Part 21

The regimental band glided into a Viennese waltz, and the intoxicating measure came swaying through the silence. The eyes winced, and then steadied angrily, scornfully. Tristram stretched out his hand and touched the coverlet. There was something groping and passionately seeking in the movement--an articulate appeal.

"Boucicault--it's rotten perhaps to come and preach--don't let it eat into you--all this. Don't judge harshly. I'm not speaking of myself, you know that. I'm thinking of your wife. You lie there dumb and helpless--I don't know what's going on in your mind. I can't understand. Well, it's like that with most of us. Words and actions don't matter much. We just hide behind them. But if we could get down to the motive of each other's cruelty, there would be neither hatred nor condemnation--at the worst, pity." He was silent an instant, his strong hands clasped between his knees. He had spoken sadly and with a certain abstraction and unconsciousness of his hearer, which lent his appeal force and took from it all hint of patronage and mockery. "I say all this because you must think a great deal--lying there--a great deal of the past. For your own peace, it would be better to judge gently a woman you must have cared for. Sometimes, behind our worst frivolity, there is a great bitterness----"

The eyes sneered. Tristram met their ferocious gibe unflinchingly.

"That is one thing I had to say. And then--there's Anne. When I asked her to be my wife, I didn't know what you would feel about our marriage and I didn't care very much. You had made her pretty wretched, and I didn't consider at the time that what had happened between us made any difference. You had been considerably less than a father to her--and besides, you were knocked out. I understand Sir Gilbert treated you like a brave man and was quite honest with you. He doesn't believe in your recovery--nor do I--chiefly because I've done everything for you that science can do--and failed." He paused again. His sentences had been clipped and hard, the words almost brutal. But his attitude was not that of a strong man talking down from the height of his strength and well-being to a broken victim. The eyes under the straight fair brows revealed pitilessly what lay behind the dogged jaw, the composed and resolute exposition. There can be no sentimentality between suffering and suffering, only equality.

"But there was one thing I hadn't understood," he said, "and that was Anne's love for you. Frankly, I thought she would be freer, happier without you. But I was mistaken. It didn't matter that you'd made her wretched. She only remembered that you were her father, the Bagh Sahib, the fine soldier who had done great things. She cared intensely, and all this--this sort of life smashed her up. If she ran away from it, it was because she felt it as an insult to you--a deliberate cruelty. She just ate her heart out about it. When I realized how matters were there was only one thing on earth I wanted to do, and that was to come along and give her every mortal thing I could to make her happy--you included--everything she'd missed. It seemed to me pitiable to consider your feelings or any conventional notions of--of propriety, as I suppose you'd call it. She needed some one to look after her--some one who cared. Well, I cared. Now that I have the right, I shall live for her as far as one human being can live for another. It is my most passionate hope to make her happy. I don't know whether I shall succeed--that's another matter. I shall do my best."

He got up and stood at his full height. The evening regimentals which he wore did not become him. They looked indefinably grotesque on his bigness--like a child's toy uniform on a grown man. The short Eton coat exaggerated the breadth of his shoulders, the black trousers the narrowness of his hips, the length of limb. The gold and red clashed with his tawny hair and the rugged, weather-tanned features. He needed a background of forest, of action, of stern living. His body needed the freedom of rough clothing.

"Anne wants you to live with us," he said. "That is what I have come to tell you. If you both would be happier, I should be glad, too. There is a great deal I might be able to do to make things more tolerable for you--at least, I should try. I have given up my quarters at Heerut. It is for you to decide."

The eyes sparkled. It seemed to Tristram that they were blazing with satiric laughter. He had a reasonless, overwhelming sense of near disaster. "Give me some sign, Boucicault. If you consent, close your eyes or----"

Slowly, as if weighed down by disuse, the withered arm lying on the sheet lifted itself from the elbow. It remained upright for an instant, throwing a sinister shadow on the wall, seeming to point upwards with menacing significance, then sank slowly to its place. The eyes were mad with exultation.

