A Psychological Contretemps
Young Andrews was a sensitive soul, but he was not unmanly. He fought
off the tears as long as he was conscious, but his pillow was wet in the
morning.
His station was "on the Bombay side," as they say in India. To be exact,
it was at Junnar. And he started down the next day, after sending Nina a
bouquet of Annandale's loveliest roses. But when he alighted from the
little branch railway line at Umballa, he halted.
The cantonment here was the home of the Darlings. But it was also the
home of Dinghal, a deputy commissioner, who was a friend of young
Andrews. So young Andrews lingered, and the deputy commissioner made him
welcome.
Hitherto he had regarded Dinghal as rather a bore. And in this he was
thoroughly justified. But since his two months at Simla the deputy
commissioner had acquired for him a distinct interest.
Dinghal knew the Darlings intimately, and his passion for gathering and
disseminating minor gossip, which had once been a fault, became now, in
the changed tastes of his visitor, an enviable virtue, especially as the
visitor found it the easiest thing in the world to direct the flow into
the one desired channel.
As a rule there was nothing vicious about Dinghal's gossip. It was so
pitifully tame and pointless that it wearied the listener to extinction;
for Dinghal was a kindly man, inclined to gloss over faults and failings
and to "play up" the good points of even the most unworthy.
This was another reason why young Andrews was so vastly entertained by
all the little talks they had about Colonel and Mrs. Darling. He had
heard enough of the other sort of thing in the club at Simla, and had
relished it then, in that Nina's husband was the chief victim, and at
that time his sympathies were all with Nina.
What he craved most now was unbiased truth. Which is sometimes a
panacea--and sometimes not.
"They're not happy, to be sure," Dinghal admitted with evident
reluctance. "But I don't know that either is to blame. Just a case of
mutual inadaptability that neither discovered until it was too late. I
knew Darling long before he married her, and I know people who knew
little Nina Calthrop when she was crowing in swaddling clothes.
"There's not a better family in England. Good people all of them. The
men have rather run to the army. You know how that goes in families.
She's a grand-daughter of old General Buddicomb, who distinguished
himself in Egypt in 1882.
"The general's sister, Nina's great-aunt, married the Duke of
Pemberwell. Fine people, I tell you. Then there was Kneedrock; a husky
young giant--viscount, you know--son of the Earl of Dumphreys, who went
to South Africa and never came back."
"Never came back?" echoed young Andrews questioningly.
"Reported killed at Spion Kop, I think it was. Body never brought home,
though. May have been Bloemfontein, I'm not sure. At any rate, they say
he was Nina's favorite cousin. She certainly took his loss very keenly.
"After her first wild grief she developed a mania for particulars. When
peace was arranged and the rank and file were coming home by the
shipload she lost no chance of getting every fact she could from every
officer she met.
"At the Pemberwell seat--Puddleford--she encountered Colonel Darling. It
was he, they say, who identified poor Kneedrock's remains, what there
was of them, and, of course, he held for her at that vital moment more
interest than any other man, woman, or child in the United Kingdom.
"She annexed him--body, soul, and breeches, as the saying is. And it
wasn't Darling's fault that he was flattered and fascinated, for Nina
was then barely twenty, and the rarest, flowerlike slip of a girl you
can imagine.
"You know what she is now. Beautiful, you think, eh? Everybody agrees
that Nina is beautiful; and she is. But five years in India, and--well,
let us say, the life of the mismated--haven't failed to rub some of the
bloom off the peach."
Mixed metaphors had no terrors for Dinghal, who evidently inherited from
somewhere a strain of Irish blood, despite his name, and treated "bulls"
as if they were pets.
"Was this fellow, Kneedrock, ever heard of afterward?" his listener
questioned. "Reported alive, I mean. It seems to me--"
"Oh, yes," Dinghal answered. "Every now and then a story crops up from
somewhere that he's been seen. But nobody believes it. If he's alive
there's no reason why he shouldn't go home, is there? The whole thing is
ridiculous on its face. Besides Darling saw him. Says he was practically
shot to pieces."
"I thought I'd heard it," returned young Andrews casually. And to
himself he said: "Kneedrock is the man she meant. Her cousin, her match,
and her mate--all in one."
"Yes," Dinghal went on, calmly filling his pipe, "Nina Calthrop was
something to covet; and, naturally enough, Darling coveted her.
"Then, on her side, there was gratitude, for the colonel had given her a
world of the sort of detail she wanted. She had cross-examined him like
a K. C., and he had answered fully and freely out of the overflowing
storehouse of his experience.
