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

to take you! Tomorrow? Oh, all right if you want to VERY badly. But I won't promise you strawberries--they're nearly all gone.'

There was the sound of a departing pony's trot, and Mrs. Innes came into the drawing-room.

'Good heavens, Horace! what are you sitting there for like a--like a ghost? Why didn't you make a noise or something, and why aren't you at office? I can't tell you how you startled me.'

'It is early,' Colonel Innes said. 'We are neither of us in the house, as a rule, at this hour.'

'Coincidence!' Violet turned a cool, searching glance on her husband, and held herself ready. 'I came home early because I want to alter the lace on my yellow bodice for tonight. It's too disgusting as it is. But I was rather glad to get away from Mrs. Mickie's lot. So rowdy!'

'And I came because I had a special reason for wanting to speak to you.'

Mrs. Violet's lips parted, and her breath, in spite of herself, came a little faster.

'As we are dining out tonight, I thought that if I didn't catch you now I might not have another opportunity--till tomorrow morning.'

'And it's always a pity to spoil one's breakfast. I can tell from your manner, mon ami, it's something disagreeable. What have I been and gone and done?'

She was dancing, poor thing, in her little vulgar way, on hot iron. But her eyes kept their inconsistent coolness.

'I heard something today which you are not in the way of hearing. You have--probably--no conception that it could be said.'

'Then she has been telling other people. ABSOLUTELY the worst thing she could do!' Mrs. Innes exclaimed privately, sitting unmoved, her face a little too expectant.

'You won't be prepared for it--you may be shocked and hurt by it. Indeed, I think there is no need to repeat it to you. But I must put you on your guard. Men are coarser, you know, than women; they are apt to put their own interpretation--'

'What is it?'

There was a physical gasp, a sharpness in her voice that brought Innes's eyes from the floor to her face.

'I am sorry,' he said, 'but--don't overestimate it, don't let it worry you. It was simply a very impertinent--a very disagreeable reference to you and Mr. Holmcroft, I think, in connection with the Dovedell's picnic. It was a particularly silly thing as well, and I am sure no one would attach any importance to it, but it was said openly at the Club, and--'

'Who said it?' Mrs. Innes demanded.

A flood of colour rushed over her face. Horace marked that she blushed.

'I don't know whether I ought to tell you, Violet. It certainly was not meant for your ears.'

'If I'm not to know who said it, I don't see why I should pay any attention to it. Mere idle rumour--'

Innes bit his lip.

'Captain Gordon said it,' he replied.

'Bobby Gordon! DO tell me what he said! I'm dying to know. Was he very disagreeable? I DID give his dance away on Thursday night.'

Innes looked at her with the curious distrust which she often inspired in him. He had a feeling that he would like to put her out of the room into a place by herself, and keep her there.

'I won't repeat what he said.' Colonel Innes took up the 'Saturday Review'.

'Oh, do, Horace! I particularly want to know.'

Innes said nothing.

'Horace! Was it--was it anything about Mr. Holmcroft being my Secretariat baa-lamb?'

'If you adorn your guess with a little profanity,' said Innes, acidly, 'you won't be far wrong.'

Mrs. Violet burst into a peal of laughter.

'Why, you old goose!' she articulated, behind her handkerchief; 'he said that to ME.'

Innes laid down the 'Saturday Review'.

'To you!' he repeated; 'Gordon said it to you!'

'Rather!' Mrs. Violet was still mirthful. 'I'm not sure that he didn't call poor little Homie something worse than that. It's the purest jealousy on his part--nothing to make a fuss about.'

The fourth skin which enables so many of us to be callous to all but the relative meaning of careless phrases had not been given to Innes, and her words fell upon his bare sense of propriety.

'Jealous,' he said, 'of a married woman? I find that difficult to understand.'

Violet's face straightened out.

'Don't be absurd, Horace. These boys are always jealous of somebody or other--it's the occupation of their lives! I really don't see how one can prevent it.'

'It seems to me that a self-respecting woman should see how. Your point of view in these matters is incomprehensible.'

'Perhaps,' Violet was driven by righteous anger to say, 'you find Miss Anderson's easier to understand.'

Colonel Innes's face took its regimental disciplinary look, and, though his eyes were aroused, his words were quiet with repression.

'I see no reason to discuss Miss Anderson with you,' he said. 'She has nothing to do with what we are talking about.'

'Oh, don't you, really! Hasn't she, indeed! I take it you are trying to make me believe that compromising things are said about Mr. Holmcroft and me at the Club. Well, I advise you to keep your ears open a little more, and listen to the things said about you and Madeline Anderson there. But I don't suppose you would be in such a hurry to repeat them to HER.'

