The Safety Curten, Ethel May Dell [e ink epub reader .TXT] 📗

not be angry with her, an uneasy sense of doubt pressed upon him. Utterly his own as he knew her to be, yet dimly, intangibly, he began to wonder what her outlook on life could be, how she regarded the tie that bound them. It was impossible to reason seriously with her. She floated out of his reach at the first touch.
So that curious honeymoon of theirs continued, love and passion crudely mingled, union without knowledge, flaming worship and blind possession.
"You are happy?" Merryon asked her once.
To which she made ardent answer, "Always happy in your arms, O king."
And Merryon was happy also, though, looking back later, it seemed to him that he snatched his happiness on the very edge of the pit, and that even at the time he must have been half-aware of it.
When, a month after her coming, the scourge of the Plains caught her, as was inevitable, he felt as if his new-found kingdom had begun already to depart from him.
For a few days Puck was seriously ill with malaria. She came through it with marvellous resolution, nursed by Merryon and his bearer, the general factotum of the establishment.
But it left her painfully weak and thin, and the colonel became again furiously insistent that she should leave the Plains till the rains were over.
Merryon, curiously enough, did not insist. Only one evening he took the little wasted body into his arms and begged her--actually begged her--to consent to go.
"I shall be with you for the first fortnight," he said. "It won't be more than a six-weeks' separation."
"Six weeks!" she protested, piteously.
"Perhaps less," he said. "I may be able to come to you for a day or two in the middle. Say you will go--and stay, sweetheart! Set my mind at rest!"
"But, darling, you may be ill. A thousand things may happen. And I couldn't go back to Shamkura. I couldn't!" said Puck, almost crying, clinging fast around his neck.
"But why not?" he questioned, gently. "Weren't they kind to you there? Weren't you happy?"
She clung faster. "Happy, Billikins! With that hateful Captain Silvester lying in wait to--to make love to me! I didn't tell you before. But that--that was why I left."
He frowned above her head. "You ought to have told me before, Puck."
She trembled in his arms. "It didn't seem to matter when once I'd got away; and I knew it would only make you cross."
"How did he make love to you?" demanded Merryon.
He tried to see her face, but she hid it resolutely against him. "Don't, Billikins! It doesn't matter now."
"It does matter," he said, sternly.
Puck was silent.
Merryon continued inexorably. "I suppose it was your own fault. You led him on."
She gave a little nervous laugh against his breast. "I never meant to, Billikins. I--I don't much like men--as a rule."
"You manage to conceal that fact very successfully," he said.
She laughed again rather piteously. "You don't know me," she whispered. "I'm not--like that--all through."
"I hope not," said Merryon, severely.
She turned her face slightly upwards and snuggled it into his neck. "You used not to mind," she said.
He held her close in his arms the while he steeled himself against her. "Well, I mind now," he said. "And I will have no more of it. Is that clearly understood?"
She assented dubiously, her lips softly kissing his neck. "It isn't--all my fault, Billikins," she whispered, wistfully, "that men treat me--lightly."
He set his teeth. "It must be your fault," he declared, firmly. "You can help it if you try."
She turned her face more fully to his. "How grim you look, darling! You haven't kissed me for quite five minutes."
"I feel more like whipping you," he said, grimly.
She leapt in his arms as if he had been about to put his words into action. "Oh, no!" she cried. "No, you wouldn't beat me, Billikins. You--you wouldn't, dear, would you?" Her great eyes, dilated and imploring, gazed into his for a long desperate second ere she gave herself back to him with a sobbing laugh. "You're not in earnest, of course. I'm silly to listen to you. Do kiss me, darling, and not frighten me anymore!"
He held her close, but still he did not comply with her request. "Did this Silvester ever kiss you?" he asked.
She shook her head vehemently, hiding her face.
"Look at me!" he said.
"No, Billikins!" she protested.
"Then tell me the truth!" he said.
"He kissed me--once, Billikins," came in distressed accents from his shoulder.
"And you?" Merryon's words sounded clipped and cold.
She shivered. "I ran right away to you. I--I didn't feel safe any more."
Merryon sat silent. Somehow he could not stir up his anger against her, albeit his inner consciousness told him that she had been to blame; but for the first time his passion was cooled. He held her without ardour, the while he wondered.
That night he awoke to the sound of her low sobbing at his side. His heart smote him. He put forth a comforting hand.
She crept into his arms. "Oh, Billikins," she whispered, "keep me with you! I'm not safe--by myself."
The man's soul stirred within him. Dimly he began to understand what his protection meant to her. It was her anchor, all she had to keep her from the whirlpools. Without it she was at the mercy of every wind that blew. Again cold doubt assailed him, but he put it forcibly away. He gathered her close, and kissed the tears from her face and the trouble from her heart.


