Part 15

"I know. But I wish you'd make Christians of our own people first. If you did that thoroughly, you'd find my villagers would come of themselves. They hear a lot about Christianity. They don't see much of it."

Meredith's eyes flashed in answer. He leant forward across the table with his hand clenched on the black-bound Bible.

"You are quite right, Tristram," he said, with restrained passion. "We have failed badly hitherto. We have acted like cowards, whispering and murmuring of our religion as though we were half-ashamed of it. Who can believe in cowards? This people has got to see Christianity as the Romans saw it, apparent weakness pitted against the majority and triumphant. They have got to see what our faith means to us. Out here we are the early Christians. We must pass through the same ordeals, we must pay the same price. Therein lies our only hope of salvation, for ourselves, for these, our brethren for whose souls we are responsible to God."

"I don't know much about their souls," Tristram returned quietly. "I'm responsible for their bodies. It's quite enough. What do you mean to do?"

Meredith threw back his square head. There was something vivid and dominating about his personality at that moment which lifted mere fanatical rhetoric to real grandeur. In some such spirit Luther might have flung down his immortal challenge.

"Testify to my faith before Caesar, Tristram."

"And who is Caesar?"

"The people. When they go down to the river to worship their gods--at the Feast of Siva----"

Tristram got up, pushing his food from him.

"You must be mad," he said hotly. "What should we do, civilized though we are, if at Easter some Brahmin insulted Christ from our altar?"

Meredith met him without flinching.

"Yours is the wretched toleration of our age," he said. "There can be no righteous toleration of lies and wickedness."

"You know what will happen? There'll be rioting--bloodshed----"

"Possibly. I believe it to be necessary. I don't shrink from it."

"That's good of you." Tristram ruffled his shock of reddish hair in a fit of angry humour. "What the rest of your victims feel about it doesn't matter, of course. Martyrs you'd call them. They wouldn't be martyrs. If a horde of infuriated fanatics descend on Gaya, it will be a slaughter stage-managed and engineered by yourself. You and your like would be chucked out of India, and serve you right. Gaya doesn't want to testify to its faith. I doubt if it knows what its faith is." He stalked over to the open door with his back to Meredith. "Well, I shall warn the authorities," he finished.

There was a silence. Meredith considered his companion with a gradual relaxation of his intensity. He got up at last and laid his hand on Tristram's broad shoulder. There was something shy and uncertain in his manner, like a school-boy who has been caught in heroics.

"You won't need to inform the authorities," he said. "I dare say I'm a pompous idiot. There won't be any slaughter. We're miles from Gaya. Their enthusiasm won't carry them that far. They'll duck me, and that'll be about the extent of it."

Tristram looked down at the dark eager face, and, catching the lurking humour in Meredith's eyes, laughed.

"Oh, well, if only you and I are going to be massacred, it's of no consequence whatever," he said. "There, man, finish your supper!"

But he himself left his food untouched. He went over to a little roughly carved cabinet and produced a tobacco jar and an old disreputable pipe. Meredith looked away from him, playing absent-mindedly with the knife which formed Tristram's dinner-service. His pulses had begun to beat faster. He was dimly aware now that he had come to Heerut with a purpose that he had cherished secretly and painfully for many months past.

"I suppose you've not seen Boucicault lately?" he asked suddenly.

Tristram did not answer at once. He seemed absorbed in the accurate filling of his pipe-bowl.

"Yes," he said, at last. "I saw him today."

"Any change?"

"None. I'm beginning to be afraid there never will be."

"Poor Anne!" Meredith said, scarcely above a breath.

Tristram came over to the table and sat down on the edge. He lit his pipe, and Meredith, alert now for every guiding sign, saw that the hand with the match shook.

"Why 'poor Anne'? It's been ghastly, of course--but then, what was her life like before? At least, there's no one to cow the spirit out of her. She's free."