"If they could have gone on talking forever about that battle--I believe
now it was Spion Kop--they might have been happy yet. But in time she
pumped the cistern dry. There wasn't a crumb of fact or conjecture left
in Darling's larder that hadn't been rolled over and over and stripped
to its bare bones."
Young Andrews nearly howled. The mixture of figures was really superb.
"I fancy the pumping was pretty well finished before the wedding," the
recital continued; "but I'm not stating that as a fact. You see that was
quite six months after their meeting, and two years or more after
Kneedrock's taking off. And in that six months they had seen each other,
not continuously, but at intervals, for Darling was a very busy man.
"Their honeymoon, such as it was, was spent on a P. & O. steamer. I have
been told that they each discovered their wretched mistake before they
got to the Gulf of Aden. Take it for what it's worth.
"Conditions weren't all they might have been when they reached Umballa.
That is certain. Darling did his best to hide the rift in the lute; but
Nina never seemed to care a hang what people thought or said.
"Mind you, I'm not blaming her. I like the frankness of it. Not that she
complained or whimpered. Not she. But she just went wild. Flirted like
the very devil with anything and everything that came along.
"That was five years ago, mind you; and she hasn't mended her ways
since. There are some who say she is possessed of the seven devils that
the Lord cast out of Mary of Magdala, but--"
"It's a lie!" broke in young Andrews furiously. "She's--"
"Of course," Dinghal came back heartily. "I know that. She's not a bad
woman. But I've heard her painted blacker than the Black Knight of the
Black Lands.
"There is no question that more than one young fellow has gone straight
to perdition because of her--and some old fellows, too, for that matter.
But they were weaker sisters, who hadn't wit enough to save their skins
from Hades."
His listener writhed. The deputy commissioner's rhetoric was certainly
most trying.
"I don't suppose," he pursued, "that in the history of the world there
has ever been a married pair more lied about than the Darlings. Nothing
has been too bad for the victims of her charms to say about her; and for
years the gossips from here to Singapore have been telling wild tales of
the colonel's cruelty, wreaked in vengeance on his wayward _mem-sahib_.
"They've had her drawn and quartered, cut, bruised, and dislocated. To
believe the hundredth part of these stories she must, long ere this, if
she managed to survive, have been resolved into a more helpless,
unsightly cripple than the most distorted _Sadhu_ that makes hideous the
twice-yearly festivals at Tirupankundram. Yet I know there's not a
scintilla of truth in any one of them."
"I heard something of that sort at Simla," said Andrews, frowning.
"You can hear it anywhere. Whenever conversation flags in Anglo-India
some ass or knave will introduce the Darlings, and rehearse the latest
invention of the prolific and never-failing scandal-makers."
"But he's cruel to her, isn't he?"
"He's only cruel to himself," answered Dinghal. "He's killing his body
and soul with strong drink, and he's risking his temporal and eternal
future as an officer in his majesty's service and as a Christian
gentleman.
"I give you my word, Andrews, he's never spoken a harsh word to her nor
laid a heavy hand on her fair person. And yet he suffers the torments of
the damned because of her. It's a very painful situation."
Andrews said he didn't pretend to understand the thing, and would like
to have the key.
Dinghal hesitated a moment. Then he looked very impressive, and when he
spoke it was with lowered voice.
"I can give you the key in three words," he said.
He paused again, and Andrews waited.
"It is this," Dinghal divulged gravely: "He loves her."
The young man from the Bombay side was thoughtfully silent for a space.
Then, as the revelation sank in, he murmured, half to himself and out of
the abundance of his own recent experience:
"God pity him!"
"That's what I say," agreed Dinghal.
At the time of this conversation Andrews had not seen Darling. He met
him a night or two later at the Umballa Club, and a strange emotional
mix-up resulted. The young man's sentimental side was oddly stirred.
Darling appealed not only to his sympathy, but to his admiration.
It was true that he had been prepared for something of this kind by
Dinghal; but he never suspected that he could entertain more than a sort
of passive pity for Nina's husband. He had an innate dislike for weak
men, physically and morally.
In that respect--and in that only--Andrews was to a degree feminine.
Strength appealed to him as it appeals to women. And the fact that
Darling had given way to a dulling, deadening indulgence in alcoholic
excesses argued for a sort of moral cowardice.
But when he met the colonel he was surprised. It may have been that he
pictured him in advance as habitually maudlin, or sodden or morose.
