Death, we are told, changes our vile bodies and minds. It is at any
rate to be hoped so, if orthodox heaven is to be endurable to some of
us. And when mind and body have gone nigh to death, so nigh that he
has stilled us in his arms for long days and nights, when he has
kissed the sight of all things mortal from our eyes, and charmed away
love and dread till soul could part from flesh without one sigh; does
not that sometimes send us back, as it were, to a new life, and make
us feel strangers even to ourselves?
Belle Raby felt this as she came back discreetly, decently, according
to her wont in all things, from the Valley of the Shadow. Everything
was changed, and she herself was no longer the girl who had cried
uselessly, "Not now! Ah, dear God, not now!"
When she first floated up to consciousness through the dim resounding
sea which for days and nights had seemed to lull her to sleep, it had
been to find herself in John's arms, while he fed her with a teaspoon,
and she had drifted down again into the dark, carrying with her a
faint, half-amused wonder why a man who had so deceived his wife
should trouble himself about her beef-tea. Neither was it a fit season
for tragedy when, with hair decently brushed for the first time, and a
bit of pink ribbon disposed somewhere to give colour to the pale face,
she lay propped up on the pillow at last, fingering a bunch of roses
brought her by the traitor. Nor when he had carried her to the sofa
with pleasant smiles at the ease of the task, could she begin the
dreadful accusation, "You knew I was an heiress,--that was why you
married me." Horrible, hateful! The blood would surge over her face,
the tears come into her eyes at the thought of the degradation of such
a mutual understanding. Better, far better, that the offender should
go scot-free. And after all, where was the difference? What had she
lost? Only ignorance; the thing itself had always been the same. And
yet she had not found it out--yet she had been content! That was the
saddest, strangest part of all, and in her first bitterness of spirit
she asked herself, more than once, if she had any right to truth, when
lies satisfied her so easily. He had not chosen her out of all the
world because he loved her, and yet she had not found him out. Was it
not possible that she had not found herself out either? And what then?
Did it make any difference, any difference at all?
During her tedious convalescence she lay turning these things over and
over in her mind, almost as if the problem referred to the life of
some one else. It was a critical time for the new venture, and long
before she could leave the sofa, her husband had to spend a day here,
two days there, arranging for labour and machinery; above all for the
new house into which he was so anxious for her to settle comfortably
before the hot weather came on. All was very natural and right;
nevertheless it marked the beginning of the epoch which comes about in
most marriages; the time when Adam and Eve leave the garden of Eden,
and face the world; the time when different dispositions naturally
drift apart to different interests. Belle, still weak and unstrung,
found a morbid significance in her husband's growing absorption in the
business; she seemed to see the greed of gold in his handsome face as
he sat descanting, over his cigarette, on the many projects of his
busy brain. Yet she said no word of blame or warning, for she began to
lack the courage of criticism. The fact was, she did not want to know
the extent of the gulf between them; therefore she kept silence on all
points which might serve as a landmark to their relative positions.
Even so she came on the knowledge unawares.
"I'm glad you don't fret over the baby," he said to her one day; "but
you were always sensible. The poor little thing might have got ill,
you know, and it would have been a bore if you had had to go to the
hills this year, when there is so much to be done."
After that she would have died sooner than mention a grief that was
always with her, despite her smiling face. Yet, when he was away, she
wept unrestrained tears over a forlorn little spot in the dreary
garden where they told her the lost hope lay hidden away, for ever,
from her eyes. If she had only seen it once, she used to think; if she
could only have shed one tear over the little face of which she used
to dream! If she could only have whispered to it that she was sorry,
that it was not her fault. Such grief, she told herself, was natural
even in the happiest wife; it could not be construed into a complaint,
or counted as a surrender to Fate. She was not going to do that,
whatever happened. Never, never! That was the ruling idea to which
even her own unhappiness gave place; and the cause of this fixed
purpose was a curious one. Nothing more or less than a passionate
desire not to defeat the purpose of Philip Marsden's legacy. He had
meant kindly by her; when, she thought with the glow of ardent
gratitude which his memory invariably aroused, had he not meant kindly
by her and hers! And no one, least of all she herself, should turn
that kindness to unkindness. Poor Belle! She was bound hand and foot
to hero-worship, and life had shown her unmistakably that it was safer
to canonise the dead. She lived, it must be remembered, in a solitude
hard even of explanation to those unacquainted with out-station life
in India. The growing gulf between her and her husband had to be
bridged over a dozen times a day by their mutual dependence on each
other even for bare speech. The saying, "It takes two to make a
quarrel," falls short of truth. It takes three; two to fight, and one
to hold the sponge, and play umpire. After a few days of silence
consequent on his frequent absences, Belle was quite ready to welcome
John back with smiles; and this very readiness gave her comfort.
