The lady guests at Peliti’s--Mrs. Jack Owen and the rest--were giving
a tea in the hotel pavilion. They had the band, the wife of the
Commander-in-Chief, the governess from Viceregal Lodge and one
little Viceregal girl, three A.D.C.’s, one member of council, and the
Archdeacon. These were the main features, moving among a hundred or so
of people more miscellaneous, who, like the ladies at Peliti’s, had come
up out of the seething Plains to the Paradise of the summer capital. The
Pavilion overhung the Mall; looking down one could see the coming
and going of leisurely Government peons in scarlet and gold, Cashmiri
vendors of great bales of embroideries and skins, big-turbaned Pahari
horse-dealers, chaffering in groups, and here and there a mounted
Secretary-sahib trotting to the Club. Beyond, the hills dipped blue
and bluer to the plains, and against them hung a single waving yellow
laburnum, a note of imagination. Madeline Anderson was looking at
it when Mrs. Mickie and Mrs. Gammidge came up with an affectionate
observation upon the cut of her skirt, after which Mrs. Mickie harked
back to what they had been talking about before.
‘She’s straight enough now, I suppose,’ this lady said.
‘She goes down. But she gives people a good deal of latitude for
speculation.’
‘Who is this?’ asked Madeline. ‘I ask for information, to keep out of
her way. I find I am developing the most shocking curiosity. I must be
in a position to check it.’
The ladies exchanged hardly perceptible glances. Then Mrs. Gammidge
said, ‘Mrs. Innes,’ and looked as if, for the moment, at any rate, she
would withhold further judgment.
‘But you mustn’t avoid the poor lady,’ put in Mrs. Mickie, ‘simply
because of her past. It wouldn’t be fair. Besides--’
‘Her past?’ Madeline made one little effort to look indifferent, and
then let the question leap up in her.
‘My dear,’ said Mrs. Gammidge, with brief impatience, ‘he married her in
Cairo, and she was--dancing there. Case of chivalry, I believe, though
there are different versions. Awful row in the regiment--he had to take
a year’s leave. Then he succeeded to the command, and the Twenty-third
were ordered out here. She came with him to Lucknow--and made slaves
of every one of them. They’ll swear to you now that she was staying
at Shepheard’s with an invalid mother when he met her. And now she’s
accepted like everybody else; and that’s all there is about it.’
‘There’s nothing in that,’ said Madeline, determinedly, ‘to prove that
she wasn’t--respectable.’
‘N--no. Of course not,’ and again the eye of Mrs. Gammidge met that of
Mrs. Mickie.
‘Though, you see love,’ added the latter lady, ‘it would have been
nicer for his people--they’ve never spoken to him since--if she had been
making her living otherwise in Cairo.’
‘As a barmaid, for instance,’ said Madeline, sarcastically.
‘As a barmaid, for instance,’ repeated Mrs. Gammidge, calmly.
‘But Simla isn’t related to him--Simla doesn’t care!’ Mrs. Mickie
exclaimed. ‘Everybody will be as polite as possible when she turns
up. You’ll see. You knew, didn’t you, that she was coming out in the
Caledonia?’
‘No,’ said Madeline. She looked carefully where she was going to put her
coffee-cup, and then she glanced out again at the laburnum hanging over
the plains. ‘I--I am glad to hear it. These separations you take so
lightly out here are miserable, tragic.’
The other ladies did not exchange glances this time. Miss Anderson’s
change of tone was too marked for comment which she might have detected.
‘Colonel Innes got the telegram this morning. She wired from Brindisi,’
Mrs. Gammidge said.
‘Does he seem pleased?’ asked Mrs. Mickie, demurely.
‘He said he was afraid she would find it very hot coming up here from
Bombay. And, of course, he is worried about a house. When a man has been
living for months at the Club--’
‘Of course, poor fellow! I do love that dear old Colonel Innes, though I
can’t say I know him a bit. He won’t take the trouble to be nice to me,
but I am perfectly certain he must be the dearest old thing inside
of him. Worth any dozen of these little bow-wows that run round after
rickshaws,’ said Mrs. Mickie, with candour.
‘I think he’s a ridiculous old glacier,’ Mrs. Gammidge remarked, and
Mrs. Mickie looked at Madeline and said, ‘Slap her!’
‘What for?’ asked Miss Anderson, with composure. ‘I dare say he
is--occasionally. It isn’t a bad thing to be, I should think, in Indian
temperatures.’
‘I guess you got it that time, dear lady,’ said Mrs. Mickie to Mrs.
Gammidge, as Madeline slipped toward the door.
‘Meant to be cross, did she? How silly of her! If she gives her little
heart away like that often, people will begin to make remarks.’
