Part 10

"That's all," she concluded drily; "Runkle is his dear wife's devoted husband." She threw a hard emphasis on the words. Rosamond suddenly paled and set her lips close.

"Oh yes! there's a postscript; he wants an answer immediately to Claridge's--and who do you think was their fellow traveller? Dr. Châtelard--he's to be at Melbury, too. It's all fish that comes to Lady Aspasia's net--evidently. Well?"

Still there was silence.

It was a clear day. A shaft of wintry sunshine pierced in between the ivy sprays, and caught the girl as she sat; her crisp aureole of hair seemed palely afire; sparks of the same faint yellow flame enkindled her eyes, and even the ends of her long eyelashes. She sat stiff and stern, her face was somewhat pallid. Bethune glanced at her suddenly. The sky was blue through the little panes beyond: he thought she made a quaintly pretty picture.

"Well!" repeated Miss Cuningham, "you had better wire to Runkle, I think."

Lady Gerardine rose from her seat with so swift a movement that, startled, Baby jumped from her perch. The elder woman was passion white; her nostrils were dilated.

"Leave me, Aspasia," she said, pointing to the door with a gesture at once dignified and incensed. "You disturb me."

"Well, I never!" exclaimed the ill-used girl. She checked herself suddenly and made a rush for the passage; if she spoke another word the tears would certainly come, and that (she thought) would be the last straw.

Quick as she was, Bethune was before her. He opened the door for her to pass. His air of detachment, the banality of the courtesy, seemed to her an insult; she flung a look of scathing reproach at him as she flounced by.

With Sir Arthur's letter clutched in her hand she sought refuge in her own room; and there on the small white bed shed some of the bitterest and angriest tears she had ever known. The thought of the two in the attic room galled her beyond endurance.

"Hasn't she had two husbands already?" sobbed she to herself, catching at the crudest conclusions with all the inconsequence of her years, "and couldn't she leave just this one man alone? ... 'You disturb me'--oh!"

Yet Bethune had remained in the attic scarcely a minute after Aspasia herself had left it. When he had returned to the table, Lady Gerardine had gazed at him a span or two with vague eyes--then she had passed her hand over her forehead, sighed wearily, and fallen into her seat.

"I can do no more to-day!" she had said. "Take those papers. You see I have copied out all in sequence, even the most trivial detail, till the Sandhurst examination. Make what use of them you like. I--forgive me, it is very stupid--but I feel troubled. And please--do not talk to me about this any more until I ask you to."

So she had dismissed him. And, dismissed, he returned to the study, which had been allotted for his use, and placed her voluminous notes with his own typewritten manuscript, pending the task of collation. Then he fell into a long reverie, and his thoughts were neither of Harry English nor of Miss Aspasia Cuningham.

* * * * *

But even in anger Baby was loyal; some instinct, rather than any positive train of reasoning, told her that Sir Arthur's arrival at the present juncture would inevitably precipitate matters to a most undesirable climax. On the other hand: how keep him away if his wife persisted in her attitude of indifference and silence? ...

"Good gracious, we'll have Runkle turning up in a special train before the week's out!" How to prevent it?

With much labour she finally concocted and despatched a telegram of Machiavellian artfulness to await arrival at Claridge's, taking further upon herself to sign it in Lady Gerardine's name:

Just received letter. Overjoyed return, trust you can make arrangements to join me here at once; unfortunate presence of guest prevents my leaving. Otherwise would meet you London before Melbury.

"That will do it, I think," said the astute young lady. "If Runkle thinks that any one is trying to dictate to him or to interfere with his own sacred arrangements--the trick is done."

*CHAPTER VII*

Before the two women met again, it was evening--the debatable hour, between light and darkness, which falls so quickly upon the December day. Rosamond had come in, wet and weary, from a walk alone on the downs; caught by reverie, she sat before the fire in her dressing-gown, her change of garb unfinished, her hair still loosened, gazing through those unsubstantial misty recent years to the past, which had grown so vivid.

