Part 5

Lady Gerardine fell back upon her pillow, and then, lifting the heavy mass of her hair, swept it across her face like a sheltering wing, as if, even in the dim room, she could not endure the gaze of human eyes upon her. Sir Arthur, for all his science of life, could not but own to himself that he was nonplussed. He shrugged his shoulders. Fortunately, sensible men were not expected to understand the whims of the charming but irresponsible sex. Rosamond was evidently not the thing, and therefore was to be indulgently excused. In spite of which philosophic conclusion his attitude towards his secretaries and other subordinates that morning was marked with unwonted asperity.

"Something's turned our seraphic old ass a trifle sour," Mr. George Murray remarked to his junior, with a grin.

* * * * *

Under the veil of her hair Rosamond would have called, if she could, on all the shades of the world to come and cover her; would have gladly sunk under them, away from the light of life and the pain of living, somewhere where all would be dark and all quiet, where she might be forgotten--and allowed to forget.

*CHAPTER VIII*

"Jani," said her mistress, "bring me Captain English's box!"

The ayah stared as if she could not have heard aright. There followed a strange oppressive silence, in which the lapping of the waters in the inner marble spaces seemed to take whispering voices of amazement. Then Lady Gerardine, standing straight and impassive by her dressing-table, her head just turned aside from the reflection of her own beauty, repeated her order in the same hard, uninflected tone.

"Captain English's box; bring it to me."

Jani looked sharply up at the speaker's face and clapped her hands together with the wail of the children of her race when sudden trouble comes upon them.

"Ai, ai!"

"Go," said Lady Gerardine.

Grudgingly Jani turned to obey. She went, muttering to herself, groping in her soul for the reason of this strange and most unexpected order--an order so out of keeping with the whole tenor of her mistress's life, that it rang in her ears like a menace of calamity.

* * * * *

It was a small thing enough, a common battered tin box, to rank with such importance. But it held tragedy: more than tragedy, a woman's murdered youth. Well did Jani remember the day it had come back to the little home, up in the hills--all that was left to them of their handsome young lord. They could not carry Rosamond back her dead; what soldier's widow can hope for that last tragic comfort? But the few tangible traces he had left behind him; these were hers by right, and to her they were brought, with scarcely less reverence than if they had been his honoured remains--the journal he had kept for her during yonder endless months of siege; the letters he had written her, never to post; his notes; sundry trifling belongings, marked with that poignant personal touch which seems to inflict the hardest pain of all.

One can kneel in uplifted resignation beside the awful grandeur of the soul-abandoned clay. But the old pipe, burned down on one side, the worn glove ... over these trivial relics the heart breaks. Rosamond English, in her nausea of misery, her rebellion against the unaccepted unrealisable sorrow, could not look at them, could not touch the poor memorials. She thrust them back into the battered box away from her sight, and with them all the garnered treasures of her brief girlhood and of her briefer wifehood: the simple keepsake, the dried flowers--sprig from her wedding bouquet, bridal wreath--the letters to the betrothed, the first letters to the wife. Things of no worth, yet full of hideous potentialities of grief: symbols of what had been, what might have been. "Away, away with them!" cried her sick heart, "out of my sight for ever!"

And now she was to break open the coffin to look upon the horror of the murdered thing that was her youth; she who had nailed it down so fast, buried it so deep!

Jani laid the box at her mistress's feet and loosened the cords slowly and with protest.

"Go, leave me now," said Rosamond, "and let no one disturb me. Leave me!" she ordered sharply, as once more the ayah hesitated. And Jani slunk away, dragging noiseless feet, her dim mind filled with inarticulate foreboding.

Rosamond drew a long breath as the hangings fell. Surely, surely, if there be anything to which one has a right, in this grinding world, it is to be alone with one's dead!

* * * * *

She took the key from where she had herself placed it ready to her hand on the table: a black rusty thing amid all the jewels and costly trinkets which it was Sir Arthur Gerardine's pleasure to provide for the adornment of the most beautiful of all his attributes--his wife. She knelt down and inserted it in the lock; and then she paused, passing her hand across her damp forehead.

