Part 2

“I have waited for you by the temple and here and in many other places. I wait every night. How is it you come so seldom?” he said. His voice was stronger, his bearing more alert and eager than at Govindhar. He spoke with a kind of assurance of welcome which she responded to instantly.

“I would have come. I didn’t know. How can I tell?”

He looked at her smiling.

“There is only one way. Why didn’t you learn it in India? It was all round you and you didn’t even notice. You don’t know your powers. Listen.”

Beatrice Veronica drew towards him, eyes rapt on his face, scarcely breathing. Yes—in India she had felt there were mighty stirrings about her, thrills of an unknown spiritual life, crisping the surface like a breeze, and passing—passing before ever you could say it was there. But it did not touch her with so much as an outermost ripple. She was too ignorant. Now—she could learn.

“You see—this is the way of it,” he said, leaning against the black pillar. “The soul is sheer thought and knowledge, but, prisoned in the body, it is the slave of the senses and all its powers are limited by these. And they lead it into acts which in their consequences are fetters of iron. Still, at a certain point of attainment one can be freer than most men believe possible. When this is so, you use the Eight Means of Mental Concentration and are free. You step into a new dimension.”

“Is this true? Do you know it?” she said earnestly. “Because, if there is any way which can be taken, I have a quest—something—someone——”

She stammered, and could not finish.

“I know. Someone you want to find in the dark. Well, it can be done. You would not believe the possibilities of that freed state of consciousness. Here, in the Shalimar you think you see nothing but moonlight and water—nothing in fact but what your senses tell you. But that is nonsense. Your eyes are shut. You are asleep in Canada and yet you see them by the inner light of memory even now and the help I am giving you! Well—use the Eight Means, and you will see them waking and as clearly as you do in sleep. But I, who am instructed, see more. This garden to me is peopled with those who made it—the dead kings and queens who rejoiced in its beauty. See—” he laid his hand on hers and suddenly she saw. Amazing—amazing! They were alone no longer.

Sitting on the floor of the pavilion, looking down into the moon-mirroring water was a woman in the ancient dress of Persia, golden and jewelled,—she flung her head up magnificently as if at the words, and looked at them, the moon full in her eyes. The garden was peopled now not only with roses but white blossoms sending out fierce hot shafts of perfume. They struck Beatrice Veronica like something tangible, and half dazed her as she stared at the startling beauty of the unveiled woman revealed like a flaming jewel in the black and white glory of the night.

With his hand on hers, she knew without words. Nourmahal the Empress, ruler of the Emperor who made the Shalimar for her pleasure, who put India with all its glories at her feet. Who else should be the soul of the garden?

It seemed to Beatrice Veronica that she had never beheld beauty before. It was beyond all pictures, all images in its sultry passionate loveliness,—it was——

But as she watched spellbound, the man lifted his hand from hers and the garden was empty of all but moonlight and roses once more, and he and she alone. She could have wept for utter loss.

“Was it a ghost?” she asked trembling.

“No, no,—an essential something that remains in certain places, not a ghost. There is nothing of what you mean by that word. Don’t be frightened! You’ll often see them.”

She stared at him perplexed, and he added:

“You see? One has only to put oneself in the receptive state and time is no more. One sees—one hears. You are only a beginner so I cannot show you much. But you _are_ a beginner or you would not be here in the Shalimar with me now. There is a bond between us which goes back—” He paused, looking keenly at her, and said quickly “Centuries, and further.”

She was stunned, dazed by the revelations. They meant so much more that it is possible to record. Also the sensation was beginning in her which we all know before waking. The dream wavers on its foundation, loosens, becomes misty, makes ready to disappear. It would be gone—gone before she could know. She caught his hand as if to steady it.

“Are you V. Lydiat?” she cried.—“You must be. You are. You come to me every day—a voice. O let me come to you like this, and teach me, teach me, that I may know and see. I am a blind creature in a universe of wonders. Let me come every night.”

His face was receding, palpitating, collapsing, but his voice came as if from something beyond it.

