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

a low voice, "Sarasvati is awake and wants to see you."

He turned from the window where he had been standing. He had on his driving coat, and his expression betrayed a nervous restlessness.

"I am waiting for Smith," he said. "When he comes I will go to her. How is she?"

"I think she is as well as possible." She came a step nearer. "David," she said gravely, "you must never let her know. I want you to promise me I believe it would break her heart. She meant to help you. The thought that she helped you is her one comfort. Don't take it from her promise me!"

He looked at her. Unconsciously she had come quite close to him, and he could see that her eyes were dim with tears. He stretched out his hand as though to take hers, and let it drop limply to his side.

"You know I won't take it from her, Di," he said. "Why should I? It was my fault and, after all, it's much better as it is. If I were elected, we should have to go on with the fight, and in the end it would kill her. As it is when the business is all over I shall shut this place up and get away right to the other end of the earth somewhere where people will leave us to live our lives in peace."

"And your work your ambition?" she broke in impulsively.

"That's all over," he answered. "It was mad and wrong of me ever to have thought of it. I see that now and and I can't I haven't the right to make her suffer." He smiled whimsically as he saw her face. "I am sorry, Di; I know that it's a disappointment for you. You wanted to make me a great man in spite of myself, but you see I'm a hopeless case. You must just look upon these last few weeks as a bit of charity nursing thrown away on an incurable failure and well, I know what you think of failures."

"You don't know," she broke in with a burst of her old storminess. "You insist on confusing me with your mother, and there couldn't be a worse mistake. What do you think I care whether you succeed or fail in the eyes of the world! You have succeeded in mine."

"I should like to know how," he said. He spoke lightly, with a trace of sarcasm in his tone, but he had flushed under the energy of her glance.

Diana turned away from him. She picked up a silver ornament lying on the table, and played with it in a kind of feverish impatience.

"You have succeeded in being yourself," she said almost angrily.

"You mean I have gone my own way?" He gave a little movement expressive of doubt. "But going one's own way does not necessarily mean going to the devil, as you once so cheerfully suggested, Di. It means swimming against the stream, and, though the individual may think the stream is running in the wrong direction, I am beginning to question his right to try and upset the divine order of things. After all, when ninety-nine sheep agree that it is better to stay in the pen the hundredth is wiser if he accepts their verdict, even if he yearns after fresh pastures. The ninety-nine are the majority, and are bound to be right."

"You are talking nonsense," she said gently, "and you know it. The world has been made by its exceptions."

"Disturbed rather," he corrected. '* Lucifer was the first exception, and his children have all played the same unhappy part. But all that is beside the point." His manner changed suddenly. "It's no use my philosophising. I have chosen my part. I have made up my mind to be in the wrong that is to say, in the minority and I am prepared to take the consequences. There was only one mistake in the declaration of war that I made to you in Kolruna. I ought to have gone my own way alone, Di."

She started and looked up at him.

"You saved her life," she said.

"Have I? Or have I broken her heart?"

"David " she began, but the memory of a pinched wan face silenced her. Her inability to compromise prevented her from entering on a long protest or offering him some cheap and trite consolation. Broken-hearted? yes, that was the one description which suited those hungry, pleading eyes. "Can it be more terrible than life?" Sarasvati had asked respecting her own death, and in that question had betrayed the uncomplaining, scarcely recognised grief which lay at the bottom of her love. "You must take her away from here," Diana said resolutely. "If anything is breaking her heart it is our outrageous climate. Take her back to her own country she is too delicate a plant to stand so rough a soil."

"I can't," Hurst answered, "it isn't safe. I heard only this morning from Professor Heilig, and he warns me to keep my wife out of India. The common people believe that she was spirited up to heaven, but by this time the priestly party knows where she is, and will spare no pains to recover her and incidentally put a knife into me." He gave a short laugh. "Of the latter possibility I am not afraid, but it is my duty--" He hesitated, as though the word displeased him. "My duty to the good folk in Kolruna is to prevent the possibility of a conflagration. You know, I suppose, that things are rather troubled again over there?"

"Yes," she said. "I heard from my father that there is mischief brewing, It is rather hastening my return."

He had been standing by the window in impatient expectation, and he started round now, a sound that was like a suppressed cry breaking from his lips.

"Your return Diana you are not going back?"

"Yes," she said steadily. "I meant to tell you before, but I am going back to my people next month."

