Madeline did her best to make certain changes delicately, imperceptibly,
so that Innes would not, above all things, be perplexed into seeking for
their reason. The walks and rides came to a vague conclusion, and Miss
Anderson no longer kept the Viceroy or anybody else waiting, while Innes
finished what he had to say to her in public, since his opportunities
for talking to her seemed to become gradually more and more like
everybody else’s. So long as she had been mistress of herself she was
indifferent to the very tolerant and good-natured gossip of the hill
capital; but as soon as she found her citadel undermined, the lightest
kind of comment became a contingency unbearable. In arranging to make
it impossible, she was really over-considerate and over-careful. Her
soldier never thought of analyzing his bad luck or searching for motive
in it. To him the combinations of circumstances that seemed always to
deprive him of former pleasures were simply among the things that might
happen. Grieving, she left him under that impression for the sake of its
expediency, and tried to make it by being more than ever agreeable on
the occasions when he came and demanded a cup of tea, and would not be
denied. After all, she consoled herself, no situation was improved by
being turned too suddenly upside down.
She did not wholly withdraw his privilege of taking counsel with her,
and he continued to go away freshened and calmed, leaving her to toss
little sad reflections into the fire, and tremulously wonder whether the
jewel of her love had flashed ever so little behind the eyes. They both
saw it a conspicuous thing that as those three weeks went on, neither he
nor she alluded even remotely to Mrs. Innes, but the fact remained, and
they allowed it to remain.
Nevertheless, Madeline knew precisely when that lady was expected, and
as she sauntered in the bazaar one morning, and heard Innes’s steps and
voice behind her, her mind became one acute surmise as to whether he
could possibly postpone the announcement any longer. But he immediately
made it plain that this was his business in stopping to speak to her.
‘Good morning,’ he said, and then, ‘My wife comes tomorrow.’ He had
not told her a bit of personal news, he had made her an official
communication, as briefly as it could be done, and he would have raised
his hat and gone on without more words if Madeline had not thwarted him.
‘What a stupidity for him to be haunted by afterward!’ was the essence
of the thought that visited her; and she put out a detaining hand.
‘Really! By the Bombay mail, I suppose--no, an hour or so later; private
tongas are always as much as that behind the mail.’
‘About eleven, I fancy. You--you are not inclined for a canter round
Summer Hill before breakfast?’
‘I am terrified of Summer Hill. The Turk always misbehaves there.
Yesterday he got one leg well over the khud--I WAS thankful he had four.
Tell me, are you ready for Mrs. Innes--everything in the house? Is there
anything I can do?
‘Oh, thanks very much! I don’t think so. The house isn’t ready, as a
matter of fact, but two or three people have offered to put us up for a
day or so until it is. I’ve left it open till my wife comes, as I dare
say she has already arranged to go to somebody. What are you buying?
Country tobacco, upon my word! For your men? That’s subversive of all
discipline!’
The lines on his face relaxed; he looked at her with fond recognition of
another delightful thing in her.
‘You give sugar-cane to your horses,’ she declared; ‘why shouldn’t I
give tobacco to mine? Goodbye; I hope Mrs. Innes will like “Two Gables”.
There are roses waiting for her in the garden, at all events.’
‘Are there?’ he said. ‘I didn’t notice. Goodbye, then.’
He went on to his office thinking of the roses, and that they were in
his garden, and that Madeline had seen them there. He thought that if
they were good roses--in fact, any kind of roses--they should be taken
care of, and he asked a Deputy Assistant Inspector-General of Ordnance
whether he knew of a gardener that was worth anything.
‘Most of them are mere coolies,’ said Colonel Innes, ‘and I’ve got some
roses in this little place I’ve taken that I want to look after.’
Next day Madeline took Brookes, and ‘The Amazing Marriage’, and a
lunch-basket, and went out to Mashobra, where the deodars shadow hardly
any scandal at all, and the Snows come, with perceptible confidence, a
little nearer.
‘They almost step,’ she said to Brookes, looking at them, ‘out of the
realm of the imagination.’
Brookes said that they did indeed, and hoped that she hadn’t by any
chance forgotten the mustard.
‘The wind is keen off the glaciers over there--anybody would think of a
condiment,’ Miss Anderson remarked in deprecation, and to this Brookes
made no response. It was a liberty she often felt compelled to take.
The Snows appealed to Madeline even more than did Carintha, Countess
of Fleetwood, to whose fortunes she gave long pauses while she looked
across their summits at renunciation, and fancied her spirit made strong
and equal to its task. She was glad of their sanctuary; she did not know
where she should find such another. Perhaps the spectacle was more than
ever sublime in its alternative to the one she had come away to postpone
the sight of; at all events it drove the reunion of the Inneses from her
mind several times for five minutes together, during which she thought
of Horace by himself, and went over, by way of preparation for her
departure, all that had come and gone between them. There had been
luminous moments, especially as they irradiated him, and she dwelt on
these. There was no reason why she should not preserve in London or in
New York a careful memory of them.