“That is what you call me. Names are nothing. Yes, come every night.”

It was gone. She was in the Shalimar alone, and somewhere in the distance she heard Sidney Verrier’s voice calling clear as a bird. Beatrice Veronica woke that morning with the sun glorying through the eastern arch of her veranda. She was still dressed. She had slept there all night. Of the dream she remembered snatches, hints, which left new hopes and impulses germinating in her soul. The unknown flowers were sown in spring. They would blossom in summer in unimaginable beauty.

That was the beginning of a time of strange and enchanting happiness. Thus one may imagine the joy of a man born blind who by some miraculous means is made to see, and wakes in a world of wonders. It is impossible that anyone should know greater bliss. The very weight of it made her methodical and practical lest a grain of heavenly gold should escape her in its transmutation to earthly terms.

The morning was V. Lydiat’s. At ten o’clock she betook herself to her high veranda, and folding her hands and composing her mind looked out to sea through the wide way of pines which terminated in its azure beauty. Then, as has been told before, it would blow softly away on a dream-wind, and the story begin.

And at night there was now invariably the meeting. At first that was always in some place she knew—somewhere she recognized from memory, haunts of her own with Sidney Verrier. But one night a new thing happened—she woke into dream by the Ganges at Cawnpore, at the terrible Massacre Ghaut, a place she had always avoided because of the horrible memories of the Indian mutiny which sicken the soul of every European who stands there.

Now she stood at the top of the beautiful broken steps under the dense shade of the very trees where the mutineers ambushed, and he was below, beckoning her.

“Well done, well done!” he said, as she came slowly down to where holy Ganges lips the lowest step. “This was a great experiment. You could never have come here alone,—I could not have brought you until now, and I had to fight the repugnance in you, but here you are. You see? We have been putting stepping-stones, you and I, each from our own side, and now the bridge is made and we hold hands in the middle. You can come anywhere now. And listen—I too am learning to go where I have never been. The world will be open to us soon.”

He looked at her with glowing eyes—the eyes of the explorer, the discoverer, on the edge of triumph.

“But why here—in this horrible place?” She shrank a little even from him as she looked about her. He laughed:

“That is no more now than a last year’s winter storm. They know. They were not afraid even then. They laugh now as they go on their way. Be happy, beloved. They are beyond the mysteries.”

Of that dream, she carried back to earth the word “beloved.” Who had said it, she could not tell, but in the dark—the warm friendly dark—there was someone who loved her, whom she loved with a perfect union. Was it—could it be V. Lydiat? She did not know. Also she remembered that she had dreamed the Massacre Ghaut at Cawnpore, and took pains to search for pictures and stories of the place to verify her dream. Yes—it was true. Things were becoming clearer.

Also, her power in writing increased very noticeably about this time. V. Lydiat was recognized as holding a unique place amongst writers of the Orient. On the one side were the scholars, the learned men who wrote in terms of ancient Oriental thought, terms no ordinary reader could understand, and on the other, the writers of the many-faceted surface, the adventurers, toying with the titillating life of zenana and veiled dangerous love-affairs,—a tissue of coloured crime. V. Lydiat recorded all, and with a method of his own which approached perfect loveliness in word and phrase. The faiths of the East were his,—in India and China alike his soul sheltered under the Divine Wings, at home in strange heavens, and hells which one day would blossom into heavens. As he and Beatrice Veronica had posed stepping-stones until they met in the middle, so he built a splendid bridge across the wide seas of misunderstanding between east and west, and many souls passed across it going and coming and were glad.

“I’m only a pioneer,” he said to Beatrice Veronica one day (she could dream the day as well as the night) sitting in the gardens of the Taj. “You too. It will be done much better soon. See how we are out-growing our limitations and feeling out after the wonders of the sub-conscious self, the essential that hands on the torch when we die. Die? No, I hate that word. Let’s say, climb a step higher on the ladder of existence. Every inch gives us a wider view of the country. You see?”

