She--Violet--had unspeakably vulgarized it, but it must be true--it must
be, to some extent, true. She may even have lied about it, but the truth
was there, fundamentally, in the mere fact that it had been suggested
to her imagination. Madeline’s name, which had come to be for him an
epitome of what was finest and most valuable, most to be lived for,
was dropping from men’s lips into a kind of an abyss of dishonourable
suggestion. There was no way out of it or around it. It was a cloud
which encompassed them, suddenly blackening down.
There was nothing that he could do--nothing. Except, yes, of
course--that was obvious, as obvious as any other plain duty. Through
his selfishness it had a beginning; in spite of his selfishness it
should have an end. That went without saying. No more walks or rides. In
a conventional way, perhaps--but nothing deliberate, designed--and never
alone together. Gossip about flippant married women was bad enough, but
that it should concern itself with an unprotected creature like Madeline
was monstrous, incredible. He strode fiercely into the road round Jakko,
and no little harmless snake, if it had crawled across his path,
would have failed to suffer a quick fate under the guidance of his
imagination. But there was nothing for him to kill, and he turned upon
himself.
The sun went down into the Punjab and left great blue-and-purple hill
worlds barring the passage behind him. The deodars sank waist deep into
filmy shadow, and the yellow afterlight lay silently among the branches.
A pink-haunched monkey lopading across the road with a great show of
prudence seemed to have strayed into an unfamiliar country, and
the rustling twigs behind him made an episode of sound. The road in
perpetual curve between its little stone parapet and the broad flank of
the hill rose and fell under the deodars; Innes took its slopes and its
steepnesses with even, unslackened stride, aware of no difference, aware
of little indeed except the physical necessity of movement, spurred on
by a futile instinct that the end of his walk would be the end of his
trouble--his amazing, black, menacing trouble. A pony’s trot behind him
struck through the silence like percussion-caps; all Jakko seemed to
echo with it; and it came nearer--insistent, purposeful--but he
was hardly aware of it until the creature pulled up beside him, and
Madeline, slipping quickly off, said--
‘I’m coming too.’
He took off his hat and stared at her. She seemed to represent a climax.
‘I’m coming too,’ she said. ‘I’m tired of picking flies off the Turk,
and he’s really unbearable about them tonight. Here, syce.’ She threw
the reins to the man and turned to Innes with a smile of relief. ‘I
would much rather do a walk. Why--you want me to come too, don’t you?’
His face was all one negative, and under the unexpectedness of it and
the amazement of it her questioning eyes slowly filled with sudden,
uncontrollable tears, so that she had to lower them, and look steadily
at the hoof-marks in the road while she waited for his answer.
‘You know how I feel about seeing you--how glad I always am,’ he
stammered. ‘But there are reasons--’
‘Reasons?’ she repeated, half audibly.
‘I don’t know how to tell you. I will write. But let me put you up
again--’
‘I will not,’ Madeline said, with a sob, ‘I won’t be sent home like
a child. I am going to walk, but--but I can quite well go alone.’ She
started forward, and her foot caught in her habit so that she made an
awkward stumble and came down on her knee. In rising she stumbled again,
and his quick arm was necessary. Looking down at her, he saw that she
was crying bitterly. The tension had lasted long, and the snap had come
when she least expected it.
‘Stop,’ Innes said, firmly, hardly daring to turn his head and ascertain
the blessed fact that they were still alone. ‘Stop instantly. You
shall not go by yourself.’ He flicked the dust off her habit with
his pocket-handkerchief. ‘Come, please; we will go on together.’ Her
distress seemed to make things simple again. It was as if the cloud that
hung over them had melted as she wept, and lifted, and drifted a little
further on. For the moment, naturally, nothing mattered except that she
should be comforted. As she walked by his side shaken with her effort
at self-control, he had to resist the impulse to touch her. His hand
tingled to do its part in soothing her, his arm ached to protect her,
while he vaguely felt an element of right, of justice, in her tears;
they were in a manner his own. What he did was to turn and ask the syce
following if he had loosened the Turk’s saddle-girths.
‘I shall be better--in a moment,’ Madeline said, and he answered, ‘Of
course’; but they walked on and said nothing more until the road ran out
from under the last deodar and round the first bare boulder that marked
the beginning of the Ladies’ Mile. It lay rolled out before them, the
Ladies’ Mile, sinuous and grey and empty, along the face of the cliff;
they could see from one end of it to the other. It was the bleak side of
Jakko; even tonight there was a fresh springing coldness in it blowing
over from the hidden snows behind the rims of the nearer hills. Madeline
held up her face to it, and gave herself a moment of its grateful
discipline.