Innes turned very white, and the rigidity of his face gave place to heavy dismay. His look was that of a man upon whom misfortune had fallen out of a clear sky. For an instant he stared at his wife. When he spoke his voice was altered.

'For God's sake!' he said, 'let us have done with this pitiful wrangling. I dare say you can take care of yourself; at all events, I only meant to warn you. But now you must tell me exactly what you mean by this that you have said--this--about--'

'The fat's in the fire,' was Mrs. Innes's reflection.

'Certainly, I'll tell you--'

'Don't shout, please!'

'I mean simply that all Simla is talking about your affair with Miss Anderson. You may imagine that because you are fifteen years older than she is things won't be thought of, but they are, and I hear it's been spoken about at Viceregal Lodge. I KNOW Lady Bloomfield has noticed it, for she herself mentioned it to me. I told her I hadn't the slightest objection, and neither have I, but there's an old proverb about people in glass houses. What are you going to do?'

Colonel Innes's expression was certainly alarming, and he had made a step toward her that had menace in it.

'I am going out,' he said, and turned and left her to her triumph.


Chapter 3.IX.

She--Violet--had unspeakably vulgarized it, but it must be true--it must be, to some extent, true. She may even have lied about it, but the truth was there, fundamentally, in the mere fact that it had been suggested to her imagination. Madeline's name, which had come to be for him an epitome of what was finest and most valuable, most to be lived for, was dropping from men's lips into a kind of an abyss of dishonourable suggestion. There was no way out of it or around it. It was a cloud which encompassed them, suddenly blackening down.

There was nothing that he could do--nothing. Except, yes, of course--that was obvious, as obvious as any other plain duty. Through his selfishness it had a beginning; in spite of his selfishness it should have an end. That went without saying. No more walks or rides. In a conventional way, perhaps--but nothing deliberate, designed--and never alone together. Gossip about flippant married women was bad enough, but that it should concern itself with an unprotected creature like Madeline was monstrous, incredible. He strode fiercely into the road round Jakko, and no little harmless snake, if it had crawled across his path, would have failed to suffer a quick fate under the guidance of his imagination. But there was nothing for him to kill, and he turned upon himself.

The sun went down into the Punjab and left great blue-and-purple hill worlds barring the passage behind him. The deodars sank waist deep into filmy shadow, and the yellow afterlight lay silently among the branches. A pink-haunched monkey lopading across the road with a great show of prudence seemed to have strayed into an unfamiliar country, and the rustling twigs behind him made an episode of sound. The road in perpetual curve between its little stone parapet and the broad flank of the hill rose and fell under the deodars; Innes took its slopes and its steepnesses with even, unslackened stride, aware of no difference, aware of little indeed except the physical necessity of movement, spurred on by a futile instinct that the end of his walk would be the end of his trouble--his amazing, black, menacing trouble. A pony's trot behind him struck through the silence like percussion-caps; all Jakko seemed to echo with it; and it came nearer--insistent, purposeful--but he was hardly aware of it until the creature pulled up beside him, and Madeline, slipping quickly off, said--

'I'm coming too.'

He took off his hat and stared at her. She seemed to represent a climax.

'I'm coming too,' she said. 'I'm tired of picking flies off the Turk, and he's really unbearable about them tonight. Here, syce.' She threw the reins to the man and turned to Innes with a smile of relief. 'I would much rather do a walk. Why--you want me to come too, don't you?'

His face was all one negative, and under the unexpectedness of it and the amazement of it her questioning eyes slowly filled with sudden, uncontrollable tears, so that she had to lower them, and look steadily at the hoof-marks in the road while she waited for his answer.

'You know how I feel about seeing you--how glad I always am,' he stammered. 'But there are reasons--'

'Reasons?' she repeated, half audibly.

'I don't know how to tell you. I will write. But let me put you up again--'

'I will not,' Madeline said, with a sob, 'I won't be sent home like a child. I am going to walk, but--but I can quite well go alone.' She started forward, and her foot caught in her habit so that she made an awkward stumble and came down on her knee. In rising she stumbled again, and his quick arm was necessary. Looking down at her, he saw that she was crying bitterly. The tension had lasted long, and the snap had come when she least expected it.

'Stop,' Innes said, firmly, hardly daring to turn his head and ascertain the blessed fact that they were still alone. 'Stop instantly. You shall not go by yourself.' He flicked the dust off her habit with his pocket-handkerchief. 'Come, please; we will go on together.' Her distress seemed to make things simple again. It was as if the cloud that hung over them had melted as she wept, and lifted, and drifted a little further on. For the moment, naturally, nothing mattered except that she should be comforted. As she walked by his side shaken with her effort at self-control, he had to resist the impulse to touch her. His hand tingled to do its part in soothing her, his arm ached to protect her, while he vaguely felt an element of right, of justice, in her tears; they were in a