She liked that “You see?” which came so often. It was so eager—so fraternal in a way. Yes, they were good comrades, she and V. Lydiat.

“Do you know I write for you?” she ventured to ask. “I have often wondered if you speak as unconsciously as I write.”

“No, no. I know. I always know. Longer ago than you would believe you used to work for me. We are in the same whirl-pool, you and I. Our atoms must always be whirled together again. You can’t escape me, Beatrice Veronica.”

“Do you think I want to?” she asked.

But in daily life she clung to her secret like grim death. She would not have been burdened with V. Lydiat’s laurels for the world. The dishonesty of it! And yet one could never explain. Hopeless! Who would believe? And apart from that, she had a kind of growing certainty that V. Lydiat would enter upon his own one day. Not that she remembered him as any more than a vague dream influence; she did not, but yet the realization of a Presence was growing, and she herself developing daily.

There is not much space here to tell the wondrous sights she saw with V. Lydiat, and holding by his hand. That would be a book in itself—and a beautiful one. And though she could only remember them in drifts like a waft of far-off music on a breeze, it was incomparable food for the sub-conscious self, and strengthened every latent faculty of memory and experience. Beatrice Veronica promised to be a very remarkable woman if some day the inner and outer faculties should unite.

But what was to be the solvent? That, this story can only indicate faintly for the end is not yet.

She went out a little less into her small world of daily life—not shunning it certainly, but her inner life was so crowded, so blissful that the outer seemed insipid enough. Why figure at teas and bridge parties, and struggle with the boredom of mah jong when the veranda was waiting with the green way before it that led to the silence of the sea, and the lover beyond? For it had come to that—the lover. All joy summed up in that word, joy unmeasurable as the oceans of sunlight—a perfect union. She walked as one carefully bearing a brimmed cup,—not a drop, not a drop must spill,—so she carried herself a little stiffly as it might seem to the outer world which could not guess the reason.

People liked her—but she moved on her own orbit, and it only intersected theirs at certain well-defined points. Her soft abstracted air won but eluded;—it put an atmosphere of strangeness about her, of thoughts she could not share with anyone.

“She must have rather a lonely life of it!” they said. But she never had.

One day came a letter from Sidney Verrier, now Sidney Mourilyan, from her husband’s coffee plantation in the Shevaroy Hills in southern India. She wrote from the settlement of Yercaud— “Not a town,” she wrote, “but dear little scattered houses in the trees. We have even a club, think of it!—after the wilds where you and I have been!—and there are pleasant people, and Tony expects to do well with coffee here. I wish half the day that you could come. You would like it, B. V.— You would like it! And you would like my boy—two years old now, and a sheer delight. Not to mention my garden. The growth here! The heliotropes are almost trees. The jasmines have giant stars. The house is stormed with flowers—almost too sweet. Couldn’t you come? Don’t you hear the east calling? At all events you hear me calling, for I want you. And you must be having very idle lazy days, for I remember I never could imagine what you would find to do if you stopped travelling. Your whole soul was in that. It’s a cold country you’re in—frigid pines, and stark mountains and icy seas. Do come out into the sunshine again.”

She laid down the letter there and looked at the beloved pines almost glittering in the sunshine as it slid off their smooth needles. And idle?—her life, her wonderful secret life! Little indeed did Sidney know if she could write like that. She took up the letter again, smiling.

“And listen, B. V.—there’s a man going round by Japan to Canada, a man called Martin Welland. I should like you to know him for two reasons. First, he can tell you all about this place. Second, I think he is interesting. If you don’t find him so, shunt him. My love, my dear B. V., and do come. Think of all you might do with this as a starting point.”

There was more, but that is the essential. You may think at this point that you know exactly how this story must inevitably end. But no.

It was about four months after this that Beatrice Veronica was rung up on the telephone in her veranda as she sat reading. The imperative interruption annoyed her;—she put down her book. A man’s voice.

“Miss Leslie? I think your friend Mrs. Mourilyan told you I was coming to Victoria. My name is Welland.”

Polite assurances from the veranda.