"You don't understand Anne. I've known her so long. Perhaps, as a clergyman, I had a deeper insight into her mind. Boucicault terrified her, but she loved him. It seems odd, doesn't it, but at the bottom he was a kind of hero to her. She thought of him as he once was--Tiger Sahib--a daring, handsome leader of men. That's what's uppermost in her now. Everything else is forgotten and forgiven. So you can see for yourself what she is suffering. It's the pitiableness of the man's utter helplessness in the face of her mother's amazing attitude----"

Tristram swung himself off the table and began to pace the room with long, impatient strides. Meredith watched him unceasingly.

"I approve of Mrs. Boucicault's attitude," Tristram said, in angry challenge.

"A great many people do. They think she's well rid of a ruffian. But, as I've told you, Anne loved him. She has a rare and wonderful spirit, Tristram, and she has forgiven. Her mother's flaunted happiness and frivolity were unbearable. She fled from it, and now she's longing for her father. She hasn't a penny of her own. It's a ghastly situation. The devil who did for Boucicault did for Anne."

Tristram stopped short. He was staring down at his pipe, which had gone out.

"You're confoundedly sure of things," he said brutally. "You know her so well. Why don't you marry her?"

"I asked her to marry me two months ago," was the answer. Meredith's hands were clasped on the table in an attitude which, but for his level voice and composed features, would have suggested an almost intolerable suffering. "She wouldn't have me, Tristram."

"I don't wonder," with a rough laugh. "What woman would care to share your life or mine?"

"You don't understand--it wasn't that. She'd be glad and proud to go into the desert with the man she loved. I wasn't the man. That's all." He was breathing thickly, and suddenly he got up with a gesture that even then Tristram recognized as poignant. "My God, man, why don't you go in and win?" he burst out.

They stared at each other through a long minute of silence. The pipe slipped from Tristram's hand and fell with a crack on the hard floor. He bent down and picked it up. The stem was broken. He tried to piece it together with a sightless persistency.

"Are you--you trying to be damned funny?" he stammered.

"Do you think I should make a jest of a thing like that?" was the fierce retort. "What I've done would be the action of a cad if you weren't the man I know you to be. It hasn't been easy--you can guess that. But I wasn't going to see Anne's happiness break up or want of a little sincerity. I believed you cared. I've been watching you. I was almost certain tonight. I understood your principles--you wouldn't ask a woman to share your life--but I know what Anne feels--she'd stick by you, Tristram----" He faltered, the thread of his argument lost in a sudden ugly sense of uncertainty. He saw Tristram's face in the shadow, and its sheer expressionlessness frightened him. "I suppose I've behaved like a fool," he said. "A man who cares as I do is liable to become obsessed with an idea. Forget it----"

Tristram started a little, as though awakening from a deep mental abstraction. He came and stood at Meredith's side, laying the fragments of the old pipe on the table with a mechanical care.

"That's the only foolish thing you've said," he remarked, gently. "I don't believe any one ever forgets anything. It's just a sort of comfortable phrase-- You did quite right--you clergymen have a kind of insight into things--you--you see where the shoe pinches--don't worry--I'm awfully grateful. Even now, I see what a fine thing you've done--I shall realize it much better later on. You've lived up to your faith--you've made me respect it. It's a case of the old Pagan and the early Christian. No, I'm not jeering. I'm in deadly earnest. There, turn in and go to sleep. I shan't want my bunk tonight. I've got to think things out--get clear with myself. So many things have been sprung on me--I've got to be alone. But don't worry. You've done the right thing. Good night."

He held out his hand, and now it was quite steady. Meredith took it and wondered at the strength of it. In the dull, bitter reaction from sacrifice, he visualized the fervour of Tristram's happiness.

"Good night. Don't let Anne guess----"

"Never--on my word."

He went out. The night was dark and oppressive. A hush of exhaustion hung over the village. Afar off a jackal howled dismally, and was answered nearer by a prowling pariah dog. Tristram crossed the deep gutter which lined the uneven roadway. Though he could see nothing, he knew every stone, every turn; he could have named the invisible huts and their owners as he passed them. The pariah dog came snuffing round his heels, and he threw it a crust which it was his habit to carry in his pocket for the starving strays of the village. He heard the snap of its famished teeth, and a hurried scamper through the darkness.

