Part 4

And Pelham was right. Englishwomen have their charms and their virtues, both of which are great and admirable, but they have no sense of comradeship. Elizabeth was to them an alien, but instead of appealing to their sympathies, they saw her without effort easily become the acknowledged belle of the regiment. There was little in common beyond the mere formal exchange of courtesies between herself and even those women and girls at the station who wished to be kind to her. She had no accomplishments in the usual sense. She neither played, nor sang, nor drew, nor painted, either on china, fans, screens, or picture frames, nor could she do anything in water colors. She had no taste for games, and would not take the trouble even to play tennis. She disliked cards and would not play bridge, nor was she in any sense the athletic woman and had no tales of prowess to tell of tremendous mountain walks or long excursions on horseback. She rode well in a graceful, untaught manner which improved distinctly under Darrell’s masterly coaching, but she did not give up her days to it as did some of the girls with statuesque figures who looked their best on horseback.

The ladies wondered how Mrs. Darrell disposed of her time. If they could have taken a look into Elizabeth’s own sitting room, they would have seen a big sewing–table; and the beautiful and dainty gowns which from time to time Mrs. Darrell appeared in, and the immense variety of hats which caused the other women to think that she was squandering her husband’s substance, came forth from that sewing room. Instead of drawing trashy pictures and embroidering mats and picture frames, Elizabeth with an artist’s eye designed and made beautiful little costumes which looked as if they came from Regent Street or the Rue de la Paix. Her housekeeping, too, was well attended to, and the little dinners which she occasionally gave were remarkably good. Her mind had not been much cultivated, but under Pelham’s direction she learned with avidity—much to the amusement of Darrell, who protested against a learned wife and predicted that Elizabeth would soon be writing a novel or doing some other unholy thing likely to result from women who meddled with books.

Meanwhile Elizabeth’s belle–ship in the regiment became firmly established. Her charming appearance and her graceful and affable manners with men, the subtle way she had of making every man believe that he was her favorite, went farther with the officers of the 178th Foot than the sketching, painting, playing, and singing of the other women. Her manners had that fascinating combination known only to American women, and possibly the secret of their ascendency over men, of something between an appeal and a command; it was like the rule of a favorite and delightful child in a household. It may be imagined that this did not enhance Elizabeth’s popularity with her own sex.

Elizabeth wondered and was piqued at the coldness of the women towards her. She made faint, ineffectual attempts at intimacy with the Colonel’s daughters and the wives of various subalterns, but it was of no avail. She was the daughter of the regiment as far as the officers were concerned, but by no means a sister of the regiment to the ladies. Pelham was surprised that the tongue of scandal passed her by, but with innocence on Elizabeth’s part, and a couple of able–bodied men like Pelham and Darrell to stand by her, the gossips found it safe to let Mrs. Darrell alone.

Elizabeth was for a time quite happy in her new life, her only sorrow being the separation from her father. She wrote him passionate letters imploring him to come to see her; but it costs money to get from Washington to Embira in the Punjaub, and General Brandon was chronically hard up. And so her life moved on, almost as closely linked with Pelham’s as with Darrell’s, for two years. It was, however, moving in a direction which Elizabeth only dimly foresaw and understood. By Pelham’s tact and judgment rather than her own there never was a breath of scandal concerning their deep and obvious intimacy. Pelham was a man to be feared as well as respected, and such people are tolerably safe from criticism.

Every day of these two years found Pelham more and more deeply and hopelessly in love with Elizabeth, with the knightly love which would guard her not only against the whole world but against himself and herself; for in those two years Elizabeth’s mind, ripening and developing, perceived that she had married a man with every grace and virtue joined to a tiresome and amiable commonplaceness. It frightened her sometimes when she discovered how bored she grew by her husband’s conversation, and she was still more frightened at the prospect which sometimes occurred to her of being separated from Pelham, on whom she had learned to depend as other women depend upon a brother or a father or even a husband. But she was not unhappy, although she gradually found her way out of the lover’s paradise into which she had embarked with Darrell.

For Darrell himself she never lost the slightest respect. He was as truthful and honorable and truly unselfish as Pelham himself was. Nevertheless, at the end of two years came the beginning of a crisis. A beautiful boy was born to Elizabeth, a child of fairness and of delightful temper. “The jolliest little chap I ever saw,” swore Darrell at the club, when the baby was less than a week old.

Elizabeth was a devoted mother, but Darrell was the most passionately fond father imaginable. The child merely as a pet was worth to him more than all the dogs and horses in existence, including the Irish setter. In him there was a deep well–spring of fatherhood. He had thought himself perfectly happy before the boy was born, but afterwards he felt he had never known what true happiness was until then; and when the child was a year old Darrell, proudly calling him “my soldier,” used to put his own cap on the baby’s pretty head and his sword in its little hand, and throw his military cloak around it and sit and gaze in rapture at the child as it laughed and crowed, delighted with its trappings.