Aspasia peeped in, half drew back, hesitated; then, as Lady Gerardine held out her left hand, without a word, the girl flew to her side and nestled down on the hearthrug at her feet, seizing the white hand with the unexpressed joy of tacit reconciliation. For a little while there was silence between them. Baby's eyes roved about the room; within her sunny head a host of new thoughts were humming like a hive of bees. All at once something unfamiliar to her touch about the fingers she was fondling drew her gaze with surprise.

"Why, Aunt Rosamond?"

"Yes, Baby."

Lady Gerardine answered from the past, her voice far away and dreamy.

"Why." The girl turned the inert hand now to the faint grey light of the waning day, now to the fireglow. "You have changed your rings. This is a new one I never saw before," and her plump fingertips felt the plain circle, so much rounder and narrower than that pompous gold band with which the great Sir Arthur had plighted his nuptial vow. The cry had almost escaped her lips: "You've never taken off Runkle's wedding-ring!" but she checked it with that new prudence circumstances were forcing upon her. She wished now she had not spoken at all. But Lady Gerardine was smiling.

"Yes," said she, tenderly, looking down at her hand where the leaping wood flame flashed back from the narrow gold circlet and the tiny coloured gems of an antique ring that surmounted it. "I have changed my rings--this one was given me the night before my marriage. It all went so quickly, you see, Baby, that my engagement ring came only the day before the wedding-ring. It was hers," said Rosamond, looking over her shoulder at the bed where Mrs. English had died. "'Tis a very old trinket, you see. Red roses of rubies, green leaves of emerald, and a diamond heart. He said it was my heart--I said it was his."

She smiled again into space. Aspasia clasped her and kissed her. It was the first time since the voyage her aunt had spoken to her openly of her hidden thoughts. And now she spoke as if confidence had always existed between them, as if she were merely continuing the thread of an interrupted discourse.

Baby's heart began to sink with an uneasy sense of awe as before something unnatural, and of her own incapacity for meeting it. She wished her kiss could stop the lovely smiling lips from further speech. But Lady Gerardine went on:

"We were married quite early, in the little Alverstoke church. I used to hate it when I went there Sunday after Sunday; but it was a new place to me that morning, holy and beautiful, all in the dewy freshness, grey amid the green, with stripes of sunlight yellow upon it, and the dancing shadows of the trees. The whole church was full of the smell of white narcissus; it was like incense. When I came up the nave, he turned where he stood at the altar rail, and looked at me. I can see him now, just as he looked; his eyes dark, dark, and his face quite pale for all it was so bronzed. Baby, I can smell the narcissus now, as I stood beside him and he put this on my finger."

She raised her hand and kissed the ring.

"I shall never take it off," she said, as if to herself. And unhappy, practical Baby, could have laughed and cried together with the despairing ejaculation: "Poor Runkle!"

The night was pressing up against the windows; only the firelight now fought the darkness in the wainscoted room. Upon the panel opposite the bed, the life-size portrait of Captain English, in its strong relief of black and white, began to assume a ruddy tint; in the shifting of the shadows the expression of the face seemed to change. It assumed startling airs of life. Baby caught sight of this and gave a faint scream.

"Oh, oh," she said, burrowing her face against Rosamond's neck, "he almost looks alive!"

Lady Gerardine had seen, too; but there was no terror in her soul.

"Why should he not look alive?" said she, in a soft confidential whisper, "he's not really dead, you know."

The astounding words had scarcely fallen upon Baby's alarmed consciousness, when there was a crunching of wheels below the window, as if the night without had suddenly engendered some ghostly visitor in state. A violent peal rang through the silent house; a new but very tangible fear was upon Aspasia. With a shriek she sprang to her feet.

"As sure as eggs is eggs, it's Runkle!"

She rushed helter-skelter to the door, while Rosamond sat still, clasping her ringed finger.

A minute later Aspasia burst into the room again. She was laughing violently in reaction, and brought a breath as of wet woods and winter winds into the warm room.

"It's all right," she gasped. "It isn't Runkle, aunt, it's only----" with a fresh irrepressible gust, "it's only the 'native spring,' you know, the black man--the secretary who's writing up Runkle's monument!"

She leaned against the bed-post, puffing and fanning herself with her handkerchief.