At the cross-roads a breeze came down from the west. It rustled through the mysterious, never-silent leaves of the council-tree. It seemed to him that their whisperings were the ghosts of familiar voices now still. He stopped to listen. He could hear Ayeshi's voice, low-pitched and meditative, the harsher notes of the headman:

"Ah, those were the great days--the great days----"

The headman had been swept away in the last epidemic. Ayeshi was gone. He would never sit again by the red firelight and listen to the story of the Rani Kurnavati. He would never lie and stare up through the fret-work of peepul leaves and dream his boyish dreams of her. Gone--all gone.

He walked on rapidly. He had no consciousness of distance or any purpose--only a desire to be always moving. But at last a sound broke through to him--the dull, menacing roar of unseen water sliding past him into the darkness. He knew then that he had reached the limit of his respite. The menace was for him. This was the end of drifting--of all dreams. Here was the reality--the whole future to be faced.

He stood there listening--bracing himself....

It was close on daybreak when he returned. The lamp still burned dimly. Meredith lay on the camp-bed, fully dressed, apparently asleep. Tristram glanced at the composed face and then stumbled over to the table against the wall and sat down. The struggle was over, but it had left him exhausted, broken, his mind blank save for odd distortions of memory. He thought he heard Wickie patter over the floor to meet him--Ayeshi's soft and friendly foot-fall--a voice in his ear---"I could make you a rich man--you could marry whom you pleased----" He heard a woman speaking gently with a subdued triumph--"Is this your confession, Major Tristram?"

But Meredith was not asleep. He had spent the night in a bitter conflict of uncertainties, in prayer, in alternating thankfulness and dread. Up to now, his growing purpose had been a light in his path, brightening as his eyes strengthened to the prospect it revealed. He had hugged sacrifice to himself and grown peaceful in his surrender. Now that his sacrifice and surrender had been made full and complete, he had lost his vision.

On Tristram's return, he had feigned sleep instinctively. Now the big, powerful figure huddled by the table fascinated him. He watched through half-opened eyes, painfully aware that he was eavesdropping, spying, but unable to turn away. Something was to be shown, made clear to him. He saw Tristram pick up a photograph which had stood hidden in the shadow and hold it before him. He remained thus motionless for many minutes. Meredith tried to speak to him, to hinder at all costs the self-betrayal which was to come. But it was too late. Without a sound, Tristram had dropped forward, hiding the portrait with his body, his face in his arms.

Thereafter Meredith lay still, with closed eyes, sick with an unformed sense of disaster.

By daybreak Tristram had disappeared. He left a brief note. He had been called to the next village--a case of fever. He hoped that the eggs would be all right for Meredith's breakfast. All very matter-of-fact and natural.

But the portrait on the table had vanished with him.

*CHAPTER XVII*

*MRS. SMITHERS DOES ACCOUNTS*

As she would have been the first to admit, arithmetic was not one of Mrs. Smithers's intellectual strongholds. Figures baulked her. They were an inexhaustible enemy which, when aroused, flung themselves upon her in serried legions and battalions, eluded pursuit, barricaded themselves behind mysterious lines, multiplied themselves into preposterous quantities, and utterly refused to "come out" and surrender to Mrs. Smithers's somewhat individual laws of subtraction and addition.

On this particular afternoon, she had determined on a grand assault, and had armed herself with a large sheet of paper, a pencil sharpened to a nicety, removed her mittens, straightened her wig, and figuratively rolled up her sleeves. Having made these preparations, which were probably intended more as a demonstration of impending "frightfulness" than as an actual assistance in her task, she took up her position in the dak-bungalow dining-room and opened fire.

She had fought unflinchingly for an hour, when the curtains at the far end of the room were pushed aside with an impatience which Mrs. Smithers seemed to recognize. Before she even looked up, she turned the sheet of paper, with its pattern of astonishing hieroglyphics on its face, and set her mittens upon it with an air of fixing a tombstone over the body of her enemy.

"Why, lawks a-mercy, Sigrid, I thought you were sleeping!" she exclaimed.

"The punkah-coolie had a nap instead. It was so hot--oh, Smithy, what an annoying person you can be! I've been hunting for you for the last hour."