He strode across the room until less than a foot separated them. His face was colourless, his black brows had met over the short straight nose in a threatening line which lent his whole expression an energy akin to violence. She braced herself, facing unfalteringly the moment which she had known since yesterday to be inevitable.

"You are not going back," he said slowly and distinctly. "You cannot go back. In the present state of things it is not safe for any woman to be in Kolruna."

"My mother refuses to leave my father, and I refuse to leave them both," she answered.

"There is another reason," he said between his teeth.

She felt herself flush under his savage, miserable eyes, but her voice retained its steadiness.

"What other reason should there be?" she asked.

For a period of time which seemed to her endless he studied her, seeming to be searching her to the soul; then only his features relaxed and softened.

"I am sorry, Di," he said quietly. "Even if there was a reason I should not have the right to ask it. I think all this work has been getting on my brain. You will stay with us until until she is safe."

"Yes," she said. Her breath was coming more easily. The moment was over. He had been sud- denly brought face to face with a circumstance which she had recognised and fought with hours before, she knew what was passing in him, for she too suffered and she was conscious of a curious pride in his calm and regained gentleness. "I will stay as long as your wife needs me," she added quietly.

He smiled the old, one-sided smile which in that moment hurt her by its unconscious resignation.

"That will be a long time, Di," he said. "You have been such a splendid friend to her. She will miss you more than she knows. But it can't be helped. Others have more claim on you." He took out his watch. "The doctor has promised to be here with the nurse by six," he went on. "He told me there was nothing to to fear for the next few hours. But I am glad you are staying with her. One can't tell and you would let me know at once, wouldn't you?"

"Of course, David."

He stood hesitating at the door.

"I think I'll go and see her now. Tell Smith when he comes to wait downstairs for me. I shan't be long. Good-bye."

She felt that he was looking back at her. The desire to go to him and take his hands, to offer him, if only in that silent farewell, her understanding and sympathy, broke over her with a violence that frightened her. She fought it down and nodded to him with a cheerful courage.

"Good luck, and a big majority!" she said.

"Thank you." He closed the door softly after him and went down the corridor to his wife's room. He was not conscious of any particular sensation. After that sudden, violent flash of pain a kind of numbness had crept over him which hid him mercifully from himself. He scarcely knew whence the pain had come. Diana was going. Well, that was inevitable. She would marry Hatherway. That was almost as inevitable as the rest. Dick had always kept his place in the running. He was a good fellow. Diana would be safe with him. But he wished she had not said that about the " big majority." It was almost as though she had laughed at him. And he had fought hard as hard as he had once run in those children's races when he had always been beaten, and when her good-natured laughter had stung him to an impotent frenzy. But that had been in the days when he had loved her. It was strange that time seemed closer to him, more real than the present.

He opened his wife's door and entered on tip-toe. She lay in the centre of the great four-poster, her small dark head thrown back upon the dead white of the pillows, the two plaits of black hair hanging over either shoulder in symmetrical order. The delicate arms lay stretched out on the coverlet, and she seemed to sleep.

Hurst drew closer, but he did not touch her, or speak. He stood at the foot of the bed and watched her. She might almost have been a child, so pathetically small and fragile did she appear in the wide, oldfashioned bed, and yet her face was that of a woman who had suffered. He saw the lines of pain about her mouth, and the hollow cheeks, but he felt no tenderness, no pity. He only knew that he was glad that she was asleep. In that moment he could not have played the comedy of gratitude. He could not have thanked her for a misdirected zeal which had put the seal upon his failure. He felt no bitterness, but a frozen indifference which ached dully, persistently, like an old reopened wound. It hurt him. He strove to shake it off to arouse himself to a normal natural feeling. He called to mind that this was his wife, and that she stood on the borderland of death. But he felt nothing. She was a total stranger to him. He could not place her in his life. It was difficult for him to understand how she came to him in this solemn, dreary English bedroom, where generations of his race had first seen the light. Only when he shut his eyes and recalled the memory of a Temple Shrine lying in the midst of the waters beneath a sky of unchanging blue did she become real to him as a vivid dream is real to the dreamer. But it was no more than a dream, and when he looked at the motionless figure lying before him it faded wholly. She was only the shadow of that half-divine being who had knelt before the altar in the midst of the dying lotus-blossoms, and she had become a