THE TANGLED SKEIN OF LOVE
The Lieutenant-Governor's ball was for Noreen but the beginning of a long
series of social entertainments, of afternoon and evening dances,
receptions, dinner and supper parties, concerts, and amateur theatrical
performances that filled every date on the calendar of the Darjeeling
Season. Only in winter sport resorts like St. Moritz and Mürren had she
ever seen its like. But in Switzerland the visitors come from many lands
and are generally strangers to each other, whereas in the Hills in India
the summer residents of the villas and the guests at the big hotels are of
the same race and class, come from the same stations in the Plains or know
of each other by repute. For, with the exception of the comparatively few
lawyers, planters, merchants, or railway folk, the names of all are set
forth in the two Golden Books of the land, the Army List and the Civil
Service List; and hostesses fly with relief to the blessed "Table of
Precedence" contained in them, which tells whether the wife of Colonel This
should go in to dinner before or after the spouse of Mr. That. The great
god Snob is the supreme deity of Anglo-India.
Many hill-stations are the Hot Weather headquarters of some important
Government official, such as the Governor of the Presidency or the
Lieutenant-Governor or Chief Commissioner of the Province. These are great
personages indeed in India. They have military guards before their doors.
The Union Jack waves by command above their august heads. They have Indian
Cavalry soldiers to trot before their wives' carriages when these good
ladies drive down to bargain in the native bazaar. But to the hill visitors
their chief reason for existing is that their position demands the giving
of official entertainments to which all of the proper class (who duly
inscribe their names in the red-bound, gold-lettered book in the hall of
Government House) have a prescriptive right to be invited.
Noreen revelled in the gaieties. Her frank-hearted enjoyment was like a
child's, and made every man who knew her anxious to add to it. She could
not possibly ride all the ponies offered to her nor accept half the
invitations that she got. Even among the women she was popular, for none
but a match-making mother or a jealous spinster could resist her.
Proposals of marriage were not showered on her, as persons ignorant of
Anglo-Indian life fondly believe to be the lot of every English girl there.
While a dowerless maiden still has a much better chance of securing a
husband in a land where maidens are few and bachelors are many, yet the day
has long gone by when every spinster who had drawn a blank in England could
be shipped off to India with the certainty of finding a spouse there.
Frequent leave and fast steamers have altered that. When a man can go home
in a fortnight every year or second year he is not as anxious to snatch at
the first maiden who appears in his station as his predecessor who lived in
India in the days when a voyage to England took six months. And men in the
East are as a rule not anxious to marry. A wife out there is a handicap at
every turn. She adds enormously to his expenses, and her society too often
lends more brightness to the existence of his fellows than his own.
Children are ruinous luxuries. Bachelor life in Mess or club is too
pleasant, sport that a single man can enjoy more readily than a married one
too attractive, rupees too few for what Kipling terms "the wild ass of the
desert" to be willing to put his head into the halter readily.
Yet men do marry in India--one wonders why!--and a girl there has so many
opportunities of meeting the opposite sex every day, and so little rivalry,
that her chances in the matrimonial market are infinitely better than at
home. In stations in the Plains there are usually four or five men to every
woman in its limited society, and the proportion of bachelors to spinsters
is far greater. Sometimes in a military cantonment with five or six
batteries and regiments in it, which, with departmental officers, may
furnish a total of eighty to a hundred unmarried men from subalterns to
colonels, there may be only one or two unwedded girls. The lower ranks are
worse off for English spinster society; for the private soldier there is
none.
Noreen's two most constant attendants were Charlesworth and Melville. The
Indian Army officer's devotion and earnestness were patent to the world,
but the Rifleman's intentions were a problem and a source of dispute among
the women, who in Indian stations not less than other places watch the
progress of every love-affair with the eyes of hawks. It was doubtful if
Charlesworth himself knew what he wanted. He was a man who loved his
liberty and his right to make love to each and every woman who caught his
fancy. Noreen's casual liking for him but her frank indifference to him in
any other capacity than that of a pleasant companion with whom to ride,
dance, or play tennis, piqued him, but not sufficiently to make him risk
losing his cherished freedom.
