingers on the arm of her chair, but the judge met her frown without waver ing.

"What do you expect me to do?" she demanded. "What any woman in your place would do." "But I am not 'any woman.'" Suddenly her frown melted, and she laid her hand lightly on his arm. "You want me to control him," she said. "I can't it wouldn't even be fair, and I haven't the right. I have no feeling which would justify such an interference. He is heavily handicapped, and, since I have no affection to offer, I must at least leave him his entire freedom. Fortunately, I can do so with an easy conscience. Our name does not depend upon him if it did, I should act differently." The judge sighed.

"I've been interfering again malgre moi, as the French say," he observed ruefully. "However, as I'm privileged, I suppose I can indulge in luxuries."

She looked at him with a quiet amusement.

"What is this 'privilege' you are talking about so much "?" she asked. "Is it your birthday?"

"Not my birthday exactly but a birthday." He drew out the gold chain and laid it clumsily in her hand. "I rescued that for you out of the bazaar as a souvenir," he said.

"Of what?"

"We met for the first time thirty years ago," he explained simply.

There was a moment's silence. She toyed thoughtfully with the gift, and the man beside her watched her, his small blinking eyes very bright. Also there was a smile about his mouth which only a close observer would have noticed as being somewhat too persistent.

"I remember now," she said, and looked at him with a critical intentness which appeared to note every crease and fold in his round, somewhat puffy face. "It was at the Hunters' dinner-party," she went on musingly. "You were different in those days, Judge. I have a recollection of a very fiery young man who said very little but looked unutterable things. In my girlish vanity it never occurred to me that you probably looked the same at every one, and I was terrified that you were going to fall in love with me."

"Well, by some miracle I escaped the temptation," the judge returned placidly. Then, as though to change the subject, he indicated Diana Chichester and Hatherway, who were crossing the empty floor in the direction of the exit. "Diana has grown an unusually lovely girl," he said, "and, of course, Hatherway is head over ears in love. They make a handsome couple--"

Mrs. Hurst rose abruptly. Her eyes had wandered back to the compound, and suddenly the whiteness of her face had become deathly.

"Take me away from here," she said in a low tone of suppressed excitement. "I don't know what is the matter with me those natives constantly moving in the dark irritate me--" She saw his face of troubled astonishment and recovered herself with an effort. "I beg your pardon -- you were speaking of Diana and Hatherway? What, matchmaking, Judge?" She laughed. "Diana Chichester is like me," she said. "She will only marry a remarkable man and Hatherway is not remarkable."

That fact was one which Hatherway himself had begun to realise, and almost at that identical moment. He had danced with Diana Chichester, and he danced well, and, so long as his arm supported her, so long he felt her equal. Like most Englishmen of his class, he excelled in all things physical, taking a sheer, unconscious delight in his own strength and health; conscious, too, in an inoffensive way, of a well-built figure and a handsome face. Nor in the normal course of his life had he ever felt particularly troubled by the knowledge that his mental abilities did not rise above the average. The matter rarely occurred to him, and never depressed him. He was popular in his regiment, he performed his duties with punctual efficiency, he did not believe in works of supererogation, and amongst men, even clever men, he held his own.

But he was discovering that nothing is more ordinary than an ordinary man in the presence of an unusual woman, and for the simple reason that, whereas men amongst themselves tacitly accept a plane on which their varying intelligences are equally at home, a woman of character never sinks, even for the sake of congeniality, below her own level. This peculiarity, which makes the sex a valuable moral force but an occasionally uncomfortable social factor, was very prominent in Diana Chichester's character. She was gracious and kind. She listened to Hatherway's conversation with an attention which would have deceived most men; but Hatherway was hi love, and he knew that she was unconsciously condescending to him.

She stood at his side, fanning herself and watching the moving lights on the road, and when her eyes rested on him for an instant it was always with that expression of friendly vagueness which was the chief point of resemblance between Mrs. Chichester and herself. The expression warned him, but in the halflight of the garden her beauty, and, above all, the charm of her personality, at once vigorous and feminine, swept him off his feet. The touch of romantic sentimentality, which is as English as it is unacknowledged, had been awakened by the music, the soft mystery of the Indian night, perhaps a little by Mrs. Chichester's charity champagne, and suddenly he lost his head, and immediately afterwards his nerve. What he meant to say had been written clearly enough in his mind what he really said was confused and stumbling, a bald and yet pathetic confession of a long-standing devotion.

When the stream of his broken eloquence ran dry, as it did very quickly, he found that he was holding her hand and that she was looking at him with an objective interest, which, had he known it, had once held back David Hurst from a culminating folly. It calmed him, instantly and painfully, but he retained her hand, striving, according to his instinct, to hold physically what his mind and soul had failed to touch.

"I know I have been a fool to say anything," he finished, with a new humility. "I can see by your face what you are going to answer but don't say it, Di! I've quite understood it would only hurt us both, and I would rather think that nothing had happened and that I had still some hope." He smiled courageously at her. ' ' For I shall go on hoping and trying, Di. It would be trite of me to say that I'm not worthy of you I don't think any man is worthy of a woman like you but my love is an honest, clean thing, and that is perhaps as much as even the best can offer you."

"I think it is," she answered gravely. "But you look at things from the wrong standpoint, Dick. You talk as though we women sat on some sort of a pedestal, watching a varying procession of offers pass before us, of which we must inevitably choose one. I don't want to choose I have not the slightest desire to marry at any rate, not for the pure sake of marrying. I am very interested in life and in myself, and the other interests which some women seem to need are not necessary to me. I have my books and the world. I want nothing more."

"A woman who does not marry--" Hatherway began doggedly.

"misses her vocation," Diana concluded, laughing. "I wonder, my dear Dick, how you men would like it if we planted a vocation before you chimney-sweeping, for instance and told you categorically that that was your business in life, and that if you didn't accept it you were running against your destiny? You would protest vigorously as I protest. The idea takes away all freedom all individuality and turns us into a herd of sheep."

"Do you mean that you will never