At the end of a year, like a judgment from heaven, the child died, after a day’s illness. In general it is the father who consoles the heart–broken mother, but in this case it was Elizabeth who kept Darrell sane in the midst of his terrible grief, who sat by him day and night, who checked by her own tears his strange cries of grief, and who upheld him when he passed through the deep waters. She herself was stricken in heart as only mothers can be, and she had a presentiment that she would never again have a child.

Pelham, who would cheerfully have borne all of Elizabeth’s sorrow at the boy’s death, was amazed and even indignant that Darrell should not have sustained her in this dreadful hour. Silently and with a sleepless vigilance and constancy Pelham supported and comforted Elizabeth.

_Chapter Four_

There was no one else to sustain Elizabeth. Darrell needed comforting even more than herself. She had formed no intimacies with any of the ladies of the station. There were among them many kind and tender–hearted women, but a barrier had grown up between them and the stranger from America.

Gradually the truth was beginning to dawn upon Elizabeth, that she depended more upon Pelham than upon Darrell; that is to say, she had married the wrong man, and the full revelation of this terrible truth came to her within two months of the time that she was left childless. It was in the heat of summer, and Elizabeth was one of those two or three of the officers’ wives, who braved the terrors of the hot season away from the hills in order to be with their husbands.

One stifling August evening, about ten o’clock, as Elizabeth was walking in the small grounds around their bungalow, the moon shining upon the tops of the great cypress trees which skirted the grounds, Pelham came down the steps of the veranda at the back of the house and joined her. The night was hot, as only Indian nights can be, but Elizabeth in her filmy white gown looked cool. She was as graceful and charming as ever, for the touch of sorrow, the knowledge of disappointment, and the necessity of keeping ceaseless watch and ward upon her own heart had added a deeper interest to her beauty while robbing her of some of her girlish fairness. Pelham, who was in mufti, wore a suit of white linen, and the two white figures could be seen for half a mile. They had not met since morning, a long time for them to be apart, because Pelham, who had lived with Darrell after the manner of a brother before his marriage, had continued it ever since. As he came up, holding his straw hat in his hand, Elizabeth said to him:—

“Where have you been all day? We waited dinner for you until at last we could wait no longer, as I wanted my poor Jack to go to the club. It doesn’t do for him to stay in this house too much.”

“I have been hard at work all day,” replied Pelham, in a tired voice. “I got a letter at noon to–day, offering me a staff appointment. It would be a very good thing, a great thing, and I have been studying it over and looking things up concerning it all the afternoon and evening. It would take me away from the regiment for a good many years, but still—“

Elizabeth’s face was quite plain to him in the white moonlight. She was already pale from the heat and from her months of suffering, but he saw a total change of expression, a look of terror, come into her eyes. It was unmistakable. Pelham himself had long known how things were with him, and it was chiefly from despair that he had seriously considered that day tearing himself from Elizabeth. He thought she would miss him as a woman misses a friend and brother, but something in her sad and lovely eyes suddenly revealed to him that it was not as a friend and brother she would miss him, but as the being dearest to her on earth; and Pelham, being then tempted of the devil, asked in a low voice:—

“Elizabeth, would it be painful to you if we parted?”

Elizabeth, staggered at the quick blow which had been dealt her, made full revelation of all she felt; she caught him by the arm and whispered: “And could you leave me? What would become of me? I think it would half kill me. First my child was taken, and now you—“

She paused, recalled to herself by the sound of her own words. She dropped Pelham’s arm as quickly as she had taken it and withdrew from him a step. They looked away from each other, alarmed and ashamed that they had drawn so near the brink of the gulf. But the winged word had been spoken; it was now gone, never to be recalled. Neither one of them could move or speak for a time. Pelham was a strong man and Elizabeth was a strong woman, and they loved not as weaklings love; their hearts were not to be conquered in an instant. They remained thus for what seemed to them an interminable time. It was really not five minutes. Then Pelham said quietly:—

“I shall remain with the regiment.”

And Elizabeth, without in the least knowing what she was saying, replied, “Thank God!”

Then, involuntarily and unable to bear longer the stress of the situation, they both turned back to the house. The scene had lasted all told five minutes; it was in full sight of many eyes if any had cared to look; but for both of them it had changed the face of creation itself. It had not, however, changed their natures, which were singularly delicate and high–minded; nor had it involved them in any dishonor.

As they entered the bungalow together, they met Darrell, who had noticed them walking through the shrubbery. Elizabeth went up to him, and placing her hand on his shoulder, a familiarity she had never used before in the presence of Pelham or any other human being, said: “I am so glad you have come back; I was beginning to feel so lonely without you. After this you must stay with me more than you have done, because I am never really happy away from you.”