Inexorable fate! She for years had walked in the company of some creature of horror, the face of which had been mercifully veiled; she had carried a mortal anguish cunningly lulled to sleep. Now her hand must lift the veil.... Now no opiate would further serve her: she must face the pain.

For a moment yet she hesitated: the last recoil of the flesh. Then the courage which despair or resignation lends--that rise of the spirit to meet the inevitable which seldom fails even the lowest human being at the end--brought back strength sufficient. She turned the key, drew out the rusty hasp, and opened the casket of her dead past.

* * * * *

The breath that rushed at her from the gaping box seized her by the throat. The unfading scent of the faded orange blossom; the very atmosphere of the lost presence, of the tobacco he had been wont to use, of the Russian-leather pocket-books she had given him; a faint, faint whisper of the English lavender her hands had been so careful to set for him, since he loved it. And, over all, through all, some odour of the siege: of strife, fever, bloodshed, and death--eastern, indescribable, terrible! Her soul sickened away.

No, the past was not dead! It had but lain in wait for her all these years. It had but gathered force to spring upon her in the fated hour. None can escape destiny. Here was the cup she had refused to drain; here were the tears of which she had cheated her heart; here, even, was the intensity of her lost youth, that she might mourn the husband of her girlhood as it had been written she must mourn.

She rose to her feet. A cry rang in her ears like the cry of an animal hurt; and she never knew that it had come from her own lips. Through gathering mists she saw Jani reappear and run towards her; and, summoning all her failing energies in one supreme effort, she called out in distinct tones:

"Close the box and let no one touch it."

Then she fell like a mown lily, straight and long, beside it.

*CHAPTER IX*

For thirty-six hours the unconsciousness for which she had longed cradled Rosamond, and when she came to herself it was slowly and with dimness. Three times, indeed, did day and night slip by her in her darkened and silent room before she even began to wonder how it was she should be left in such peace. But upon the fourth dawn, as the sun set to work to paint once more the jewel glories of her walls, memory came back upon her like a torrent.

She sat up, wildly crying:

"Jani, the box! What have they done with the box?"

The ayah's arms were round her in a second. Jani whispered and soothed her mistress as, long ago, she had soothed her nursling. Safe was the mem sahib's box; no one should lay finger on it but herself. But the mem sahib must be good and sleep, for Jani was by her. And Rosamond let her head rest gratefully upon the wasted bosom that once had held such loving bounties for her, and from thence slid back upon her pillows into forgetfulness again. She was weary still, with a great and blessed weariness.

* * * * *

Dr. Saunders paid brief daily visits. In Sir Arthur's opinion he was inclined to make culpably light of the whole affair--to allow those unimportant fever cases in the compound to weigh against the indisposition of the Lieutenant-Governor's wife.

It is a notable fact that the medical man treats the feminine syncope as not calling for much notice. And though the excellent Scot conceded that there might be some shock caused by the fall, to account for the prolonged unconsciousness, he declined to admit to Sir Arthur there was ground for anxiety or to recommend any treatment but quiet--absolute quiet. The preliminary symptom of irritability towards himself which Sir Arthur commented upon as extraordinary and alarming, Dr. Saunders in so many words declined, as a waste of time, even to discuss.

Nevertheless, as days succeeded each other and the patient's languor, not to say apathy, continued unabated, Dr. Saunders abruptly changed his tactics and informed his Excellency that he had better lose no time in sending his wife home.

"Pack her off," he said brusquely.

"Pack her off!" The choice of words was as unfitting as the idea they embodied was distasteful.

"I thought," said Sir Arthur, loftily, "that you were aware, Dr. Saunders, of my intention of progressing homewards next month."

"Well, I should pack off Lady Gerardine by the next boat," said the doctor, no whit abashed. "There's a good deal of sickness about, and I should not like to take the responsibility of keeping her on here in this condition. She's in a queer low state--damn queer low state, Sir Arthur."