Chunerbutty left Darjeeling after a week's stay. Parry, having become
sufficiently sober to enquire after him and learn of his absence,
demanded his instant return in a telegram so profanely worded that it
shocked even the Barwahi post-office _babu._ The engineer called on
Noreen to say good-bye, and offered to be the bearer of a message to her
brother. He kept up to the end the fable of his sick father.
He could not tell her the real reason of his coming to Darjeeling. The
truth was that he had learned that the Rajah had inspired the attempt by
the Bhuttias to carry off Noreen and wanted to see and upbraid him for his
deceit and treachery to their agreement. There had been a furious quarrel
when the two accomplices met. The Rajah taunted the other with his lack of
success with Noreen and the failure of his plan to persuade her to marry
him. Chunerbutty retorted that he had not been allowed sufficient time to
win the favour of an English girl, who, unlike Indian maidens, was free to
choose her own husband. And he threatened to inform the Government if any
further attempt against her were made without his knowledge and approval.
But the quarrel did not last long. Each scoundrel needed the help of the
other. Still, Chunerbutty judged it safer to remove himself from the
Rajah's house and find a lodging elsewhere, lest any deplorable accident
might occur to him under his patron's roof.
After the engineer's departure Noreen seldom saw the Rajah, and then only
at official entertainments, to which his position gained him invitations.
He spoke to her once or twice at these receptions, but as a rule she
contrived to elude him.
So far she had got on very well with Mrs. Smith. Their wills had never
clashed, for the girl unselfishly gave in to her friend whenever the latter
demanded it, which was often enough. Ida's ways were certainly not
Noreen's, and the latter sometimes felt tempted to disapprove of her
excessive familiarity with Captain Bain and one or two others. But the next
moment she took herself severely to task for being censorious of the elder
woman, who must surely know better how to behave towards men than a young
unmarried girl who had been buried so long in the jungle. And Ida did not
guess why sometimes her repentant little friend's caresses were so fervent
and her desire to please her so manifest, and ascribed it all to her own
sweetness of nature.
The coming of the Rains did not check the gaiety of the dwellers on the
mountain-tops, though torrential downpours had to be faced on black nights
in shrouded rickshas and dripping _dandies_, though incessant lightning lit
up the road to the club or theatre, and the thunder made it difficult to
hear the music of the band in the ballroom. Noreen missed nothing of the
revels. But in all the whirl of gaiety and pleasure in which her days were
passed her thoughts turned more and more to the great forest lying
thousands of feet below her, and the man who passed his lonely days
therein.
Little news of him came to her. He never wrote, and her brother seldom
mentioned him in his letters; for during Parker's absence on two months'
privilege leave from Ranga Duar Dermot did not quit it often and very
rarely visited the planters' club or the bungalows of any of its members.
And Noreen wanted news of him. Much as she saw of other men now--many of
them attractive and some of whom she frankly liked--none had effaced
Dermot's image or displaced him from the shrine that she had built for him
in her inmost heart. Mingled with her love was hero-worship. She dared
not hope that he could ever be interested in or care for any one as
shallow-minded as she. She could not picture him descending from the
pedestal on which she had placed him to raise so ordinary a girl to his
heart. She could not fancy him in the light, frothy life of Darjeeling.
She judged him too serious to care for frivolities, and it inspired her
with a little awe of him and a fear that he would despise her as a
feather-brained, silly woman if he saw how she enjoyed the amusements
of the hill-station. But she felt that she would gladly exchange the
gaieties and cool climate of Darjeeling for the torments of the Terai
again, if only it would bring him to her side. For sometimes the longing
to see him grew almost unbearable.
As the days went by the power of the gay life of the Hills to satisfy her
grew less, while the ache in her heart for her absent friend increased. If
only she could hear from him she thought she could bear the separation
better. From her brother she learned by chance that he was alone in Ranga
Duar, the only news that she had had of him for a long time. The Rains had
burst, and she pictured the loneliness of the one European in the solitary
outpost, cut off from his kind, with no one of his race to speak to,
deprived of the most ordinary requirements, necessities, of civilisation,
without a doctor within hundreds of miles.
At that thought her heart seemed to stop beating. Without a doctor! He
might be ill, dying, for all she knew, with no one of his colour to tend
him, no loving hand to hold a cup to his fevered lips. Even in the short
time that she had been in India she had heard of many tragedies of
isolation, of sick and lonely Englishmen with none but ignorant, careless
native servants to look after them in their illness, no doctor to alleviate
their sufferings, until pain and delirium drove them to look for relief and
oblivion down the barrel of a too-ready pistol.