“Yes, I am staying at the Empress. May I come out and see you this afternoon? I have a small parcel for you from Mrs. Mourilyan.”

So it was settled, and with her Chinese servant she made the little black oak table beautiful with silver and long-stemmed flowers in beautiful old English glass bowls. If he went back to Yercaud he should at least tell Sidney that her home in “that cold country” was desirable.

He came at four and she could hear his voice in the little hall as Wing admitted him.

She liked it. The words were clear, well-cut, neither blurred nor bungled. Then he came in. A tall man, broad-shouldered, with grey eyes and hair that sprang strongly from a broad forehead, clean-shaven, a sensitive mouth, possibly thirty-eight, or so. All these things flashed together in an impression of something to be liked and trusted. On his side he saw a young woman in a blue-grey gown with hazel eyes and hair to match—a harmony of delicate browns enhancing an almond-pale face with faintly coloured lips and a look of fragility which belied the nervous strength beneath.

The parcel was given and received; a chain of Indian moonstones in silver, very lovely in its shifting lights, and then came news, much news, of the home at Yercaud.

“I heard of you so much there that you are no stranger to me,” he said, watching with curious interest while she filled the Chinese cups of pink and jade porcelain with jasmine tea from a hidden valley in Anhui. It fascinated him—the white hands flitting like little quick birds on their quick errands, the girl, so calm and self-possessed, mistress of herself and her house. Many years of wandering had opened his heart to the feminine charm of it all, the quiet, the rose-leaf scent in the air, the things which group by instinct about a refined woman.

“You have a delightful home!” he said at last, rather abruptly.

“Yes— When you return do try to convince Mrs. Mourilyan that I don’t live in a hut on an iceberg. You agree with me, I am sure, that only Kashmir and perhaps one or two other places can be more beautiful than this.”

“Yes. I fully agree. Yet it misses something which permeates India in places far less beautiful. It lacks atmosphere. Just as the fallen leaves of a forest make up a rich soil in which all growth is luxuriant, so the dead ancientry of India makes earth and air rich with memory and tradition—and more. You can’t get it in these new countries.”

“I know,” she said eagerly. “Here it’s just a beautiful child with all her complexities before her. It rests one, you know. I felt it an amazing rest when I came here.”

“I can understand that. And they tell me the climate is delightful. I wish I could stay here. I may come back some day. But I must return to India in four months.”

“You have work?”

“Yes and no. I have collected an immense quantity of notes for several books, but—now you will laugh!—I shall never write them.”

“But why—why? I know there’s an immense opening for true books about the Orient.”

“I think so too. But you allow it’s a drawback that I am entirely devoid of the writing gift. I have my knowledge. I have the thing flame-clear in my mind. But let me put it on paper and it evaporates. Dull as ditchwater! You see?”

That last little phrase sent a blush flying up her cheek. It recalled many things.

“Yes, I see. But couldn’t you put it in skilful hands?”

He laid down his cup and turned suddenly on her.

“Could _you_ do it?”

“I? I wish I could, but I am doing work at present——”

“Literary?”

“Of a sort. Secretarial. I write from dictation.”

“May I ask what sort of things?”

With a curious reluctance she answered.

“Indian,” and said no more.

He seemed to meditate a moment on that; then said slowly:

“It appears you have experience of the very things that interest me. Tell me—for I have been so long in the wilds— Is there any writer nowadays taking the place with regard to things Indian that Lafcadio Hearn did with things Japanese? A man who gets at the soul of it as well as the beautiful surface?”

With her eyes on the ground and a sense of something startling in the air, she answered with a question.

“Have you ever heard of V. Lydiat’s books?”

There was a puzzled furrow between his eyebrows.

“Not that I know of. Up in Kulu and beyond, the new books don’t penetrate. A man or a woman?”

“People are not certain. The initial might mean either. But the critics all say a man. The last is called the ‘The Unstruck Music,’ the one before ‘The Dream of Stars.’ The first, ‘The Ninefold Flower.’”

“Beautiful names,” he said. “Can I get them here?”