Things could not be so far wrong after all. And so every time he
went away, she set herself to miss his company with a zest that would
have seemed to the spectators--had there been any--right-minded,
wrong-headed, and purely pitiful. It was so even to herself,
at times, when, for instance, the shadows of day lifted in the
night-time, and she woke to find her pillow wet with tears,--why, she
knew not. Perhaps because those who had loved her best were lying in
unknown graves far away among the everlasting hills. It seemed so
strange that they should have met such similar fates; their very
deaths mysterious, if all too certain. In her mind they seemed
indissolubly mixed up with each other, living and dying, and her
thoughts were often with them. Not in sadness, in anything but
sadness; rather in a deep unreasoning content that they had loved and
trusted her.
And all the while Fate was arranging a cunning blow against her
hard-contested peace.
She was expecting her husband one evening when the rapid Indian
twilight had begun to fill the large bare room with shadows, and as,
driven by the waning light from her books, she sat down at the piano,
her fingers found one theme after another on the keys. Quite
carelessly they fell on the _Frühlingslied_, which three years before
had wrought poor Dick's undoing. And then, suddenly, she seemed to
feel the touch of his warm young lips on hers, to see the fire and
worship of his eyes. Was _that_ Love? she wondered, as her fingers
stilled themselves to silence; or was _that_ too nothing but a lie?
Dear, dear old Dick! The shadows gathered into an eager protesting
face, the empty room seemed full of the life that was dead for ever.
Ah, if it could be so really? If those dear dead could only come back
just to know how sorely the living longed for them.
A sound behind made her rise hastily. "Is that you, John? How late you
are!" she said with face averted, for, dark as it was, the unbidden
tears in her eyes craved concealment.
"No! it is I, Philip Marsden."
Her hand fell on the keys with a jarring clang that set the room
ringing. Philip! Nervous, overwrought, unstrung as she was by long
months of silence and repression, it seemed to her that the dead had
heard her wish. How terribly afraid she was! Afraid of Philip? A swift
denial in her heart made her turn slowly and strain her eyes into the
shadow by the door. He was there, tall and still, for darkness dazzles
like day and Philip Marsden's eyes were seeking her in vain by the
sound of her voice until he saw a dim figure meeting him with
outstretched hands. "Philip, oh, Philip! kindest! best! dearest!"
In the shadows their hands met, warm clinging hands; and at the touch
a cry, half-fear, half-joy, dominated the still echoing discord. The
next instant like a child who, frightened in the dark, sees a familiar
face, she was in his arms sobbing out her relief and wonder. "Ah,
Philip, it is you yourself! You are not dead! You have come back to
me, my dear, my dear!"
He had entered the room cynically contemptuous over the inevitable
predicament into which Fate and his impulsive actions had led him.
During his long captivity he had so often faced the extreme
probability of her marrying John Raby that the certainty which had met
him on his arrival at Kohât two days before had brought no surprise,
and but little pain. The past, he had said, was over. She had never
liked him; and he? That too was over; had been over for months if,
indeed, it had ever existed. He must go down at once, of course,
explain about Dick's legacy and settle what was to be done in the
meantime--that was all. And now she was in his arms and everything was
swept away in the flood of a great tenderness that never left him
again.
"Oh, Belle! You are glad, you are glad that I have come back!"
The wonder and joy of his voice seemed to rouse her to realities; she
drew away from him, and stood with one hand raised to her forehead in
perplexity. "How dark it is!" she cried, petulantly. "I did not see. I
cannot,--Why did you come like a thief in the night? Why did you not
write? Why?--you should not have come, you should not!"
"I did write," he answered gently, the blame in her tone seeming to
escape his ear. "I wrote from Kohât to tell you. The dog-cart was at
the station and I thought--"
"It was for John, not for you," she interrupted almost fiercely. "It
was for my husband--" She broke off into silence.
"Yes; I heard at Kohât you were married."
He could not see her face, nor she his, and once more her voice was
petulant in complaint. "You startled me. No one could have seen in the
dark."
"Shall I call for lights now?"
"If you please."
When he returned, followed by a servant bringing the lamp, she was
standing where he had left her. Great Heavens, how she had changed!
Was this little Belle Stuart with her beautiful grey eyes? This woman
with the nameless look of motherhood, the nameless dignity of
knowledge in her face; and yet with a terror, such as the tyranny of
truth brings with it, in the tired eyes which used to be so clear of
care.