‘The worst of that girl is,’ Mrs. Mickie continued, ‘that you never can
depend upon her. For days together she’ll be just as giddy and jolly as
anybody and then suddenly she’ll give you a nasty superior bit of
ice down the back of your neck like that. I’ve got her coming to tea
tomorrow afternoon,’ Mrs. Mickie added, with sudden gloom, ‘and little
Lord Billy and all that set are coming. They’ll throw buns at each
other--I know they will. What, in heaven’s name, made me ask her?’
‘Oh, she’ll have recovered by then. You must make allowance for the
shock we gave her, poor dear. Consider how you would feel if Lady
Worsley suddenly appeared upon the scene, and demanded devotion from Sir
Frank.’
‘She wouldn’t get it,’ Mrs. Mickie dimpled candidly. ‘Frank always loses
his heart and his conscience at the same time. But you don’t suppose
there’s anything serious in this affair? Pure pretty platonics, I should
call it.’
Mrs. Gammidge lifted her eyebrows. ‘I dare say that is what they imagine
it. Well, they’re never in the same room for two minutes without being
aware of it, and their absorption when they get in a corner--I saw her
keep the Viceroy waiting, the other night after dinner, while Colonel
Innes finished a sentence. And then she was annoyed at the interruption.
Here’s Kitty Vesey, lookin’ SUCH a dog! Hello, Kitty! where did you get
that hat, where did you get that tile? But that wasn’t the colour of
your hair last week, Kitty!’
‘Don’t feel any kind of a dog’--Mrs. Vesey’s pout, though becoming, was
genuine. ‘I’m in a perfectly furious rage, my dears, and I’m coming home
to cry, just as soon as I’ve had an ice. What do you think--they won’t
let me have Val for Captain Wynne’s part in ‘The Outcast Pearl’--they
say he’s been tried before, and he’s a stick. Did you ever hear of such
brutes? They want me to act with Major Dalton, and he’s MUCH too old for
the part.’
‘Kitten,’ said Mrs. Mickie, with conviction, ‘Valentine Drake on the
stage would be fatal to your affection for him.’
‘I don’t care, I won’t act with anybody else--I’ll throw up the part.
Haven’t I got to make love to the man? How am I to play up to such an
unkissable-looking animal as Major Dalton? I shall CERTAINLY throw up
the part.’
‘Don’t do anything rash, Kitty. If you do, they’ll probably offer it to
me, and I warn you I won’t give it back to you.’
‘Oh, refuse it, like a dear! I am dying to put them in a hole. It’s
jealousy, that’s what it is. Goodbye, Mrs. Jack, I’ve had a lovely time.
Val and I have been explaining our affection to the Archdeacon, and he
says it’s perfectly innocent. We’re going to get him to put it on paper
to produce when Jimmy sues for a divorce, aren’t we, Val?’
‘You’re not going?’ said Mrs. Jack Owen.
‘Oh, yes, I must. But I’ve enjoyed myself awfully, and so has everybody
I’ve been talking to. I say, Mickie, dear--about tomorrow afternoon--I
suppose I may bring Val?’
‘Oh, dear, yes,’ Mrs. Mickie replied. ‘But you must let me hold his
hand.’
‘I don’t know which of you is the most ridiculous,’ Mrs. Owen remarked;
‘I shall write to both your husbands this very night,’ but as the group
shifted and left her alone with Mrs. Gammidge, she said she didn’t know
whether Mrs. Vesey would be quite so chirpy three weeks hence. ‘When
Mrs. Innes comes out,’ she added in explanation. ‘Oh, yes, Valentine
Drake is quite her property. My own idea is that Kitty won’t be in it.’
Where the road past Peliti’s dips to the Mall Madeline met Horace Innes.
When she appeared in her rickshaw he dismounted, and gave the reins to
his syce. She saw in his eyes the look of a person who has been all
day lapsing into meditation and rousing himself from it. ‘You are very
late,’ she said as he came up.
‘Oh, I’m not going; at least, you are just coming away, aren’t you? I
think it is too late. I’ll turn back with you.’
‘Do,’ she said, and looked at his capable, sensitive hand as he laid
it on the side of her little carriage. Miss Anderson had not the
accomplishment of palm-reading, but she took general manual impressions.
She had observed Colonel Innes’s hand before, but it had never offered
itself so intimately to her inspection. That, perhaps, was why the
conviction seemed new to her, as she thought ‘He is admirable--and it is
all there.’
When they got to the level Mall he kept his hold, which was a perfectly
natural and proper thing for him to do, walking alongside; but she still
looked at it.
‘I have heard your good news,’ she said, smiling congratulation at him.
‘My good news? Oh, about my wife, of course. Yes, she ought to be here
by the end of the month. I thought of writing to tell you when the
telegram came, and then I--didn’t. The files drove it out of my head, I
fancy.’