Thus the girl tortured herself, as a loving woman will do, by imagining all
the most terrible things happening to the man of her heart. She feared no
longer the perils of the forest for him. She felt that he was master of man
or beast in it. But fever lays low the strongest. It might be that while
she was dancing he was lying ill, dying, perhaps dead. And she would not
know. The dreadful idea occurred to her after her return from a ball at
which she had been universally admired and much sought after. But, as she
sat wrapped in her blue silk dressing-gown, her feet thrust into satin
slippers of the same colour, her pretty hair about her shoulders, instead
of recalling the triumphs of the evening, the compliments of her partners,
and the unspoken envy of other girls, her thoughts flew to one solitary man
in a little bungalow, cloud-enfolded and comfortless, in a lonely outpost.
The sudden dread of his being ill chilled her blood and so terrified her
that, if the hour had not made it impossible, she would have gone out at
once and telegraphed to him to ask if all were well.
Yet the next instant her face grew scarlet at the thought. She sat for a
long time motionless, thinking hard. Then the idea occurred to her of
writing to him, writing a chatty, almost impersonal letter, such as one
friend could send to another without fear of her motives being
misunderstood. She had too high an opinion of Dermot to think that he would
deem her forward, yet it cost her much to be the first to write. But her
anxiety conquered pride. And she wrote the letter that Dermot read in his
bungalow in Ranga Duar while the storm shook the hills.
The girl counted the days, the hours, until she could hope for an answer.
Would he reply at once, she wondered. She knew that, even shut up in his
little station, he had much work to occupy him. He could not spare time,
perhaps, for a letter to a silly girl. And the thought of all that she had
put in hers to him made her face burn, for it seemed so vapid and frivolous
that he was sure to despise her.
On the fourth day after she had written to Dermot she was engaged to ride
in the afternoon with Captain Charlesworth. But in the morning a note came
to her from him regretting his inability to keep the appointment, as the
Divisional General had arrived in Darjeeling and intended to inspect the
Rifles after lunch. Noreen was not sorry, for she was going to a dance that
evening and did not wish to tire herself before it.
Distracted and little in the mood for gaiety as she felt that night, yet
when she entered the large ballroom of the Amusement Club she could not
help laughing at the quaint and original decorations for the occasion. For
the entertainment was one of the great features of the Season, the
Bachelors' Ball, and the walls were blazoned with the insignia of the Tribe
of the Wild Ass. Everywhere was painted its coat-of-arms--a bottle,
slippers, and a pipe crossed with a latch-key, all in proper heraldic
guise. Captain Melville, who was a leading member of the ball committee and
who was her particular host that night, spirited her away from the crowd of
partner-seeking men at the doorway and took her on a tour of the room to
see and admire the scheme of decoration. She was laughing at one original
ornamentation when a well-known voice behind her said:
"May I hope for a dance tonight, Miss Daleham?"
The girl started and turned round incredulously, feeling that her ears had
deceived her. To her astonishment Dermot stood before her. For a few
seconds she could not trust herself to reply. She felt that she had grown
pale. At last she said, and her voice sounded strange in her own ears:
"Major Dermot! Is it possible? I--I thought you--"
She could not finish the sentence. But neither man observed her emotion,
for Melville had suddenly seized Dermot's hand and was shaking it warmly.
They had been on service together once and had not met since. The next
moment, a committee man being urgently wanted, Melville was called away and
left Dermot and the girl together.
"I suppose you thought me shut up in my mountain home," the man said, "and
probably wondered why I had not answered your very interesting letter. It
was so kind of you in all your gaiety here to think of me in my
loneliness."
Noreen had quite recovered from her surprise and smiled brightly at him.
"Yes, I believed you to be in Ranga Duar," she said. "How is it you are
here?"
"An unexpected summons reached me at the same time as your letter. Four
days ago I had no idea that I should be coming here."
"How could you bear to leave your beloved jungle and that dear Badshah? I
know you dislike hill-stations," said the girl, laughing and tremulously
happy. The world seemed a much brighter place than it did five minutes
before.