“I can lend them to you.”

They talked long after that, in a curiously intimate way that gave her secret but intense happiness. It was almost in fear that she asked when he was going on and where.

When he went off he carried the three books under his arm.

“I shall read ‘The Ninefold Flower,’ first. It interests me to see how a writer’s mind develops.”

That night she had no dream and next day she tried even more eagerly than usual to get in touch with V. Lydiat, but in vain. The oracle was dumb. It frightened her, for the whole thing was so strange that she had never felt sure it might not vanish as suddenly as it came. She sat patiently all that morning, hoping and sorely disturbed, but the Pacific hung a relentless azure curtain before her fairyland and the pines dreamed their own sunshine-fragrance and made no way for palms.

At one o’clock the telephone rang sharply,

“Welland speaking. May I come and see you this afternoon?”

It was impossible for she had an engagement, but she named the evening at eight. He caught at it—his voice was evidence of that eagerness.

He came a minute or two before the time, and a book was in his hand. She knew the cover with a drift of stars across it before he spoke.

It broke out the moment he was in the room.

“A most amazing thing. I hardly know how to tell you. You’ll think I’m mad. It’s my book—_mine_, yet I never wrote it.”

They stared at each other in a kind of consternation and the little colour in her face fell away and left her lily-pale. She could feel but not control the trembling of her hands.

“You mean——”

“I mean—there are my notes one after another, but expressed in a way I never could hope for, exquisitely expressed. But it’s mine all the same. A cruel, enchanting robbery! You don’t believe me. How could you? But I can prove it. See here.”

With passionate haste he pulled a roll of paper from his pocket, and pushed the typed sheets before her. The first story in “The Ninefold Flower,” was called “The Lady of Beauty.” The notes began, “The Queen of Beauty,” and went on _seriatim_ with the scaffolding of the story.

“The way it’s done here, in this book, is the very way I used to see it in my dreams, but it was utterly beyond me. For God’s sake, tell me what you think.”

She laid it down.

“Of course it’s yours. No doubt of that. But his too. You blocked out the marble. He made the statue. The very judgment of Solomon could not decide between you.”

“That’s true,” he said hopelessly. “But the mystery of it. The appalling hopeless mystery. No eye but mine has ever seen that paper till now.”

Silence. A grey moth flew in from the garden and circled about the lamp. The little flutter of its wings was the only sound. Then in a shaken voice very unlike its usual sedate sweetness, she asked.

“Mr. Welland, do you ever dream?”

“Awake? Constantly.”

“Asleep?”

She saw caution steal into his frank eyes and drop a curtain before them.

“Why do you ask? Everyone dreams.”

She gathered up all her courage for the next question.

“Were you ever in the Shalimar?”

“Certainly. Does anyone ever go to Kashmir and miss it?”

He was fencing, that was palpable. It gave her hope for a golden gleam through her fear. She clasped her shaking hands tightly in each other.

“I have the strangest dreams. I can only bring back snatches. Yet I know there is a wonderful connected story behind them. I dreamt the Shalimar not long ago,—I brought back one image. A woman in an old Persian dress sitting by the black Pampoor pillars and looking down into the water where the moon dipped and swam all gold.”

“Yes, yes, go on!” he breathed.

“There were flowers—white flowers. I never saw them there in the daylight.”

“Unbearably sweet,” he interjected. “The scent is like the thrust of a lance. I know, I know. But there was another woman. I can’t remember her face.”

“How did she stand?” asked Beatrice Veronica.

“Near me—but she could see nothing. The day still blinded her, until——”

“Until you laid your hand on hers. Then she saw.”

Another long silence. Only the beating of the moth’s wings. He leaned forward from his chair and laid his hands on the clasp of hers. Their eyes met, absorbing each other; the way for the electric current was clear.

“I remember now,” he said, very softly. “It was you. It was you at the Temple of Govindhar. At the Massacre Ghaut of Cawnpore. Ah, I dragged you there against your will to show I was the stronger. It is you—always you.”