‘Heavy day?’
‘Yes,’ he said, absently. They went along together in an intimacy of
silence, and Madeline was quite aware of the effort with which she said:
‘I shall look forward to meeting Mrs. Innes.’
It was plain that his smile was perfunctory, but he put it on with
creditable alacrity.
‘She will be delighted. My wife is a clever woman,’ he went on, ‘very
bright and attractive. She keeps people well amused.’
‘She must be a great success in India, then.’
‘I think she is liked. She has a tremendous fund of humour and spirits.
A fellow feels terribly dull beside her sometimes.’
Madeline cast a quick glance at him, but he was only occupied to find
other matters with which he might commend his wife.
‘She is very fond of animals,’ he said, ‘and she sings and plays
well--really extremely well.’
‘That must be charming,’ murmured Madeline, privately iterating, ‘He
doesn’t mean to damn her--he doesn’t mean to damn her.’ ‘Have you a
photograph of her?’
‘Quantities of them,’ he said, with simplicity.
‘You have never shown me one. But how could you?’ she added in haste;
‘a photograph is always about the size of a door nowadays. It is simply
impossible to keep one’s friends and relations in a pocketbook as one
used to do.’
They might have stopped there, but some demon of persistence drove
Madeline on. She besought help from her imagination; she was not for the
moment honest. It was an impulse--an equivocal impulse--born doubtless
of the equivocal situation, and it ended badly.
‘She will bring something of the spring out to you,’ said Madeline--‘the
spring in England. How many years is it since you have seen it? There
will be a breath of the cowslips about her, and in her eyes the soft wet
of the English sky. Oh, you will be very glad to see her.’ The girl was
well aware of her insincerity, but only dimly of her cruelty. She was
drawn on by something stronger than her sense of honesty and humanity, a
determination to see, to know, that swept these things away.
Innes’s hand tightened on the rickshaw, and he made at first no answer.
Then he said:
‘She has been staying in town, you know.’
There was just a quiver of Madeline’s eyelid; it said nothing of the
natural rapacity behind. This man’s testimony was coming out in throes,
and yet--it must be said--again she probed.
‘Then she will put you in touch again,’ she cried; ‘you will remember
when you see her all the vigour of great issues and the fascination of
great personalities. For a little while, anyway, after she comes, you
will be in a world--far away from here--where people talk and think and
live.’
He looked at her in wonder, not understanding, as indeed how could he?
‘Why,’ he said, ‘you speak of what YOU have done’; and before the truth
of this she cast down her eyes and turned a hot, deep red, and had
nothing to say.
‘No,’ he said, ‘my wife is not like that.’
He walked along in absorption, from which he roused himself with
resentment in his voice.
‘I can not leave such a fabric of illusion in your mind. It irritates me
that it should be there--about anybody belonging to me. My wife is not
in the least what you imagine her. She has her virtues, but she is--like
the rest. I can not hope that you will take to her, and she won’t
like you either--we never care about the same people. And we shall see
nothing of you--nothing. I can hardly believe that I am saying this of
my own wife, but--I wish that she had stayed in England.’
‘Mrs. Mickie!’ cried Madeline to a passing rickshaw, ‘what are you
rushing on like that for? Just go quietly and peaceably along with us,
please, and tell us what Mrs. Vesey decided to do about her part in ‘The
Outcast Pearl’. I’m dining out tonight--I must know.’ And Mrs. Mickie
was kind enough to accompany them all the rest of the way.
Miss Anderson dined out, and preferred to suppose that she had no time
to think until she was on her way home along the empty road round Jakko
at eleven o’clock that night. Then it pleased her to get out of her
rickshaw and walk. There was an opulent moon, the vast hills curving
down to the plains were all grey and silvery, and the deodars overhead
fretted the road with dramatic shadows. About her hung the great
stillness in a mighty loneliness in which little Simla is set, and it
freed her from what had happened, so that she could look at it and cry
out. She actually did speak, pausing in the little pavilion on the road
where the nursemaids gather in the daytime, but very low, so that her
words fell round her even in that silence, and hardly a deodar was
aware. ‘I will not go now,’ she said. ‘I will stay and realize that he
is another woman’s husband. That should cure me if anything will--to see
him surrounded by the commonplaces of married life, that kind of married
life. I will stay till she comes and a fortnight after. Besides, I want
to see her--I want to see how far she comes short.’ She was silent for
a moment, and the moonlight played upon her smile of quiet triumph.
‘He cares too,’ she said; ‘he cares too, but he doesn’t know it, and
I promise you one thing, Madeline Anderson, you won’t help him to find
out. And in five weeks I will go away and leave my love where I found
it--on a mountaintop in the middle of Asia!’