Tristram was back to the bedside at one stride. He laid his fingers on the savagely beating pulse. With rapid, skilful movements, he began to test the muscles and nerve of the now motionless arm. He was breathing quickly. The weariness, the painful deliberation had gone from him. He was himself again--the fighter on the vast field of suffering, the physician glorying in the greatest of all triumphs.

"By God, Boucicault, you don't know what that may mean! It's what we'd hoped for. Look here--can you do it again?"

The arm remained inert, the eyes were, momentarily veiled and insignificant. "How long have you been able to do that?" He was still busy with his examination and scarcely troubled about an answer. He had plunged back into a world where there were no passions or conflicts, but only huge immutable laws, no personal desires or unreal dreams, but only facts, unending chains of cause and effect, a thousand paths converging on one great end. It was not till he had made every experiment complete that he remembered. He looked up. The eyes were turned into their corners, resting on his face. Their exaggerated expanse of white gave them a look like that of a vicious dog. They did not move save when Tristram lifted himself slowly from his half-kneeling position, and then they followed him with a malicious fixity. The rest of the face was dead--a crumbling mask--but the life in those eyes was inextinguishable, titanic in its will to continuation.

He had to escape from them. He went over to the wide-open balcony and stood there with his back turned, staring out into the darkness. For a moment, his brain refused to face this reckoning with the future. He listened to the music which poured through the scented stillness like the drowsy, delicious murmur of running water. A man and a woman came down the pathway which led from the front of the bungalow. He could hear their voices--the man's deep-pitched and earnest, the woman's silvery and ironic. The light from a Chinese lantern shining softly among the branches drew a subdued gleam from the gold on the man's collar, from the woman's white, uncovered shoulders. Suddenly the man bent down, and they stood together through a tense, suffocating moment of silence. Then the woman spoke again--breathlessly, the ironic lightness gone.

Tristram drew back. He felt as though he had been drawn out into the night's delirious sweetness; as though in defiance of that silent, menacing figure his pulses had leapt forward, his blood had clamoured for the fulfilment of its elemental demand on all this wealth of living. He was young still--young in his purity of feeling--young in the unsatisfied forces of desire. Youth flung itself on him with its imperative behests--now when he reeled under the knowledge of its passing. For it was over. He reasoned clearly enough through this storm of primitive emotion. Boucicault would live. He might come back into life--he, Tristram, would bring him back to life. It was the task which his creed set him--not the creed of his profession but the deeper, sterner creed of his blood.

And what if his blood lied, what if his creed were a mad, senseless paradox? Was not the happiness of the majority the only good, its preservation the only morality? This man had set himself against the law. In a ghostly, tragic procession, those whom he had hunted out of their rightful heritage passed before Tristram's memory--young officers, those six men in the full glory of manhood standing in the barrack yard, their backs to the wall, their faces to their brothers, and the death which was to be dealt out to them; Eleanor Boucicault grey-cheeked and wild-eyed pursuing the phantom promises of life; Anne, cowed and broken, haunted now by a remorseful treacherous memory; a death-stricken little mongrel dog, most harmless, most pitiable of all, with glazed eyes, seeking to understand the black mystery of human cruelty.

Tristram put his hand to the stiff military collar as though it choked him. The foundations on which he had built his life were crumbling under his feet. Was he to give this criminal mind the power to act, to drag his escaped and maimed victims back into the net of his authority, to add others to that pitiable procession? Tristram recognized the issues with an appalling clearness. His trained intellect grappled with them with the same stern impartiality of judgment as he would have used in tracking the source of a disease. With regard to himself, he discarded all false sentiment. As men judge, the blow he had struck had been unfortunate but just. Was he to heap an outrageous punishment upon himself, upon Anne, upon an old woman who had known no happiness save her joy in him? Would it not be a strong and logical following out of his sincere belief if he made no effort to fan this evil flame to life?