‘I have been as foolish as possible,’ she said, ‘as foolish as possible.
I have distressed you. Well, I couldn’t help it--that is all there is to
be said. Now if you will tell me--what is in your mind--what you spoke
of writing--I will mount again and go home. It doesn’t matter--I know
you didn’t mean to be unkind.’ Her lip was trembling again, and he knew
it, and dared not look at it.
‘How can you ask me to tell you--miserable things!’ he exclaimed. ‘How
can I find the words? And I have only just been told--I can hardly
myself conceive it--’
‘I am not a child in her teens that my ears should be guarded from
miserable things. I have come of age, I have entered into my inheritance
of the world’s bitterness with the rest. I can listen,’ Madeline said.
‘Why not?’
He looked to her with grave tenderness. ‘You think yourself very old,
and very wise about the world,’ he said; ‘but you are a woman, and you
will be hurt. And when I think that a little ordinary forethought on my
part would have protected you, I feel like the criminal I am.’
‘Don’t make too much of it,’ she said, simply. ‘I have a presentiment--’
‘I’ll tell you,’ Innes said, slowly; ‘I won’t niggle about it. The
people of this place--idiots!--are unable to believe that a man and a
woman can be to each other what we are.’
‘Yes?’ said Madeline. She paused beside the parapet and looked down at
the indistinct little fields below, and the blurred masses of white wild
roses waving midway against the precipice.
‘They can not understand that there can be any higher plane of
intercourse between us than the one they know. They won’t see--they
can’t see--that the satisfaction we find in being together is of a
different nature.’
‘I see,’ said Madeline. She had raised her eyes, and they sought
the solemn lines of the horizon. She looked as if she saw something
infinitely lifted above the pettiness he retailed to her.
‘So they say--good God, why should I tell you what they say!’ It
suddenly flashed upon him that the embodiment of it in words would be at
once, from him, sacrilegious and ludicrous. It flashed upon him that her
natural anger would bring him pain, and that if she laughed--it was so
hard to tell when she would laugh--it would be as if she struck him.
He cast about him dumb and helpless while she kept her invincibly
quiet gaze upon the farther hills. She was thinking that this breath of
gossip, now that it had blown, was a very slight affair compared with
Horace Innes’s misery--which he did not seem to understand. Then her
soul rose up in her, brushing everything aside, and forgetting, alas!
the vow it had once made to her.
‘I think I know,’ she said. ‘They are indeed foolish. They say that
we--love each other. Is not that what they say?’
He looked in amazement into her tender eyes and caught at the little
mocking smile about her lips. Suddenly the world grew light about him,
the shadows fled away. Somewhere down in the valley, he remembered
afterward, a hill-flute made music. When he spoke it was almost in a
whisper, lest he should disturb some newly perceived lovely thing that
had wings, and might leave him. ‘Oh, Madeline,’ he said, ‘is it true?’
She only smiled on in gladness that took no heed of any apprehension,
any fear or scruple, and he himself keeping his eyes upon her face,
said, ‘It is true.’
So they stood for a little time in silence while she resisted her great
opportunity. She resisted it to the end, and presently beckoned to the
syce, who came up leading the pony. Innes mounted her mechanically and
said, ‘Is that all right?’ as she put her foot in the stirrup, without
knowing that he had spoken.
‘Goodbye,’ she said; ‘I am going away--immediately. It will be better.
And listen--I have known this for weeks--and I have gone on seeing you.
And I hope I am not any more wicked than I feel. Goodbye.’
‘Goodbye,’ he said, taking his hand from the pony’s neck, and she rode
buoyantly away. He, turning to breast the road again, saw darkness
gathering over the end of it, and drawing nearer.
At eleven o’clock next morning Brookes rose from her packing to take
a note addressed to her mistress from the hand of a messenger in the
Imperial red and gold. It ran:
‘Dear Miss Anderson--I write to tell you that I have obtained three
weeks’ leave, and I am going into the interior to shoot, starting this
afternoon. You spoke yesterday of leaving Simla almost immediately. I
trust you will not do this, as it would be extremely risky to venture
down to the Plains just now. In ten days the rains will have broken,
when it will be safe. Pray wait till then.
‘Yours sincerely,
‘Horace Innes.’
Involuntarily the letter found its way to Madeline’s lips, and remained
there until she saw the maid observing her with intelligence.
‘Brookes,’ she said, ‘I am strongly advised not to start until the rains
break. I think, on the whole, that we won’t.’
‘Indeed, miss,’ returned Brookes, ‘Mrs. Sergeant Simmons told me that
it was courting cholera to go--and nothing short of it. I must say I’m
thankful.’