"I am sorry," he began; then his thought overflowed conventional
speech, making him exclaim--"Don't look so scared, for pity's sake!"
"Don't look like that!" she echoed swiftly. "That is what you said the
last time I saw you: 'Don't, Belle, the whole world is before you,
life and happiness and love.' It was not true, and you have only made
it worse by coming back to upset everything, to take away everything."
"I am not going to take anything. The money--"
"Money, what money? I was not thinking of money. Ah, I remember now!
Of course it is yours, all yours."
Then silence fell between them again; but it was a silence eloquent of
explanation. So eloquent that Philip Marsden had to turn aside and
look out on the red bars of the sunset before he could beat down the
mad desire to take instant advantage of her self-betrayal. But he was
a man who above all things claimed the control of his own life, and
the knowledge that he too had been caught unawares helped him. "It is
all my fault, Mrs. Raby," he said, coming back to her, with a great
deference in voice and look. "This has startled you terribly, and you
have been ill, I think."
"Yes, I have been ill, very ill. The baby died, and then--oh, Philip,
Philip! I thought you were dead; I did indeed."
That was the end. Every atom of chivalry the man possessed, every
scrap of good in his nature responded to the pitiful appeal. "I do not
wonder," he answered, and though he spoke lightly there was a new tone
in his voice which always remained in it afterwards when he addressed
her. "I thought I was dead myself. Come, let us sit down, and I will
tell you how it all happened. Yes, I thought I was dead; at least so
Afzul Khân declares--"
"Afzul Khân! That was the name of the sepoy you arrested at
Faizapore."
Did she remember that? It was so long ago; long before the day he had
seen her last, when he had tried to comfort her, and she had sobbed
out her sorrow as to a brother, in just such another bare shadowy room
as this. Ah, poor Belle, poor Belle! Had it all been a mistake from
beginning to end? The only refuge from bewildering thought seemed
speech, and so he plunged into it, explaining, at far greater length
than he would otherwise have done, how he came to be sitting beside
her, instead of lying with whitening bones in some deep pool in the
mountains. He must, he said, have become unconscious from loss of
blood, and slipped into the river after he was wounded, for Afzul Khân
from his place of concealment on the water's edge had seen him
drifting down and dragged him to safety. They were a queer lot, the
Afghans, and Afzul believed he owed the Major a life. After that it
was a week ere he could be taken to decent shelter, because Afzul was
also wounded; but of all this he himself knew nothing. His
unconsciousness passing into delirium it was six weeks ere he awoke to
find himself in a sort of cave with snow shining like sunlight beyond
the opening, and Afzul cooking marmot-flesh over a smoky fire. Even
after that there was a rough time what with cold and hunger, for it
was an enemy's country, and the people about were at blood-feud with
Afzul's clan. At last it became a toss-up for death one way or the
other, seeing he was too weak to attempt escape. So he had given
himself up to the tribe, trusting that to their avarice an English
prisoner might be worth a ransom, while Afzul had gone east promising
to return with the swallows.
Then months had passed bringing threats of death more and more
constant as the promised ambassador never returned, until towards
autumn, being stronger, he managed to escape, and after running the
gauntlet of danger and starvation succeeded in reaching Afzul's tribe,
only to find him slowly recovering from rheumatic fever brought on by
exposure and privation. The poor fellow had been at death's door, and
long ere he was strong enough to act as pilot eastwards winter had set
her seal on the passes. So there they had remained, fairly
comfortable, until spring melted the snows. "And," he added with a
smile, for Belle's face had resumed its calm, "I grew quite fat, in
comparison! Yet they all took me for a ghost when I walked in to the
mess-room at Kohât one evening after dinner,--just as I walked in
here."
But her truthful eyes looked into his and declined the excuse. "No! I
did not take you for a ghost, except for an instant. I knew it was
you, and that you had come back to claim--everything."
"Then you knew wrong. I have come to claim nothing. Perhaps I have no
right to claim anything; so it need make no difference--"
"It must make a difference to John," she interrupted coldly. "I was
thinking of him. It is hard on him at all events."
"Hard! Of course it is hard," he answered with a sudden pain at his
heart. "Yet it is not my fault. I meant no harm."
"You have done no harm as far as I know," was the still colder reply.
But in her turn she rose and looked out to that low bar of red still
lingering in the horizon. "It is all very unfortunate, but we shall
manage,--somehow." There was a pause, then she added in quite her
ordinary tone, "I don't think John can be coming to-night, so we need
not wait dinner for him. They have taken your things to the end room.
I see a light there."
"But I have no right--" he began, crossing to where she stood.