"What a turn he's given me--poor thing! I'm glad we've got Jani for him. He looked so forlorn, standing in the hall, staring about him with great sad eyes, like something pitchforked into a different world."

* * * * *

Jani carried a lamp into the small bare chamber allotted to Muhammed Saif-u-din, and set it on the table at which he was seated.

She turned up the wick, and was straightening herself from her task when her glance fell upon the man's hands and became riveted there. Even in their attitude of repose, folded one over the other in the oriental fashion, these dusky hands had a singular suggestion of strength and energy about them. They were larger, too, than might have been expected in a babu; but then was he not of the virile northern breed?

After a while, slowly, the woman's gaze travelled up to the broad breast, where it rested once more. Then, upon a sudden impulse, she tilted the green shade so as to throw the full light upon the bearded countenance. The secretary smiled and raised his eyes to look at her in return; but her action had cast her face into profound shadow.

"So," said he, in her own tongue, "here we meet, children of the sun in the land of the mist. So far from home we should be friends."

"I make no friend of your blood-stained race," said Jani, harshly.

"Why, what harm have we done thee or thine, mother?" asked Muhammed, his easy good-humoured tone contradicted by the relentless keenness of the gaze that still strove to pierce the gloom in her direction.

"What harm, Pathan?" shrieked Jani, suddenly, trembling with a sort of monkey fury. She flung out her hands as if waving off some threatening vision. "What harm, do you ask, have you done, you and your brothers of the mountain? Harm enough. See that ye do no more. Cross not my mistress's path."

Muhammed put his hand over his mouth, as if to conceal a yawn. Then, with an air of weary curiosity:

"Your mistress?" he echoed. "Nay, mother, my business is with your noble lord. How should even my shadow ever come between your lady and the sun?"

"I will tell you," said Jani. She came closer to him, though still keeping in the darkness, and laid her fingers on his sleeve. "Your mountains once brought her great sorrow. She has forgotten, she is consoled. I would not that she remembered again. Why did you come here?" she cried, breaking into a wail. "My heart trembles. It is for no good!"

The man shrugged his shoulders, but she repeated in a sort of frenzy:

"Keep out of the Mem Sahib's way. Waï, that you should have come here to remind her! Her tears are dry."

Muhammed smiled again, a smile full of secret yet fierce irony.

"I am here," said he, "upon the bidding of my most noble lord and master, the Governor Sahib, of splendid fame."

"Great be his shadow!" ejaculated the woman, with Eastern gesture of reverence. "Oh, you speak the truth; that is a noble and magnificent lord!"

"Ay," quoth the secretary. Then, with a movement as sudden as her own had been, he lifted the shade altogether from the lamp. Jani again flung out both her hands.

"Stay," he commanded, as she huddled towards the door; and she stayed, glancing at him with furtive, furious eyes like a frightened wild thing. "You love your lady then so deeply?" he queried, studying her dark face in the revealing glare.

The ayah's lips moved. She looked askance at her questioner, dropped her gaze upon his hands again, hesitated, and at last spoke:

"I--I suckled her at this breast," she beat her withered bosom. "She is more beloved to me than the child of my flesh. When she weeps, it is as if my blood fell. She is happy, she is great, she is the lady of a high and magnificent lord. She reigns as a queen, she has jewels--oh, jewels--all her heart can wish."

"What then?" cried Muhammed, laughing loudly.

"The sons of the mountain have made her weep enough," cried Jani, hoarsely. She was trembling as between a terror of pleading and an impotence of anger. "Woe to you if your shadow come between her and the sunshine! The dead are dead, past and done with; but the living she shall keep--and her greatness."

"You speak in riddles," said the Pathan, coldly. "But doubtless you are a faithful servant. Faithful, but also foolish. I will not harm your mistress!"

"Who harms my lord harms her," retorted the woman, sullenly.

Muhammed's eyes flashed.

"And who would harm so just, so great, so beloved a master? You weary me, mother; begone."

He did not raise his voice, but there was that in it before which she shrank; creeping from the room thereafter stealthily, like a threatened dog.