Sir Arthur puffed an angry breath down his nostrils and fixed a withering gaze on the other's dry, impassive countenance.

What sort of a physician was this who, having charge of the precious health of such a distinguished household, could allow one of its most important members to get into a damn queer low state and then brazenly announce the fact? Sir Arthur, a spot of red anger burning upon each cheekbone, gave Dr. Saunders clearly to understand how grossly he had failed in his post of trust, and announced his own intention of procuring higher opinion without delay. Whereat the doctor shrugged his shoulders and drove off in his little trap at break-neck speed, as philosophically as ever.

The higher medical opinion was procured. And though it was enveloped in phraseology better suited to the patient's distinguished station, it was substantially the same as the first--with the single difference that it seemed to take a more serious view of the case. Lady Gerardine was once more ordered home with the least possible delay, this time under penalties so obscurely hinted at as to seem far more alarming than the most explicit statement.

Sir Arthur's irritable anxiety caught fire again. He hastened the departure with as much energy as he had hitherto displayed in repudiating the idea. Truth to tell, no prescription could have well been less pleasing to him. Precluded himself by public business from leaving before his allotted time, not only would his stately "progress" home be sorely shorn of its chief adornment, but the visit of his distinguished relative, Lady Aspasia Melbury, would have to be unceremoniously postponed. Moreover, it was never part of his views of the marital state to allow his beautiful wife to remove herself more than a day's journey from his personal influence. Scornfully as he would have repudiated any suggestion of jealousy (and indeed, as Aspasia had asserted, he was perhaps too vain a man to entertain so unflattering a guest in the complacency of his thoughts), he had, whether from long residence in the East or natural disposition, an almost oriental manner of regarding the wife as an appanage to the man's estate--a satellite, pleasing and brilliant enough, but yet a mere satellite in the greater luminary's orbit of glory. And therefore, while feverishly speeding the necessary preparations, he could not but let it be seen that he was disappointed, not to say hurt, that there should be any necessity for them.

Lady Gerardine showed herself as gently indifferent to reproach as she had been to solicitude. But the physician's wisdom was so far justified that, from the moment she was told of his decision, she roused herself and began to take some interest in life again.

"Home," she said, "England! Oh, I am glad!"

And, by-and-by, when she was alone with Aspasia, she began, to the girl's delight, to discuss plans with quite an eagerness in her weak voice.

They were in a long cool room, one of the bygone zenana apartments preserved practically untouched, which opened upon the one side into the garden through the arches of a colonnade, and was secluded even from that quiet spot by marvellous stone lacework screens, each different down to the smallest detail of design, yet all in harmony. However the small dusky Eastern beauties may have rebelled in their day against these exquisite prison walls; the present Northern mistress of the whilom palace found pleasure in their very seclusion, their apartness; and, according to her wont, she feasted her soul lazily on their artistic perfections.

She was stretched on a highly painted Indian couch which had been converted into a sofa, and let her eyes wander from the carving of the window screens themselves to their even lovelier reflections, cut in grey shadow on the white marble of the pavement. From the inner rooms the waters of the baths played murmurous accompaniment to her thought and her interrupted speech. Aspasia, squatting on the rug at the foot of the couch, listened, commented, and suggested.

The latter had not yet quite overcome her horrified sense of guilt in connection with Lady Gerardine's singular breakdown. Without being able to piece together any reasonable explanation of late events, she felt instinctively that here was more than met the eye; that there was in the web of her aunt's life, so to speak, an under-warp of unknown colour and unexpected strength; that behind the placid surface there lay secret depths; and that her own trifling treachery had unwittingly set forces in motion with incalculable possibilities. She had gone about, these days, with a solemn look--a living presentment of childish anxiety. The scared shadow was still on her pretty face as she now sat in attendance.

"Home in six weeks..." said Rosamond, dreamily. "We shall still find violets amid the dark-green leaves, Baby, and brown and yellow chrysanthemums on the top of their frost-bitten stalks."