So the lights were twinkling all up and down and round about Simla
when she cantered back to it and it was late when she started for the
Worsleys, where she was dining. One little lighted house looked much
like another perched on the mountainside, and the wooden board painted
‘Branksome Hall, Maj.-Gen. T.P. Worsley, R.E.,’ nailed to the most
conspicuous tree from the main road, was invisible in the darkness.
Madeline arrived in consequence at the wrong dinner-party, and was
acclaimed and redirected with much gaiety, which gave her a further
agreeable impression of the insouciance of Simla, but made her later
still at the Worsleys. So that half the people were already seated when
she at last appeared, and her hostess had just time to cry, ‘My dear,
we thought the langurs must have eaten you! Captain Gordon, you are not
abandoned after all. You know Miss Anderson?’ when she found herself
before her soup.
Captain Gordon heard her account of herself with complacence, and
declared, wiping his moustache, that a similar experience had befallen
him only a fortnight before.
‘Did you ever hear the story of that absent-minded chap, Sir James
Jackson, who went to the RIGHT dinner-party by mistake?’ he asked, ‘and
apologized like mad, by Jove! and insisted he couldn’t stay. The people
nearly had to tie him down in his--’ Captain Gordon stopped, arrested by
his companion’s sudden and complete inattention.
‘I see a lady,’ interrupted Madeline, with odd distinctness, ‘curiously
like somebody I have known before.’ Her eyes convinced themselves, and
then refused to be convinced of the inconceivable fact that they were
resting on Violet Prendergast. It was at first too amazing, too amazing
only. Then an old forgotten feeling rose in her bosom; the hand on
the stem of her wine-glass grew tense. The sensation fell away; she
remembered her emancipation, the years arose and reassured her during
which Violet Prendergast, living or dead, had been to her of absolutely
no importance. Yet there was a little aroused tremour in her voice as
she went on, ‘She is on the General’s right--he must have taken her in.
Can you see from where you are sitting?’
‘These narrow oval tables are a nuisance that way, aren’t they? You
don’t know who you’re dining with till the end of the function. Oh! I
see--that’s Mrs. Innes, just out, and fresh as paint, isn’t she? The
Colonel’--Captain Gordon craned his head again--‘is sitting fourth from
me on this side.’
‘Mrs. Innes! Really!’ said Madeline. ‘Then--then of course I must be
mistaken.’
She removed her eyes almost stealthily from the other woman’s face
and fixed them on the pattern of the table-cloth. Her brain guided her
clearly through the tumult of her perception, and no emotion could be
observed in the smiling attention which she gave to Captain Gordon’s
account of the afternoon’s tandem racing; but there was a furious
beating in her breast, and she thought she could never draw a breath
long enough to control it. It helped her that there was food to swallow,
wine to drink, and Captain Gordon to listen to; and under cover of these
things she gradually, consciously, prepared herself for the shock of
encounter which should be conclusive. Presently she leaned a little
forward and let her glance, in which no outsider could see the steady
recognition, rest upon the lady on the General’s right, until that
person’s agreeable blue eyes wandered down the table and met it.
Perhaps Madeline’s own eyelids fluttered a little as she saw the sudden
stricture in the face that received her message, and the grimace with
which it uttered, pallid with apprehension, its response to a pleasantry
of General Worsley’s. She was not consummate in her self-control, but
she was able at all events to send the glance travelling prettily on
with a casual smile for an intervening friend, and bring it back to her
dinner-roll without mischief. It did not adventure again; she knew, and
she set herself to hold her knowledge, to look at it and understand it,
while the mechanical part of her made up its mind about the entrees, and
sympathized with Captain Gordon on his hard luck in having three ponies
laid up at once. She did not look again, although she felt the watching
of the other woman, and was quite aware of the moment at which Mrs.
Innes allowed herself the reprieve of believing that at the Worsley’s
dinner-party at least there would be no scandal. The belief had
its reflex action, doing something to calm her. How could there
be--scandal--she asked herself, and dismissed with relief the
denunciations which crowded vague but insistent in her brain. Even then
she had not grasped the salient points of the situation; she was
too much occupied with its irony as it affected her personally; her
impressions circled steadily round the word ‘twice’ and the unimaginable
coincidence. Her resentment filled her, and her indignation was like
a clear flame behind her smiling face. Robbed twice, once in New York
and--oh! preposterous--the second time in Simla! Robbed of the same
things by the same hand! She perceived in the shock of it only a
monstrous fatality, a ludicrously wicked chance. This may have been due
to the necessity of listening to Captain Gordon.
At all events it was only as she passed Colonel Innes on her way to the
drawing-room and saw ahead of her the very modish receding back of Mrs.
Innes that she realized other things--crime and freedom.
It was the reversion of power; it brought her a great exultation. She
sat down under it in a corner, hoping to be left alone, with a white
face and shining eyes. Power and opportunity and purpose--righteous
purpose!