"In which case," Mrs. Smithers commented, with a judicial flavour of speech culled from the law reports, "you must have looked under all the chairs and tables. I can't see how anybody could hunt for anything in this nasty barn of a place without running into them in ten minutes. Not a decent door, not a corner where you can get a moment to yourself--let alone escape from those crawling black things----"

Sigrid Fersen sighed. She had been standing in the doorway, one slender arm, from which the sleeve of her pale green tea-gown had dropped back, raised to hold aside the curtain. Now she came forward, moving restlessly and noiselessly about the room, picking up one ornament after another and putting it down without apparently having looked at it.

"You never will let me wipe my boots on you, Smithy," she complained. "I've trained you to be a doormat ever since I was an infant in arms, and you still show not the slightest aptitude. One of these days, I shall lose patience and send you flying." She caught the line of contempt at the corner of Mrs. Smithers's prim mouth and came over and pinched her ear with real severity. "I saw that sneer, you horrid, disreputable old tyrant! You think I can't get on without you. I wish I could, just to spite you----"

She stopped short, as though losing interest in her train of thought, and stood at Mrs. Smithers's side stroking the latter's withered cheek with a light, absent-minded hand. Mrs. Smithers accepted the attention much as a cat would have done, without gush or undignified gratitude, but with sedate I-fully-deserve-it satisfaction. "Smithy, do you realize that we shall have to pack up soon?"

"And a very good thing, too. A nice sight you're getting to look in this oven of a place."

"Am I? I thought so myself this afternoon. It quite frightened me. Smithy, make an effort and tell the truth. Am I showing signs of--of wear and tear?"

Mrs. Smithers unbent. She took the hand on her shoulder and kissed it abruptly and shamefacedly.

"Steel doesn't rust, Sigrid."

"Doesn't it? That shows what you know about steel. Also it proves you've been reading penny novelettes again. Still, there is such a thing as poetic licence, and as a compliment it will pass. No, I shan't rust, Smithy--I'd rather snap like the good blade of your metaphor----" She drifted along the currents of her thoughts for a moment, and then added abruptly, "So it's hey for England and the end of things."

"The beginning, my dear."

"I don't know. We're almost at the end of our tether."

"Well, you knew that would happen."

"Yes--I suppose I did. I remember making admirable, lucid plans to meet the event. Nothing particular has happened to upset them."

"Nothing at all, my dear."

"By the way, the Rajah has asked me to marry him."

Mrs. Smithers laughed. Her amusement was usually of a more restrained kind, and the laugh had a rusty, disused sound.

"That's a good joke."

"Isn't it? I don't think he would have offered me anything so respectable if he had had more pluck. He's terrified of me and of Gaya. He imagines Gaya would make him impossible if he insulted me. I've outgrown his original intentions altogether."

"What did you say?"

"I told him he wasn't rich enough. It was horribly vulgar, but it's the sort of thing he understands. I've never seen a man more humiliated. If I had told him he was a blackguard, he wouldn't have minded. It's wonderful how he has assimilated our Western ideals."

"Sigrid----"

"Yes, I know--I'm in a detestable mood. I'm upset, Smithy. I've always controlled my life, moulded it into the shape I wanted. I was so sure that I could never be beaten by it. I thought there was only one real catastrophe we human beings were afflicted with--ill-health--and that I was prepared to master in my own way. But now----"

Mrs. Smithers picked up her pencil and tapped the table with a judicial air of summing up.

"You're out of sorts, Sigrid. Look at things straight. Two years ago we started off on a wild-goose chase. I knew it was a wild-goose chase, but you had to be humoured and so I just let you run. Besides, you had a grain of horse-sense in you. If you couldn't find what you wanted in those two years, you'd take the next best thing. Well, you haven't found it----"

"How do you know? What about the Rajah?"

"Sigrid--your mind wants a good spring-cleaning. It's full of cobwebs and horrors----"

"Or Major Tristram?"

Mrs. Smithers seized upon her mittens and folded them up into a tight ball and smacked them viciously down on the table.

"Of course, you're in love with him, the poor benighted, footling ninny. That's the whole trouble."

"And you're dying for me to marry him. That's why you're always insulting him."