This was one of the most stupendous lies ever uttered by a woman’s lips; but the recording angel had no occasion to shed a tear over it, as he inscribed it on the records of high heaven. A look of pleasure came into Darrell’s honest, sombre eyes. It was not often that love like this survived the honeymoon, and Elizabeth must indeed be deeply in love with him, if she used such language before Pelham. He put his arm around her slender waist, and spoke to Pelham instead of her.

“You miserable dog,” he said, “why don’t you get a wife like mine?”

Pelham, with a smile upon his dark, expressive, and somewhat homely face, answered quite naturally, “Because I can’t find a wife like yours.”

From that day, in spite of the fact that Elizabeth was a true wife of an honorable man, her whole life was irradiated by the joy of knowing that she was loved by Pelham and even that she loved him in return. It made them both careful in a thousand ways where heretofore they had been without thought. It made Elizabeth the sweetest as well as the most dutiful wife imaginable to Darrell. Her constant ministrations to him, her untiring efforts to please him, did more than he thought possible to soothe his grief over the dead child.

Elizabeth had always been kind and flattering to Darrell’s friends, not only out of respect for him, but from the pleasure which every woman takes in exercising the conscious power to please. But now she was if anything more attractive to them than ever, and Darrell enjoyed a delight most gratifying to his pride in finding himself the preferred admirer of a charming wife who was admired by every man who knew her. Elizabeth felt, without one word being spoken, that her conduct was approved by Pelham. She sometimes suspected what Pelham never did, that he, rather than she, deserved credit for the lofty purity of their relations, and doubted whether after all Pelham were not stronger in a sense of honor and rectitude even than herself, so great was his mastery over her. For, after all, the greatest power which one human being can exercise over another is the power of uplifting and making better; and such Elizabeth felt was Pelham’s influence over her, just as Pelham felt that Elizabeth was his guardian angel.

The Darrells and Pelham spent all together four years at Embira. Every year Elizabeth thought she would be able to return to America to see her father, if for only a few weeks, but every year the Darrell exchequer showed the impossibility of this. Their narrow means did not permit them to travel, or even to entertain except in the simplest manner, and Elizabeth only remained well dressed from the fact that she knew how to make her own gowns better than most Regent Street dressmakers. They often joked and laughed about their old relative Lady Pelham’s fortune, which was to come first to Darrell, and, failing a son and heir, to Pelham. Darrell dolefully related how Lady Pelham’s mother had lived to be ninety–six, and her father to be ninety–seven, and not one of her uncles or aunts had died under ninety years of age, while the lady herself was not more than fifty years of age and reckoned the most robust woman in England. They built castles in the air, of what they would do when they got the Pelham fortune, and Darrell tried to induce Pelham to agree to a division of the spoils in advance. It was a great joke; but one day, nearly nine years after Elizabeth’s marriage, death came to the three lives which stood between Darrell and Lady Pelham’s money, and Darrell came into the life estate of a fortune of forty thousand pounds.

_Chapter Five_

After nine years in India one is glad to get back to England, particularly as Darrell, in spite of the large stock of health and spirits which he took from England with him, had found as most men do in India that he had a liver. Elizabeth had remained perfectly well during all the nine years of her life under the hard blue Indian skies. She was now in her thirtieth year, and Darrell was nearly forty. Their attachment had assumed the fixed and settled form which nine years of constant association and respect must inevitably produce in every marriage. There were no jars or disagreements between them, and except for the absence of children Darrell reckoned his domestic life absolutely perfect.

Pelham, who like Darrell was now a major with a lieutenant–colonelcy in sight, knew that the time had come, if he was ever to see anything of the world beyond India, England, and his flying trip to the United States, for him to start upon his travels. In one way he was no longer necessary to Elizabeth, as she was now a trained and experienced woman,—the least likely, he thought, of any woman in the world, to make a false step of any kind. Elizabeth herself, although she had never ceased to depend on Pelham, had developed under his tutelage, so that she was in many ways able to stand without him; and, not being a woman to keep a man at her side without cause, she encouraged Pelham in his desire to travel.

The three returned to England together. After being established in the fine London house which was a part of their inheritance, Elizabeth’s first thought was for her father. It was in the spring–time that the Darrells arrived in Europe, and a delightful plan was arranged by which Elizabeth was to send for General Brandon, and he with the Darrells and Pelham were to begin in August a three months’ journey on the Continent. Elizabeth, whose mind was now well formed and furnished, looked forward with eagerness to seeing the brilliant capitals of Continental Europe,—those spots of romantic beauty and poetic sights, of which she had first read and dreamed in the old country house in Virginia and afterwards under the solemn deodars and in the shady bungalows of the Punjaub.