"My beloved jungle has no charm for me at this season," he said. "But
Badshah--ah, that was another matter. I have seldom felt parting with a
human friend as much as I did leaving him. The dear old fellow seemed to
know that I was going away from him. But I was very pleased to come here to
see how you were enjoying yourself in this gay spot. I was glad to know
that you were out of the Terai during the Rains."
So he had wanted to see her again. Noreen blushed, but Dermot did not
observe her heightened colour, for he had taken her programme out of her
hand in his usual quiet, masterful manner and was scrutinising it.
"You haven't said yet if I may have a dance," he continued. "But I know
that on an occasion like this I must lose no time if I want one."
"Oh, do you dance?" she asked in surprise. Somehow she had never associated
him with ballrooms and social frivolities.
Dermot laughed.
"You forget that I was on the Staff in Simla. I shouldn't have been kept
there a day if I hadn't been able to dance. What may I have?"
Noreen felt tempted to bid him take all her programme.
"Well, I'm engaged for several. They are all written down. Take any of the
others you like," she said demurely, but her heart was beating fast at the
thought of dancing with him.
"H'm; I see that all the first ones are booked. May I--oh, I see you have
the supper dances free. May I take you in to supper?"
"Yes, do, please. We haven't met for so long, and I have heaps to tell
you," the girl said. "We can talk ever so much better at the supper-table
than in an interval."
"Thank you. I'll take the supper dances then."
"Wouldn't you care for any others?" she asked timidly. What would he think
of her? Yet she didn't care. He was with her again, and she wanted to see
all she could of him.
"I should indeed. May I have this--and this?"
"With pleasure. Is that enough?"
"I'll be greedy. After all, the men up here have had dances from you all
the Season, and I have never danced with you yet. I'll take these, too, if
you can spare them."
She looked at him earnestly.
"I owe you more than a few dances can pay," she said simply.
"Thank you, little friend," he said, and a happy feeling thrilled her at
his words. He had not forgotten her, then. He used to call her that
sometimes in Ranga Duar. She was still his little friend. What a delightful
place the world was after all!
As he pencilled his initials on her programme a horde of dance-hungry men
swooped down on Noreen and almost pushed him aside. He bowed and strolled
away to watch the dancing. He had no desire to obtain other partners and
was content to watch his little friend of the forest, who seemed to have
suddenly become a very lovely woman. She seemed very gay and happy, he
thought. He noticed that she danced oftenest with Melville and a tall, fair
man whom he did not know.
Never had the early part of a ball seemed to Noreen to drag so much as this
one did. She felt that her partners must find her very stupid indeed, for
she paid no attention to what they said and answered at random.
At last almost in a trance of happiness she found herself gliding round the
room with Dermot's arm about her. The band was playing a dreamy waltz, and
her partner danced perfectly. Neither of them spoke. Noreen could not; she
felt that all she wanted was to float, on air it seemed, held close to
Dermot's breast. She gave a sigh when the dance ended. In the interval she
did not want to talk; it was enough to look at his face, to hear his voice.
She hated her next partner when he came to claim her.
But she had two more dances with Dermot before the band struck up "The
Roast Beef of Old England," and the ballroom emptied. At supper he
contrived to secure a small table at which they were alone; so they were
able to talk without constraint. She began to wonder how she had ever
thought him grave and stern or felt in awe of him. For in the gay
atmosphere his Irish nature was uppermost; he was as light-hearted as a
boy, and his conversation was almost frivolous.
During supper Noreen saw Ida watching her across the room, and later on,
when the dancing began again, her friend cornered her.
"I say, darling, who is the new man you've been dancing with such a lot
tonight? You had supper with him, too. I've never seen him before. He's
awfully good-looking."
"Oh, that is--I suppose you mean Major Dermot," replied the girl, feeling
suddenly shy.
"Major Dermot? Who's he? What is--Oh, is it the wonderful hero from the
Terai, the man you told me so much about when you came up?"
"Yes; he is the same."
"Really? How interesting! He's so distinguished-looking. When did he come
up? Why didn't you tell me he was coming?"
"I didn't know it myself."
"I should love to meet him. Introduce him to me. Now, at once."