She moved away from Mrs. Smithers's side and stood at the open window looking out on to the garden, her hand to her cheek in her favourite attitude of meditation. "Yes, I am in love with him in a superficial sort of way. It's his absurdity, his unreality, his utterly impossible conception of life. And his love of me. Just as absurd as the rest of him. A fantasia. Two years' worship of a woman he saw dancing for ten minutes before a vulgar, gaping, unseeing mob! Think of it. It's sheer worship, Smithy. He sees something miraculous--divine in me. That's the wonderful part of him. He's right. He's gone right through me to what is divine--my art. He saw me dance--he was just a country-bumpkin who didn't know Beethoven from Bizet--and he didn't worry about my beauty or the shape of my limbs, or wonder whether my pearls were real or who gave them to me. He saw God in me. I knew that when I found my photograph on his table. In a kind of flash. It wasn't a silly, stage-door infatuation. It was real--a perfect understanding." She threw out her arms with a gesture of freedom, of spiritual expansion. "Oh, it tasted good, that understanding. I couldn't have done less than love him." She seemed to sink into a deep, brooding contentment, and Mrs. Smithers did not move or speak. "But I shan't marry him. I am not young any longer. I have built my house and have lived in it too long. I need space and splendour, magnificence. I should stifle in his hovel. I am no sensualist. I belong to the best of the old Greeks. No vulgar display of wealth, no ugliness of poverty--but absolute Beauty--that's my religion--the most austere religion of the world. He understands, but he cannot follow. He doesn't know it, but he has chosen the road of the Galilean--not the Galilean of the Cross, but the simple man who loved the sparrows and the lilies--and I follow Diana and Apollo----" She broke off with a sigh and turned away. "So that's the end of that. We shall pack our trunks, and one day it will be just an episode. But today--don't let any one worry me today, Smithy. There's some one coming up the drive now. Tell them I'm ill--anything--only don't let them worry me----"

She touched the old cheek with her lips, and then soundlessly, like a flash of pale light, had vanished.

Mrs. Smithers unfolded her mittens and put them on. Apparently unmoved, she was about to resume her offensive against her enemy, when Mary Compton made her appearance on the balcony. Whereupon Mrs. Smithers postponed her attack in order to settle first with the intruder. Her manner, however, was almost gracious. She liked Mrs. Compton. She liked her especially this afternoon because she was wearing one of Sigrid's frocks--by no means an old one--which Mrs. Smithers had altered with her own hands. This detail formed an unbreakable link of affection and fraternity.

Mrs. Compton did not wait for an invitation. She dropped into the nearest chair, discarded her garden hat, and flung her parasol on the floor, proceeding thereafter to ruffle her grey-threaded curly hair with an exasperated hand.

"Oh, the heat! Smithy, for pity's sake, don't tell me I've faced it for nothing. Sigrid's in?"

"She's in, Mrs. Compton, but she's not at home."

"Not even for me?"

"Not for a living soul."

"She's--she's not ill?"

"Not that I know of." She shot a glance at Mrs. Compton's crestfallen countenance, and relaxed her official attitude. "You can have a cup of tea if you like."

Mrs. Compton laughed.

"Well, it's a poor substitute, but I'll take it. I should expire on your doorstep if you didn't give me something to revive me. I met that brute of a Barclay on the road and he offered me a lift. The mere thought of it will keep me on the frazzle for days. I only hope he isn't coming here."

"He'd better not," Mrs. Smithers observed, with grim significance. There was a moment's silence, and then she jerked her head in the direction of the curtained doorway. "It's the heat," she explained. "It's just wearing her to ribbons. The Lord be praised, we shall be going back to civilization soon."

Mrs. Compton sat bolt upright, red with consternation.

"She's not going back to England?"

"I hope so, I'm sure."

"It's--it's an engagement, I suppose?"

"H'm, a sort of one."

"Smithy--and it's just as though she only arrived yesterday. What shall I do? Everything will be nothing without her. What did she come for? Just to make us all hate each other, just to show us what a silly, colourless world we live in? Smithy, this means a divorce for me. I shall desert Archie. I shall live at stage-doors and spend my fortune on front seats in the pit. I shall see her dance at last----"