Darrell’s health improved wonderfully from the day he arrived in England, and it was thought that this Continental tour would restore him to the physical perfection which he originally possessed. They found London delightful, as London is apt to be with youth, good looks, beauty, and forty thousand pounds. Pelham had his own lodgings near them, but Darrell’s house was home to him. He saw almost as much of Elizabeth as in the years when they lived in cantonments together, but both Elizabeth and Darrell were fonder of society than Pelham. After they had breakfasted, Darrell and Elizabeth went together shopping, a novel and delightful experience to both of them; and they generally carried Pelham along with them, much to his disgust. They always referred things to him and never took his advice.

Darrell loved to adorn Elizabeth’s beauty, and one of the things which gave him the most pleasure was the making of a fine diamond and pearl necklace for his wife’s white throat. He had inherited a diamond necklace along with the Pelham properties. To these he added other stones and some fine pearls. Elizabeth insisted that the pretty pearl brooch which had been her wedding gift from Darrell should be included in the necklace, and they spent hours together at the jeweller’s planning the making of the necklace. Pelham stood by listening good–naturedly, and never suggesting any reduction in expense where Elizabeth’s wishes were concerned.

When August came, however, Darrell was not so well, but he was eager for the Continental tour, upon which Elizabeth had set her heart. Elizabeth, however, would not hear of his going, and as Pelham’s leave was limited he would be forced to go without the Darrells. The doctors had not absolutely said that Darrell should not go, but considered it best that he remain in England; it was Elizabeth’s over–solicitude for Darrell which really induced her to give up a plan so dear not only to her, but, as she well knew, to Pelham also. It cost her far more to deny Pelham than to deny herself, and this he well understood; for by that time they read each other like an open book, although no word of love had been spoken between them after that sudden out–break of their hearts on that night now eight years past when, standing in the solemn gloom of the cypress trees in the sultry Indian night, they had uttered unforgetable words. Pelham never felt prouder of Elizabeth and her forgetfulness of self than on the day she told him of her decision about the Continental tour, in her pretty London drawing–room, in which she fitted beautifully. It was so, as Pelham thought, that she fitted every place in which he had seen her.

“You know how delightful it would be for us to go,”—she always spoke of “us,” Darrell and herself being in fact never separated,—“but the doctor says it wouldn’t be the best thing for Jack; he would be sure to overdo it, and that is what I don’t intend to let him do.”

“Elizabeth,” said Pelham, after a pause, “I think you are all in all the best wife I ever knew.”

“Why shouldn’t I be a good wife—haven’t I the best husband in the world? Jack often reminds me of my father, who has just such an open, frank, simple nature as Jack’s,—one of those natures which nobody fears and yet of which everybody is a little afraid.”

“That is true,” replied Pelham. “Jack as a little fellow was the straightest lad I ever knew. If your boy had lived, I think he would have been as straight a little fellow as Jack.”

Elizabeth’s eyes filled. She had not yet learned to bear unmoved any mention of the child, who was quite forgotten by all except Darrell, Pelham, and herself. Just then Darrell entered from riding. He was neither as handsome nor as young–looking as he had been ten years before; and Pelham, who never had been handsome or particularly good–looking, was now quite gray and looked as if he had been baked in an oven, but he had the clearest, kindest eye and the firmest thin–lipped, sensible mouth, which redeemed his face from positive ugliness. Elizabeth was no longer a girl, but with the same striking and touching beauty of her girlhood.

“So,” said Darrell, after kissing Elizabeth’s hand, “you are leaving us next week. By gad, I wish I were going with you, but Elizabeth won’t hear of it. Now if I had married an English wife instead of an American, she would have let me do as I please.”

“And make yourself ill,” replied Elizabeth. “But if you will take care of yourself and do all I tell you, perhaps in the autumn I may take you to the Continent.”

“But Pelham won’t be with us.”

“You’re very complimentary,” replied Elizabeth, with a cheering air of coquetry. “Ten years ago you could get along with only me. Now you must have Pelham and I don’t know how many other men to keep you from being bored to death.” Such speeches are common when husband and wife are sure of each other.

It was the next evening at dinner time that around the table Darrell began to tell of an expedition into West Africa which he had heard talked of at the club. It would be partly private and partly governmental, and would require more than a year’s absence from England. Pelham’s grave eyes lighted up as the story went on. He had an indestructible love of bold adventure, and he had no more been able to indulge his fondness and taste than he had been able to indulge his fondness for intelligent travel. Elizabeth, with prophetic intuition, saw that the idea had taken hold of Pelham’s imagination. She felt assured that if she were to make the same appeal that she had done unconsciously in the garden that night at Embira, Pelham would not resist it, and would remain in England with her; but she was of too generous a nature to wish to hold him back from what would be an advantage as well as a strong man’s delight to him. She was not surprised, therefore, when Pelham turned up next day, to hear that he had been to the War Office and had been looking into the West African expedition.