The circumstances had come to her in a flash; she brought them up again
steadily and scrutinized them. The case was absolutely clear. Frank
Prendergast had been dead just seven months. Colonel Innes imagined
himself married four years. Violet Prendergast was a bigamist, and
Horace Innes had no wife.
That was the marvellous transcendent fact; that was what lifted her and
carried her on great pulsing waves that rolled beyond the walls of the
little fripperied drawing-room and its collection of low-necked women,
out into her life, which had not these boundaries. She lived again in a
possible world. There was no stone wall between herself and joy.
The old Mussulman butler who offered her coffee looked at her with
aroused curiosity--here was certainly a memsahib under the favour of
God--and as she stirred it, the shadow that Violet Prendergast had
thrown upon her life faded out of her mind in the light that was there.
Then she looked up and met that lady’s vivid blue eyes. Mrs. Innes’s
colour had not returned, but there was a recklessness in the lines of
her mouth. In the way she held her chin, expressing that she had been
reflecting on old scores, and anticipated the worst. Meeting this
vigilance Miss Anderson experienced a slight recoil. Her happiness, she
realized, had been brought to her in the hands of ugly circumstance.
‘And so melodramatic,’ she told herself. ‘It is really almost vulgar. In
a story I should have no patience with it.’ But she went on stirring her
coffee with a little uncontrollable smile.
A moment later she had to contemplate the circumstance that her hostess
was addressing her. Mrs. Innes wished to be introduced. Mrs. Innes,
incarnate, conscious sensation, was smiling at her, saying that she must
know so great a friend of her husband’s. He made so few friends, and she
was so grateful to anybody who was good to him. Eyes and voice tolerably
in rein, aware of the situation at every point, she had a meretricious
daring; and it occurred to Madeline, looking at her, that she was after
all a fairly competent second-class adventuress. She would not refuse
the cue. It would make so little difference.
‘On the contrary, I am tremendously indebted to Colonel Innes. He has
been so very kind about ponies and jhampanies and things. Simla is
full of pitfalls for a stranger, don’t you think?’ And Miss Anderson,
unclosing her fan, turned her reposeful head a little in the direction
of three married schoolgirls voluble on her left.
‘Not when you get to know the language. You must learn the language;
it’s indispensable. But of course it depends on how long you mean to
stay.’
‘I think I will learn the language,’ said Madeline.
‘But General Worsley told me you were leaving Simla in a fortnight.’
‘Oh no. My plans are very indefinite; but I shall stay much longer than
that.’
‘It is Miss Anderson, isn’t it?--Miss Madeline Anderson, of New
York--no, Brooklyn?’
Madeline looked at her. ‘Did not the General say so?’ she asked.
‘Yes, he did. But one looks to make quite sure.’
‘I can understand that.’
Mrs. Innes leaned forward with one elbow on her knee.
It was not a graceful attitude, but it gave the casual air to the
conversation which was desirable.
‘What are you going to do?’ she said.
‘My plans are as indefinite as possible, really,’ Madeline returned.
‘I may spend the cold weather in Calcutta, or go into camp with the
Dovedells--I should like that.’
‘Mrs. Innes,’ cried the nearest schoolgirl, ‘we are coming tomorrow to
see all the lovely things in your boxes, may we?’
‘Do, duckies. But mind, no copying of them by durzies in the veranda.
They’re all Paris things--Coulter’s--and you know he doesn’t copy well,
does he? Oh, dear! here are the men--they always come too soon, don’t
they? So glad to have had even a little chat, Miss Anderson. I’ll come
and see you tomorrow. You know newcomers in India always make the first
calls. I shall find you at home, sha’n’t I?’
‘By all means,’ Madeline said.
Mrs. Innes crossed the room, crying out that the heat was perfectly
absurd for Simla, it must be cooler outside; and as Captain Valentine
Drake followed her into the semi-darkness of the veranda, the three
married schoolgirls looked at each other and smiled.
‘Don’t be naughty,’ said Captain Gordon, leaning over the sofa from
behind. ‘They’re very dear friends, and they’ve been separated for two
years.’
Madeline heard this as plainly as they did. She noted disdainfully how
it all fell in.
‘How absent you are tonight!’ Horace Innes exclaimed, when Miss Anderson
had asked him a trivial question for the third time.
‘Hush!’ she said. ‘Mrs. Scallepa is going to sing;’ and as Mrs. Scallepa
sang she let her eyes play over him with a light in them so tender, that
once catching it the felt a sudden answering throb, and looked again;
but after that her eyes were on the floor.
‘We are staying here,’ he said a quarter of an hour later, as he saw her
into her rickshaw; ‘and I think I must see you to your quarters. It’s
very dark, and there is an ugly little slip half-way between this and
the Mall.
He ran upstairs to get his coat and stick, and a white face like an
apparition suddenly hung itself on the edge of Madeline’s rickshaw-hood.
‘Don’t tell him tonight,’ it said, hoarsely.
‘Are you ready, Colonel Innes? Then good night, everybody,’ cried
Madeline.
She was not at all sure that she would not tell Horace Innes ‘tonight’.