She turned to him with a sudden gracious smile. "Right! you have every
right to everything. You have given me,--what have you not given me?"
A tall figure crouching in the verandah rose as they passed through
the open French window.
"Who is that?" she asked, half startled.
"Afzul Khân. I can't take him back to the regiment, of course, but he
came so far with me. He has business, he says, in Faizapore."
"Afzul Khân! Call him here, please."
It was a curious group: those two bound to each other by such a tissue
of misunderstanding and mistake, and the Pathan responsible for part
of those mistakes. He stood by _salaaming_ stolidly; for all that
taking in the scene with a quick eye.
"You have brought me back the best friend I ever had," said Belle with
a ring in her voice, and all instinctively her hand sought her
companion's and found it.
"It is God's will, not mine," was the reply. Not an atom of sentiment
in the words, not a scrap of sanctimoniousness; simply a statement of
fact. God's will! And stowed away in the folds of his fur coat lay a
long blue envelope, ominously stained with blood, and addressed in a
free bold hand to Miss Belle Stuart, favoured by Major Marsden of the
101st Sikhs. That was poor Dick's will at any rate. Even in their
ignorance those two looked at each other and wondered. God's will! It
was strange, if true.
"We dine in the garden now, it is cooler. I shall be ready in ten
minutes," said Belle.
She was waiting for him under the stars when he came out from his
room, and the slender figure against its setting of barren plain and
over-arching sky seemed all too slight for its surroundings.
"You must be very lonely here," he said abruptly.
Her light laugh startled him. "Not to-night at any rate! To-night is
high holiday, and I only hope the _khânsâmah_ will give us a good
dinner. Come! you must be hungry."
Thinking over it afterwards the rest of the evening seemed like a
dream to Philip Marsden. A halo of light round a table set with
flowers; a man and a woman talking and laughing, the man with a deep
unreasoning content in the present preventing all thought for the
future. How gay she was, how brilliant! How little need there was for
words with those clear sympathetic eyes lighting up into comprehension
at the first hint; and with some people it was necessary to have
Johnson's dictionary on the table ready for reference! Afterwards
again, as he sat in the moonlight smoking his cigar, and the cool
night wind stirred the lace ruffle on the delicate white arm stretched
on the lounge chair, how pleasant silence was; silence with the
consciousness of comprehension. Then when her hand lay in his as they
said good-night how dear her words were once more. "I want you to
understand that I am glad. Why not? You thought I meant the money, but
it was not that. I don't know what I meant, but it was not that. I
used to cry because I couldn't thank you; and now you have come, I do
not want to."
"Thank me for what?" he asked, with a catch in his voice.
But there was no answering tremble in hers. "You are not so wise as
your ghost; it knew. Supposing it was better to be dead after all?
That would be a pity, would it not? Good-night. John will be home
to-morrow."
He stood and stared at the lamp after she had gone, as if its feeble
ray would illuminate the puzzle of a woman's face and words. He did
not know that for the first time in her life Belle had turned on Fate.
"I do not care," she had said, recklessly, as she walked up and down
waiting for him amid the flowering oleanders. "One cannot be always
thinking, thinking. He has come back and I am glad. Surely that is
enough for to-night."
It was not much to claim, and yet it made the puzzle so much the
harder for Philip Marsden. He sat on the edge of his bed, and swore to
himself that he did not know what it all meant, that he did not even
know his own feelings. To leave a girl with whom you fancied yourself
in love and who apparently hated you; to die, and fall out of love,
only to find when you came back to life, that she who had scorned you
living had taken a fancy to your memory. Nay more, to find that
something in you had survived death. What? Were the elements of a
French novel born out of such materials? He had never thought over
these questions, being one of those men who, from a certain physical
fastidiousness, are not brought into contact with them. So he may have
been said to be, in his way, quite as conventional in his morality as
any woman; and the suggestion of such a situation offended him quite
as much as it would have offended Belle. The pride and combativeness
of the man rose up against the suggestion even while the very thought
of her glad welcome thrilled him through and through. He wished
no harm to her,--God forbid! And yet if one were to believe the
world--bah! what was one to believe? He was too restless to sleep,
and, with the curious instinct which drives most good men to be
tempted of the devil in the wilderness, he put on a pair of thick
boots, turned up his trousers methodically, and set out to seek peace
in a moonlight walk. Bathos, no doubt; but if the sublime borders on
the ridiculous, the commonplaces of life must touch on its tragedy. It
was a broad white road down which he started at a rattling pace.