As yet he was not conscious of any direct temptation. He was only facing the issues--weighing one life against another, as it had happened a hundred times in his professional career.

He turned slowly and came back into the room. The eyes followed him, but their malicious knowledge no longer reached him. The fight was not now between himself and this man, but between two fundamental and opposite conceptions of life. There was a little table at the foot of the bed, crowded with the paraphernalia of sickness. He stopped before it, because its interest offered a fresh delay, and idly picked up one of the glass-stoppered bottles. He opened it and smelt its contents. The faint, sickly perfume flashed its significance to his brain.

Men were given the power to kill----

He looked up. The eyes burning in that white mask were on his hands. Their expression had changed--had become more horrible. It was the very spirit of fear and triumphant evil.

Tristram put the bottle back in its place. He came and stood by the bed.

"I don't want you to hope too much, Boucicault," he said, coolly and professionally. "In the best of cases, it will be a long job. I shall come tomorrow and go over you again and see what's to be done. If Sir Gilbert is still in the land, we'll have him over. And you must do all you can to help us. As to me--I quite realize I have landed myself in an impasse from which there is no possible escape. I don't know what Anne will feel or think. But she'll be so thankful to get you back, the cost won't matter. At any rate, I shall not speak of all this again to you. My business with you is to give you back to life. The afterwards is my concern. Good night, Boucicault."

As he had spoken, his eyes on the mask of bitterness and hatred, something rushed over him. It was like the melting of a frozen stream under the first warm sunshine. It seemed to him that he had looked straight down through those eyes into the very heart of human misery, and had understood. He remembered his own words: "There is only one distinction between men--the unhappy and the happy, the cursed and the blessed." They blazed now with a real significance. Men were pitchforked into this world with distorted bodies or distorted souls--what did it matter which? They deserved neither hatred nor condemnation--they were the awful mystery of humanity, the visible symbol of the curse under which humanity totters. "Here, but for a wild incalculable chance, go I, Tristram."

He bent down and laid his hand on Boucicault's arm. He did not stop to think whether or not his touch might be repugnant to the other man. He acted out of an imperative instinct.

"You mustn't worry," he said gently, and almost gaily. "You'll live to do for me yet, Boucicault! Good night again."

The eyes closed as though they had burnt themselves out. Tristram moved quietly to the verandah. He had a sudden sense of freedom, of physical relief, which was like an awakening from a suffocating nightmare. He went down the steps into the garden. It was then, as he stood there listening to the music and the distant voices, that he saw Sigrid Fersen come towards him. His eyes could not have recognized her face, for it was dark and she was moving quickly, like a pale mysterious light, through the shadow of the trees. But he knew her. Was it her step--the lithe, familiar motion of her body--or something deep-hidden within himself which irresistibly went out to her? He could not have told. He waited for her. She came on unseeingly to the edge of the faint reflection from Boucicault's room, and then stood still, staring at him. Her small, white face had an aghast look. He tried to speak to her and could not. His throat hurt him.

He knew now that he had never known her, never, even in his dreams of her, realized her potentialities. He knew that she had deliberately thrown down her weapons to meet him in the stern simplicity of his life. She had been too proud, too self-assured perhaps to fear to show herself to him physically at her least. Now he saw her at her highest--the priceless, polished stone in a rare and exquisite setting.

A languorous breath of night-wind ruffled the smooth gold of her hair and lifted the flimsy scarf from her shoulders. It fluttered out behind her like a pale mist. He saw the single string of pearls at her neck. He fancied he could see the passionate life beating beneath them. And through all her brilliancy, her burning vitality, there was a strain of quaint Victorianism, a demure elfishness--like the inter-weaving of a minuet with the riot of a bacchanal.

He could not have spoken to her, and at last a smile dawned at the corners of her mouth. He knew that she had been afraid, and it flashed upon him that in the bitterest moment she would retain her humour, her zest of life.

"You quite frightened me, Major Tristram," she said. "I have never seen you in uniform before."