Muhammed, his hands folded once more, remained seated long into the night, with the merciless light of the unshaded lamp upon his brooding countenance.

*CHAPTER VIII*

The law of change, of passage--the pressure of time, in fact--is so strong upon everything that comes under its law at all, that not even in memory can we remain stationary. Fain, fain, would Rosamond have lingered upon the first stage of that journey into the past she had so singularly engaged upon. But, in spite of herself, the wheels were turning, the moments dropping; from within as well as from without, she was forced on and on, and she knew that in a little while she must reach the parting of the ways.

It having been ruled for us that life is almost all change, and that change is mostly sorrow, it is a dispensation of mercy that we should be blind travellers along the road, and never know what lies beyond. But Rosamond, who had rebelled against the natural law, was now, with eyes unsealed, advancing fatally towards the way of sorrows she had already once traversed, refusing to mourn at her appointed hour.

Fain would she have walked in the sheltered valley, fain even called back the old sleep of coldness. In vain. Time was marching, and she must march. And two there were that drove her forward, besides the relentless invisible power--Bethune, with his expectant close presence, and Sir Arthur, unbearable menace from the distance.

* * * * *

"And then, you know, the summons came," said she.

"I know," he answered. Then there was silence between them.

Lady Gerardine had come to Major Bethune in the little library where he spent some hours each morning over his work. These last days she had shown an unaccountable distaste to his presence in the attic room. And he, studying her now, thought that, in this short week of his visit, she had altered and wasted; that the bloom had faded on her cheek, and that cheek itself was faintly hollowed. He had been poring over some old maps of the Baroghil district, pipe in mouth, when she entered upon him. And at sight of her, he had risen to his feet, putting aside the briar with a muttered apology. But she, arrested in her advance, had stood inhaling the vapour of his tobacco, her lips parted with a quivering that was half smile, half pain.

"I like it," she had said dreamily. "It brings me back."

Awkward he nearly always felt himself before her, never more so than at these moments of self-betrayal on her part, when every glimpse of her innermost feeling contradicted the hard facts of her life. He stood stiffly, not taking up his pipe at her bidding. Then, pulling herself together, she had advanced again, ceremoniously requesting him to be seated. She had only come to bring him another note, which she had omitted to join to those annals of Harry English's life up to their marriage, already in his hands.

He had just glanced at it and flicked it on one side, and then at the expectancy of his silence, she had grown pale. There could be no turning back, she did not ask it, scarcely hoped for it. But, O God, if she might wait a little longer!

She sank into the worn leather armchair. It was a small room, lined with volumes, and the air was full of the smell of ancient bindings, ancient paper and print; that good smell of books, so grateful to the nostrils of one who loves them, mingled with the pungency of Bethune's tobacco.

The wild orchard came quite close to the window and across the panes, under an impatient wind, the empty boughs went ceaselessly up and down like withered arms upon some perpetual useless signalling. To Rosamond they seemed spectres of past summers, waving her back from their own hopeless winter. The room was warm and rosy with firelight, but in her heart she felt cold. And Major Bethune sat waiting.

"I only had one or two letters from him," she faltered at last; "and then came the silence." Her lovely mouth twitched with pain; Raymond Bethune turned his eyes away from her face.

"He joined us at Gilgit," he said, staring out at the frantic boughs. "I remember how he looked, as he jogged in, towards evening, with his fellows--white with dust, his very hair powdered."

She clasped her hands; the tension slightly relaxed.

"You all loved him?" she said softly.

"Loved him!" he gave a short laugh. "Well, he was a sort of god to me, and to the men too. Some of the subs thought him hard on them--so he was, hard as nails."

Astonishment filled her gaze.

"Gad," said the man, "I remember poor little Fane--he went during the siege, fever--I remember the little fellow saying, half crying: 'I think English is made of stone.' But it was before he had seen him at the fighting. That was a leader of men!"

"Hard!" said Lady Gerardine. "Harry made of stone!" she gave a low laugh, half indignant.