With a hurried apology to her own partner and Noreen's she dragged the girl
off in search of the fresh man who had taken her fancy, and did not give up
the chase until, with Melville's aid, Dermot was run to earth in the
cardroom and introduced to her. Ida did not wait for him to ask her to
dance but calmly ran her pencil through three names on the programme and
bestowed the vacancies thus created on him in such a way that he could not
refuse them. Dermot, however, did not grumble. She was Noreen's friend; if
not the rose, she was near the rose.
Ida was not the only one who noticed how frequently the girl had danced
with him. Charlesworth, disappointed at finding vacancies on her programme,
for which he had hoped, already filled, commented on it and asked who the
stranger was in a supercilious tone that made her furious and gained for
him a well-merited snubbing.
Indifferent to criticism, kind or otherwise, Noreen gave herself up for the
evening to the happiness of Dermot's presence, trying to trick herself into
the belief that he was still only a dear friend to whom she owed an immense
debt of gratitude for saving her life and her honour. Never had a ball
seemed so enjoyable--not even her first. Never had she had a partner who
suited her so well. Certainly he danced to perfection, but she knew that if
he had been the worst dancer in the room she still would have preferred him
to all others. And never had she hated the ending of an entertainment so
much. But Dermot walked beside her _dandy_ to the gate of her hotel, calmly
displacing Charlesworth, much to the fury of the Rifleman, who had begun to
consider this his prerogative.
Ida and she sat up for hours in her room discussing the ball and all its
happenings, but the older woman's most constant topic was Dermot. It was a
subject of which Noreen felt that she could never weary; and she drew her
friend on to talk of him, if the conversation threatened to stray to
anything less interesting. The girl was used to Ida's sudden fancies for
men, for the married woman was both susceptible and fickle, and Noreen
judged that this sudden predilection for Dermot would die as quickly as a
hundred others before it. But this time she was wrong.
The Major was not to remain many days in Darjeeling, but Noreen hoped that
he would give her much of his spare time while there. She was disappointed,
however, to find that although he was frequently in her and Ida's company
at the Amusement Club or elsewhere, he made no effort to compete with
Charlesworth or Melville or any other man who sought to monopolise her, but
drew back and allowed him to have a clear field while he himself seemed
content to talk to Mrs. Smith. At first she was hurt. He was her friend,
not Ida's. But he never sought to be alone with her, never asked her to
ride with him, or do anything that would take her away from the others.
Then she grew piqued. If he did not value her society he should see that
others did, and she suddenly grew more gracious to Charlesworth, who seemed
to sense in Dermot a more dangerous rival than was Melville or any of the
others and began to be more openly devoted and to put more meaning into his
intentions.
One hateful night when she had been with Charlesworth to a private dance to
which Ida had refused to go, dining instead with Dermot, who had no
invitation to the affair, the blow fell. After her return to the hotel her
treacherous friend had crept into her room, weeping and imploring her
sympathy. Too late, she sobbed on Noreen's shoulder, she had found her
soul-mate, the man destined for her through the past æons, the one man who
could make her happy and whose existence she alone could complete. Why had
she met Dermot too late? Why was she tied to a clod, mated to a clown? Why
were two lives to be wrecked?
As Noreen listened amazed an icy hand seemed to clutch her shrinking heart.
Was this true? Did Dermot really care for Ida? Could the man whom she had
revered as a white-souled knight be base enough to make love to another
man's wife?
Then the demon of jealousy poisoned her soul. She got the weeping Ida back
to her bed, and sat in her own dark room until the dawn came, her brain in
a whirl, her heart filled with a fierce hatred of Dermot. And when next
day, his business finished, he had to leave Darjeeling, she made a point of
absenting herself with Charlesworth from the hotel at the time when Dermot
had arranged to come to say good-bye.
But long before the train in which he travelled down to the Plains was
half-way to Siliguri, the girl lay on her bed, her face buried in her
pillow, her body shaken with silent but convulsive sobs.
And Dermot stared out into the thick mist that shrouded the mountains and
enfolded his downward-slipping train and wondered if his one-time little
friend of the forest would be happy in the new life that, according to her
bosom-friend and confidant, Mrs. Smith, would open to her as Charlesworth's
wife as soon as she spoke the word that was trembling on her lips.
And he sighed unconsciously. Then he frowned as the distasteful memory
recurred to him of the previous night, when a wanton woman, misled by
vanity and his courteous manner, had shamelessly offered him what she
termed her love and forced him to play the Joseph to a modern Mrs.
Potiphar.