"Does it become me?" he heard himself ask back.

"No. You look as though you were rather stifled by so much magnificence. And you've never seen me in full gala either, have you?"

"No."

"It suits me, doesn't it? That's the difference between us. I'm in my natural element. Will you take me back, Major Tristram? I came out for a breath of fresh air and to escape Mrs. Boucicault. Mrs. Boucicault asked me to dance. I think she fancied it would be a good method of rehabilitating me in the eyes of outraged Gaya. But I didn't want to. What's the use of marrying if you have to go on working for your living?"

He walked silently beside her. He did not know this woman with the hard voice--he felt that she did not want him to know her. Her hand rested lightly on his arm. He looked at it. It was like alabaster on the red sleeve. "We're going to be married shortly," she went on. "Mr. Meredith is trying to refuse his services. He doesn't approve. He wants us to leave Gaya. It's so absurdly Christian, isn't it? My husband's business will be in Gaya and I like the place----" They had turned the curve of the path and came within sight of the softly-lit garden. They could see shadows of the dancers gliding through Mrs. Boucicault's rooms to the rhythm of the latest American distortion. Little groups had gathered round the tables on the verandah and there was much laughter and the subdued clinking of glasses. The Chinese lanterns shone like bright warm eyes amid the trees.

Sigrid stood still an instant. He heard her draw a deep, unsteady breath. "How gay it all is--fairy-like! One can scarcely believe that there is such a thing as reality. Perhaps there isn't. Mrs. Boucicault is a daring hostess. It requires nerve to dance with a dead husband in the house."

It occurred to him then to tell her what he had just discovered. He held back. He was afraid of troubling the surface of their relationship. They did not know one another. The man and woman who had faced each other that night in Heerut belonged to a different life. They were shadows--or had become shadows.

"By the way, Major Tristram, what has happened to the Wickie Memorial? Is he still among the living?"

"He lives and rejoices in the name of Richard," he answered lightly.

"Do you sometimes let him out of the compound?" she asked.

He did not answer her at once. Her voice had sounded casual enough, and yet he knew that there had been something deliberate in her words--a deliberate desire to hurt, to thrust down through his seeming tranquillity to a raw and open wound.

"How did you know?" he asked curtly.

"I don't know--I guessed."

"My wife doesn't like animals about the place," he said steadily. "I do what I can for the little chap. You see, in Heerut it was different--and I don't live at Heerut now."

"Of course not. You have become so civilized." They had reached the verandah steps and she turned to him with a laugh. "So civilized. The old landmarks have gone--the beard, the disreputable clothes, the wild-man-o'-the-wood's hair--and heaven knows what else! Is there anything left of the Dakktar Sahib, or is he smothered under the respectability of Major Tristram?" Her eyes ran over him--mockingly. He raised his right hand--he could not have told why. It was at once a movement of pain and self-defence. Then he saw that her eyes were on his wrist. "I'm sorry----" she said, gently. "I am intolerable. There are things one must believe in or perish--Forgive me. And, for a wedding-present, will you give Richard back to me? I think he would be happier."

He nodded. He had the feeling that therewith something for which he had fought had been finally surrendered. He followed her silently up the steps. At the top they were met by Anne. She went up to her husband and put her hand on his arm. She did not look at Sigrid, and the deliberateness of her disregard betrayed how keenly she felt the other's presence. Her obstinate mouth was compressed and unsmiling.

"I have been wanting you, Tris," she said sharply. "Where have you been?"

"With your father," he answered. "I'm sorry. I did not know you were looking for me."

"You might have told me----" Her voice sounded pettish and breathless. "I should have come with you. And you haven't danced with me once."

He laughed. He felt rather than saw that Sigrid had turned away and joined one of the parties of the verandah. He heard Radcliffe offer her his place and the sulky deference in the boy's voice. It gave him a sudden knowledge of the fight she was waging.

"I can't dance--not even as well as a polar-bear," he said. "You've married a loutish barbarian, Anne."