"Don't you know," said Bethune, "that here"--he tapped the jagged lines of the mountain maps--"you can't do anything if you're not harder than the rocks? And with those devils of ours," his own face softened oddly as he spoke; "they're hard enough--they're devils, I tell you--to lead them right, you've got to be more than devil yourself--you've got to be--an archangel."

Some vision of a glorious fighting Michael, with a stern serene face of immutable justice, featured with the beauty of the dead, rose before Rosamond. She flushed and trembled; then she thought back again and with anger.

"Ah, but his heart," she said; "ah, you did not know him!"

He wheeled round upon her and gazed at her, his cold eyes singularly enkindled.

"You forget," said he, and quoted "that every man 'boasts two soul sides, one to face the world with, one to show a woman when he loves her.'"

"Ah!" said Rosamond.--It was a tender cry, as if she had taken something very lovely to her heart and was holding it close. With an abrupt movement Bethune turned back to his table; his harsh face looked harsher and more unemotional than usual, and he began folding up his papers as if he thought the conversation had lasted long enough.

"Perhaps to-morrow," he said, "you will be able to give me the beginning of the siege papers."

"I will try," said Rosamond, catching her breath. And then, after a moment, she rose and left him without another word.

* * * * *

Rosamond felt restless; the walls of the house oppressed her; the sound of the piano in the drawing-room was maddening; she wanted to be out in the wide spaces with her overwhelming thoughts. She caught up a cape, drew the hood over her head, and went quickly forth to meet the December wind.

Down the grass-grown avenues, under the bereft and complaining orchard trees, she went, making for the downs. At the boundary gate she met the old one-armed postman toiling with his burden. He thrust a letter into her hand and passed on. She saw that it was addressed in Sir Arthur's writing, and bore the stamp of Melbury. She broke it open and read impatiently, eager to be back with her absorbing dream. Her husband was urgently summoning her to join him at once, under Lady Aspasia's roof. He expressed surprise, tinged with dissatisfaction, that Lady Aspasia's kind letter of invitation to her should have remained unanswered.

"No doubt, dear," Sir Arthur wrote, "you are waiting until you can ascertain the date of your visitor's departure, but this must not be allowed to interfere." Here was a command. Rosamond gave a vague laugh.

"Who is the guest, by the way? I am expecting a letter from you, forwarded from London. Probably you have written to Claridge's. I would gladly accede to your request and come at once to the manor-house...." She stared, as the phrase caught her eyes, then laughed again: "Poor man--what was he thinking of?"

She crumpled the sheet in her hand and walked on. The wind blew fiercely across the downs, every leaf and spray, every dry gorse-bush, every blade of rank grass was writhen and bent in the same direction. She struggled to the shelter of a hazel copse and sat her down.

Before her stretched the moorland, dun-grey and yellow, dipping to the horizon; above her head the sky was leaden grey, charged with cloud wrack--a huge bowl of storm. She thought of that glowing Indian morning, when he had told her he must leave her, and of the twenty-four hours that had elapsed between that moment and their parting. What tenderness, gentler than a woman's, had he not revealed to her then--Harry English, the hard man, fierce angel-leader of devils! And the words of Browning rushed back upon her, once again as a message of balm--

... two soul sides, one to face the world with, One to show a woman when he loves her.

Ah, nothing could rob her of that! She had been the woman he had loved, and the soul side he had shown to her, most generous, most sacred, most beautiful, was what no other being in the Universe could have from him, not even his God!

They had parted in the dawn, the Indian dawn, all shot with flame. Not once had he faltered in his resolute cheerfulness. He had kissed her and blessed her as she lay in bed. But at the door he had halted to look upon her a last time; and she was weeping. Then he had flung himself back beside her ... and now she closed her eyes and shuddered on the memory of his last kisses.

With the chill barren earth beneath her, the lowering winter sky above, the sun-warmth of his love again enfolded her. It was as if his presence brooded upon her. Oh, could she but die and be with him! "Harry, I am yours," she called to him in the passion of her soul, "yours only--love, take me!"

So strong seemed the atmosphere of his spirit about her, that she looked round wildly, almost feeling as if her soul-cry must have called back the dead. There stretched the iron earth, there hung the relentless skies--the world was empty.