"And is it not jolly," said Aspasia, hugging her knees, "to think that we can go and paddle about in the wet as much as ever we like, without any one after us! And isn't it delightful to be going off just our two selves. Oh! Aunt Rosamond, you gave me an awful fright, you know; but really it was rather well done of you, to faint off like that. You see, the doctor says, whatever they do, now, they're not to contradict you. If ever I get an illness I hope it will be that sort. It is worth anything to be leaving Runkle behind."

Rosamond did not answer, unless a small secret smile in her pillows could be called an answer.

"I don't suppose," proceeded Baby, emboldened, "that you have ever been free from the dear Runkle for more than three days at a time since you married him."

The phrase being a mere statement of fact, it was again left without response.

"And really," pursued Aspasia, warming to her subject, "the way he pounced upon us last summer up in the hills was enough to ruin the nerves of a camel. No sooner gone than he was back. Positively one would rather have had him at home the whole time!"

Force of comparison evidently could no further go. Lady Gerardine gave one of her rare laughs. Baby's face was all wrathful gravity.

Poor Sir Arthur! Disciplinarian as he was, he failed to inspire his immediate circle with anything like average respect. It was a study in morals to watch the rapidity with which the first awe of some newly joined member of his English staff, the flattered reverential fascination produced by early intercourse with the great man, gave way to the snigger, the jeer, the grudging submission. But, serene in his own consciousness of power and his own heaven-born gift of applying it, Sir Arthur laid down the law smilingly and inflexibly; and the native world about him, at least, bowed to his rule with impassive face and supple back. And, if there were any symptoms of that mutiny which his niece declared a long continuance of his rule must inevitably foster, it is quite certain that he would have refused to believe in it until the rebel's knife was actually at his throat.

"Ah," cried he, coming in upon them at the sound of his wife's laugh, "that's better! I thought we should soon have you on the right road when Sir James took you in hand."

Sir James's harmless ammonia mixture, orange-scented, differed as little from Dr. Saunders' sedative drops as the pith of his flowery advice from the latter's blunt statement. But Dr. Saunders was in deep disgrace, and would probably remain so until the Governor's next colic.

Lady Gerardine's face had instantly fallen back to its usual expression of indifference.

"I hope you weren't listening," cried Aspasia, pertly, "we were just saying what a bore you are."

Sir Arthur laughed again, very guilelessly, and stooped to pinch her little pink ear.

"I have wired to Sir James to have his opinion upon the best resort for you in England, until my arrival, dear. His answer has just come."

He spread out the flimsy sheet and ran his short trim finger along the lines: "'Decidedly Brighton, Margate, or Eastbourne.' It is evident he thinks you require bracing."

"I have quite decided where I am going," answered Lady Gerardine, turning her head on her cushion to look at him.

"Eh?" cried Sir Arthur, scarce able to believe his ears.

"I have been unable to talk business, hitherto," proceeded his wife, gently. "But I wanted to tell you I have decided: I go to Saltwoods."

"To Saltwoods?" His eyes were fixed, protruding, in displeased amazement.

To Saltwoods, that paltry little Dorsetshire manor-house which, by the recent demise of Captain English's mother, had devolved upon his young widow! The Old Ancient House, as it was invariably called throughout the countryside, set in such preposterous isolation that the letting of it on any terms had ever remained an impossibility--the legacy was by no means acceptable to Sir Arthur. The various sums that he had already had to disburse for its upkeep and repairs had been a very just grievance with him; and one of the many matters of business he had resolved to accomplish on his return to England was the sale, at any loss, of this inconvenient estate.

"I mean to go there," said Lady Gerardine in the same tone of delicate deliberation, but sitting up among her cushions and pushing the hair from her forehead with the gesture that he had already learned to regard with some dismay as indicative of "her nervous moments." "Old Mary, the housekeeper, can easily get in a couple of country girls, and that will do for me and Aspasia very well."