"Your barbarism seems to appeal to some people," she flashed back. He knew then that she had listened. But he could feel no resentment. She looked ill and almost old. Her home-made evening dress did not become her, and the Indian sun had begun to drain the colour from her cheeks. As though remorse-stricken, she pressed his arm, looking up at him pathetically. "Tris, I didn't mean to be cross and horrid. I wanted to go home with you----"

"Weren't you enjoying yourself?" he asked.

"I couldn't--Tris, don't you see----?"

He looked past her into the brightly-lit rooms where a few couples were still dancing. He saw then what it was that had driven her out to seek him. Mrs. Boucicault danced the tango with Barclay. They were both conspicuous. Barclay was the only man in civilian dress, and, thanks to Rasaldu's angry absence, his deeper isolation was made more manifest. But he danced well--perhaps too well. Mrs. Boucicault gave a fierce little laugh of pleasure as he guided her swiftly across the room. She herself was an outrageous figure in her youthful, almost childish dress, high at the neck and loaded with jewellery. Her fluffy grey hair looked tossed and disordered, her cheeks were painted. But as she suddenly broke off and came towards them leaning on Barclay's arm, Tristram saw that there was nothing artificial in her shining eyes.

"Now, what do you think of me, Tristram?" she exclaimed. "Isn't there life in me yet? Don't you admire me?"

He felt Anne shrink closer to him. He bowed gravely.

"With all my heart," he answered.

"Oh, it's been splendid! I've been chasing the years and catching them up. Mr. Barclay dances so wonderfully, Anne: you should try your step with his----"

Barclay made a little movement forward. He only glanced at Anne. His eyes fixed themselves on Tristram's face.

"I haven't the pleasure," he said, in his soft mincing way. "Perhaps you'd introduce me to your wife, Tristram----"

"I don't care whom I dance with as long as our steps match," Mrs. Boucicault continued, with reckless ecstasy.

There was a moment's silence. Barclay had heard. His eyes narrowed a little and his nostrils dilated with his quick breathing. Tristram turned to Anne. She stared straight up at him. Her face was sallow and pinched-looking.

"Will you please take me home, Tris?"

She slipped her arm through his and turned to go. Barclay held his ground. His lips were trembling. The little vein of success that he had had with Mrs. Boucicault had intoxicated him, but many things had happened that evening. It was as Mrs. Bosanquet had said--Gaya was fighting to the last ditch.

"I don't think Mrs. Tristram understands," he said huskily. "We're sort of relations, aren't we? Won't you do the brotherly, Tristram?"

He had not meant to say it. It was the look on Anne's face which had goaded him--the hundred petty pin-pricks which he had endured patiently, the sudden realization of the impossible gulf between him and the tall standing uniformed figure before him.

Anne gave a little laugh. It was tremulous and disgusted.

"I really think we'd better go, Tris."

"I'm not drunk," Barclay said. "It's true. You'd better ask him. Captain Tristram was my father right enough----" He swung round. "Why don't you own up to it, damn you----?" he burst out.

The little group nearest him turned to look at him. He was only conscious of Tristram and Sigrid. The latter had half-risen from her place. He saw her face as a white blank. Some one came and touched him on the arm. That was what he wanted--to come to grips with them, to choke them with some of the humiliation that was like dry dust in his throat.

"Look here, Barclay----"

"It's perfectly true," Tristram said suddenly. "Mr. Barclay is my half-brother. I understood that he did not wish it known--or I should have acknowledged the relationship before. I do so now."

There was a silence. He had spoken simply and very naturally. It was as though a bomb had been thrown into the room and he had picked it up and proved it an empty shell. Still more, it was as though a child had burst out with some weighty, wonderful secret and had been met by cool, indifferent laughter. The whole situation seemed to have lost point--become tiresome and ridiculous. The man who had interfered drew back, muttering an apology. Mrs. Boucicault laughed.

"How silly it all is!" she said, half to herself. "What does it matter?"