CHAPTER VIII
THE MOUTH OF THE PIT

So Puck had her way and stayed.
She was evidently sublimely happy--at least in Merryon's society, but she did not pick up her strength very quickly, and but for her unfailing high spirits Merryon would have felt anxious about her. There seemed to be nothing of her. She was not like a creature of flesh and blood. Yet how utterly, how abundantly, she satisfied him! She poured out her love to him in a perpetual offering that never varied or grew less. She gave him freely, eagerly, glowingly, all she had to give. With passionate triumph she answered to his need. And that need was growing. He could not blind himself to the fact. His profession no longer filled his life. There were times when he even resented its demands upon him. The sick list was rapidly growing, and from morning till night his days were full.
Puck made no complaint. She was always waiting for him, however late the hour of his return. She was always in his arms the moment the dripping overcoat was removed. Sometimes he brought work back with him, and wrestled with regimental accounts and other details far into the night. It was not his work, but someone had to do it, and it had devolved upon him.
Puck never would go to bed without him. It was too lonely, she said; she was afraid of snakes, or rats, or bogies. She used to curl up on the _charpoy_ in his room, clad in the airiest of wrappers, and doze the time away till he was ready.
One night she actually fell into a sound sleep thus, and he, finishing his work, sat on and on, watching her, loath to disturb her. There was deep pathos in her sleeping face. Lines that in her waking moments were never apparent were painfully noticeable in repose. She had the puzzled, wistful look of a child who has gone through trouble without understanding it--a hurt and piteous look.
He watched her thus till a sense of trespass came upon him, and then he rose, bent over her, and very tenderly lifted her.
She was alert on the instant, with a sharp movement of resistance. Then at once her arms went round his neck. "Oh, darling, is it you? Don't bother to carry me! You're so tired!"
He smiled at the idea, and she nestled against his heart, lifting soft lips to his.
He carried her to bed, and laid her down, but she would not let him go immediately. She yet clung about his neck, hiding her face against it.
He held her closely. "Good-night, little pal--little sweetheart," he said.
Her arms tightened. "Billikins!" she said.
He waited. "What is it, dear?"
She became a little agitated. He could feel her lips moving, but they said no audible word.
He waited in silence. And suddenly she raised her face and looked at him fully. There was a glory in her eyes such as he had never seen before.
"I dreamt last night that the wonderfullest thing happened," she said, her red lips quivering close to his own. "Billikins, what if--the dream came true?"
A hot wave of feeling went through him at her words. He crushed her to him, feeling the quick beat of her heart against his own, the throbbing surrender of her whole being to his. He kissed her burningly, with such a passion of devotion as had never before moved him.
She laughed rapturously. "Isn't it great, Billikins?" she said. "And I'd have missed it all if it hadn't been for you. Just think--if I hadn't jumped--before the safety-curtain--came--down!"
She was speaking between his kisses, and eventually they stopped her.
"Don't think," he said; "don't think!"
It was the beginning of a new era, the entrance of a new element into their lives. Perhaps till that night he had never looked upon her wholly in the light of wife. His blind passion for her had intoxicated him. She had been to him an elf from fairyland, a being elusive who offered him all the magic of her love, but upon whom he had no claims. But from that night his attitude towards her underwent a change. Very tenderly he took her into his own close keeping. She had become human in his eyes, no longer a wayward sprite, but a woman, eager-hearted, and his own. He gave her reverence because of that womanhood which he had only just begun to visualize in her. Out of his passion there had kindled a greater fire. All that she had in life she gave him, glorying in the gift, and in return he gave her love.
All through the days that followed he watched over her with unfailing devotion--a devotion that drew her nearer to him than she had ever been before. She was ever responsive to his mood, keenly susceptible to his every phase of feeling. But, curiously, she took no open notice of the change in him. She was sublimely happy, and like a child she lived upon happiness, asking no questions. He never saw her other than content.
Slowly that month of deadly rain wore on. The Plains had become a vast and fetid swamp, the atmosphere a weltering, steamy heat, charged with fever, leaden with despair.
But Puck was like a singing bird in the heart of the wilderness. She lived apart in a paradise of her own, and even the colonel had to relent again and bestow his grim smile upon her.
"Merryon's a lucky devil," he said, and everyone in the mess agreed with him.
But, "You wait!" said Macfarlane, the doctor, with gloomy emphasis. "There's more to come."
It was on a night of awful darkness that he uttered this prophecy, and his hearers were in too overwhelming a state of depression to debate the matter.
Merryon's bungalow was actually the only one in the station in which happiness reigned. They were sitting together in his den smoking a great many cigarettes, listening to the perpetual patter of the rain on the roof and the drip, drip, drip of it from gutter to veranda, superbly content and "completely weather-proof," as Puck expressed it.
"I hope none of the boys will turn