"Preposterous! Now that's what I call perfectly idiotic! I don't want to find fault with you, my dear girl, and of course you've been ill and all that. But it's quite evident you are not yet in a state to see things in their right light. 'A case of sudden neurasthenia upon a highly sensitive organisation,' as Sir James says."

This was certainly a more suitable definition of her ladyship's malady than the "damn queer low state" of Dr. Saunders; and Sir Arthur rolled it with some complacency upon his tongue.

"There, there, we won't discuss the matter any more just now. Rely upon me to arrange all that is necessary in the most suitable and satisfactory manner." He drew a carved stool to the head of the couch, and possessed himself of her hand in his affectionate way. "There, there, she must not be worried!"

Across the fatigue of Lady Gerardine's countenance came an expression that was almost a faint amusement, tempered with pity. Aspasia watching, very demure, mouse-still, from her lowly post, found the situation one of interest.

"You are always kind," said Rosamond then; "but I shall be better at Saltwoods than anywhere. You forget that I have work to do."

"Work?" echoed Sir Arthur. He drew back to contemplate her uneasily; positively this sounded like wandering.

"It was your wish," she continued (could there lurk in that soft voice an undertone of resentment?), "that I should ... look over"--she hesitated as if she could not pronounce her dead husband's name and remodelled her phrase--"that I should assist Major Bethune with his book."

"Ah!"

Sir Arthur remembered. But the proposition was none the less absurd. That Lady Gerardine, too delicate to be able to remain with him--with him, Sir Arthur, the Lieutenant-Governor, at a moment when a hostess was eminently needed at Government House--should be taking into her calculations the claims of so unimportant a personality as that of poor dead and gone English, was, for all his consciously punctilious chivalry towards his predecessor's shade, a piece of irritating feminine perversity that positively stank in Sir Arthur's nostrils. He snorted. For a moment, indeed, he was really angry. And the sharpness of his first exclamation brought the blood racing to Aspasia's cheeks. She hesitated on the point of interference. But the invalid's unruffled demeanour made no demand upon assistance. Suddenly realising himself the unfitness of his tone towards a neurasthenic patient of highly sensitive organisation, Sir Arthur dropped from loud indignation to his usual indulgent pitch:

"See, my love, how perverse you are. First, when it seemed a mere matter of justice to poor English's memory and could have been accomplished with a very trifling expenditure of trouble, you were opposed to the matter. And now, when, as Sir James says, it is so important for you to have absolute rest, to put even your ordinary correspondence on one side, you tell me, childishly, that it is my wish you should _work_! I hope, I hope," said Sir Arthur, appealing to space, "that I am not an unreasonable man."

"I was wrong," said Lady Gerardine; "I do not intend to do it because it was your wish, but because it is now mine."

Once again Sir Arthur paused for want of the phrase that would lit his sense of the extraordinary attitude of his wife and yet not induce any recurrence of the dreaded symptoms. Then a brilliant solution of the difficulty flashed across his mind.

"I will write and inform Major Bethune of the necessary postponement of the whole affair. And now, not a word more."

Lady Gerardine smiled, but it was with lips that were growing pale.

"I have myself written to Major Bethune," said she. "It is all settled. He will be travelling by our boat and will come to me at Saltwoods as soon as I am ready for him."

She sank a fraction deeper among her cushions as she spoke, and a blue shade gathered about her mouth and nostrils. Aspasia scrambled to her feet in time to arrest the storm that was threatening in clouds upon her uncle's brow.

"For Heaven's sake," she cried, "hold your tongue and go away, Runkle. You'll kill her!" She dived for the smelling-salts and shrieked for Jani. "Good gracious," she rated him, holding the bottle with pink, shaky fingers to the waxen nostrils, "after all the doctors said, and everything!"

Sir Arthur retired, remarkably crestfallen, to his study. How was a man to exercise the proper marital control upon the marble-white obstinacy of a fainting woman?

Neurasthenic shock was a very fine diagnosis. But it was a question, after all--he lit his cheroot--whether a "damn queer state" did not more aptly picture the actual condition of affairs.

* * * * *