Certainly he was no one of these. He had the look of a hard drinker, it
was true; but he carried his liquor well. More than that, he gave the
unmistakable impression of inherent strength and courage.
Darling was not a large man. He appeared to measure barely five feet
nine, and his weight could not have exceeded ten stone--apparently all
bone and sinew, with no sign of bloating.
Sandy-haired, pale blue of eye, his firm chin a trifle long, he was not
ill-looking. But his age must have doubled Nina's on their wedding day.
Before he and Andrews had chatted for five minutes a mutual liking was
established. They were both passionately fond of sport, and the fact
developed and was exchanged in that brief period of intercourse.
"If you've nothing better to do to-morrow," Darling suggested, "I'd be
glad to show you some of my trophies. What do you say to tiffin with me?
My wife is still in the hills, and we can talk big game without fear of
boring the other sex. Shall I expect you?"
Andrews knew that he should say he had met Mrs. Darling at Simla, but he
was so eager to answer "yes" that the opportunity got away from him at
the moment; and as it didn't again present itself, his failure to make
the truth clear was a harassing worry from that time on.
Moreover, though he could not repent, he reproached and upbraided
himself for having fallen in love with Nina. All that he had learned
since arriving at Umballa appeared only to add to her desirability.
Absence had indeed, in this instance, made the heart grow fonder.
That he had broken his journey here, not so much for the sake of
pumping Dinghal as for the chance of getting one more look at
her--possibly one more word with her--he had candidly to admit to his
better self. But he wished with all his heart that she was maid or
widow, or--if there must be a husband, that he was some other--almost
any other than Darling. He would have felt less a brute had it even been
Dinghal.
It was a psychological contretemps of the rarest sort, and distinctly
uncomfortable. He had found the colonel as infatuating in his way as his
wife was in hers, and, naturally, there were no means by which he could
reconcile the liking and the loving.
Even when he appeared at the Darling bungalow, the next day, the thing
got him by the throat, as it were, at every turn. For the trophies of
the sportsman and the all-too-feminine evidences of the chatelaine
clashed side by side; every clash echoing in young Andrews's soul.
Again and again he found his attention straying, for instance, from an
especially fine tiger-skin or the mounted head of a curiously horned
markhor to a dainty writing-desk that he knew at a glance must be
Nina's, or to a framed photograph of a group on an English lawn, in
which, instinctively, he detected Nina in the tall, girlish figure in
the white frock.
Indeed, the drawing-room seemed to be all Nina. He saw her
everywhere--in every chair, on every window-seat, and on every couch.
The dining-room was more divided; but the gun-room, of course, was all
Darling.
They lingered there the greater part of the afternoon. Every rifle,
every fowling-piece had its story, and there were many of them; for
Darling boasted a veritable armory.
It was here, too, that Andrews got some comprehension of the extent of
the officer's unbridled indulgence. He drank and smoked practically
continuously. One peg followed another with but the briefest
intermissions; and the civil-service man made no attempt to keep pace
with him.
If any effect was observable it was merely in a readier flow of
narrative, in a more extended and richer vocabulary. But, strangely
enough, from first to last, there was no mention of Mrs. Darling. And
his visitor, taking this in the nature of a warning, knowing what he
did, deemed it not only wiser but safer, now, to guard the fact of his
acquaintanceship.
In his closer study of Darling he had made a discovery which accounted,
he believed, in a measure, at least, for his strange appeal. Even in his
gayest moments there was a certain pathos in his expression.
Andrews had noted this the previous evening at the club, but had failed
to trace it. He found it now in a very perceptible droop, at intervals,
of the corners of his mouth. And it was as though he knew this and
struggled to avoid it which gave the impression of bearing up against
odds that were too great for him.
The afternoon was well spent before Darling would listen to his guest's
going. They were still in the gun-room when, at length, he rose for
departure. And then the colonel delayed it further by a proposal that he
consider joining Major Cumnock and himself on a hunting trip they were
planning.
"I'd love to, of all things," Andrews returned heartily. "But the fact
is my leave ends in another week, and I've got to report at Junnar by
the twenty-fifth. Otherwise, I shouldn't hesitate a second. I--"
And there he suddenly paused.
It was something in Darling's expression that arrested him first;
something that he couldn't just interpret. Afterward he told himself
that it was a most singular combination of rapture and pain.
Then he, too, caught the echo of voices--women's voices--and, the next
instant, one woman's voice rose clear above the chorus. It was Nina's.