Before, behind, it merged into a treeless horizon and it led--God
knows where! For all he knew it might be the road leading to
destruction; the ready-made conventional turnpike worn by the feet of
thousands following some bell-wether who had tinkled down to death
when the world was young. The moon shone garishly, eclipsing the
stars. It seemed a pity, seeing they were at least further from this
detestable world than she,--a mere satellite dancing attendance on a
half-congealed cinder, and allowing it to come between her and the
light at every critical moment! A pretty conceit, but not thought; and
Philip was there with the firm intention of thinking out the position.
Yet again and again he found himself basking in the remembrance of
Belle's welcome. How glad, how unfeignedly, innocently glad she had
been, till fear crept in. Fear of what? Of the French novel, of
course. He had felt it himself; he had asked himself the same
question, doubtless, as she had; and what in heaven's name was to be
the answer? Must love always be handfast to something else? Or was it
possible for it to exist, not in the self-denying penance of propriety
and duty, but absolutely free and content in itself? Why not?
As he tramped along, stunning noises came from a neighbouring village;
thrummings of tom-toms, and blares of inconceivable horns mingling in
a wild, beast-like tumult. That meant a marriage in all its unglozed
simplicity of purpose; a marriage, to use the jargon, unsanctified by
love. But after all what had love to do with marriage? What could the
most unselfish dream of humanity have to do with the most selfish, the
most exacting, the most commonplace of all ties? Love, it is true,
might exist side by side with marriage, but the perfection of the one
was not bound up in the perfection of the other. Had not the attempt
to find an unnecessary fig-leaf by uniting sentiment to passion, only
ended in an apotheosis of animalism not much above that which found
expression in those hideous yells and brayings? Above! nay below! for
it degraded love and passion alike by false shame.
To escape the wedding party he struck away from the road, and felt
relieved when he had got rid of its hard-and-fast lines, its arrogance
of knowing the way. The clumps of tall tiger-grass shot arrowlike
against the velvet sky, and every now and again a faint rustle at
their roots told of something watching the intruder; a brooding
partridge may be, perhaps a snake with unwinking eyes. And as he
walked, his thoughts seemed to lead him on, till something of the
truth, something naked yet not ashamed as it had been before mankind
ate of the sorrowful tree, came home to him. It could not be true,
that verdict of the world. He would defy it.
Suddenly he found himself confronted by a strange barrier, blocking
his way. As far as eye could reach on either side rose a wall of
shadow twenty feet high, a wall dense and dark below, filmy as cobwebs
where the tasselled reeds of which it was composed touched the purple
of the sky. The gossamer wings of a day could pass through those
feathery tops; but below, even the buffalo had to seek an oozy track
here and there. He had often heard of this reed wall, which, following
the old river bed, divides village from village as effectually as when
the stream ran fast and deep; but its curious aptness to his thoughts
startled him. Impenetrable save for those who sought the mire, or
those with the wings of a dove. Which was it to be? As he stood
arrested by his own fancy a night-heron flitted past; its broad white
wings whirred softly, and its plumed head, craning forward, with
blood-red eyes searching the shadows, cleft the moonlight. By some
strange jugglery of fancy it reminded him of a picture by Gustave
Doré, and with the remembrance of Francesca da Rimini came that of the
scared look in poor Belle's face.
He turned aside impatiently beset once more by the desire for escape
and struck across the plain; coming, after a time, on a footpath which
he followed mechanically through the tamarisk bushes, until he emerged
on an open space where a hoar frost of salt crystals glittered on rows
and rows of tiny mounds. So pure, so white, that the eye might have
sworn to a winter's night even while the other senses told of more
than summer's heat; a deception increasing the unreality with which
Philip recognised that his wandering steps had led him to a village
grave-yard. A far cry from the marriage feast! He sat down on the pile
of disordered bricks and stucco which marked the resting-place of the
saint round whose bones the faithful had gathered, and asked himself
what chance there was of standing out against the opinion of the many
in life, if even in death it was always follow my leader?
A quaint place it was; no enclosure, no token of hope or grief, no
symbol of faith; nothing but the dead, clean forgotten and out of
mind. Ah! but Belle had not forgotten him, and if he had remained dead
she would have gone on giving him the best part of herself without
reproach, without remorse. Was death then the only freedom from the
body? He sat so long immersed in his own thoughts that the slow stars
were wheeling to meet the dawn ere he rose, and threw out his arms
cramped by long stillness. Dead, yet alive,--that was the old panacea.
Was nothing else attainable? Must love be killed? Why?
A rustle in the tamarisks beyond the open made him turn sharply, and
make his way towards the corner whence it proceeded. As he did so a
group of men defiled from the bushes, set down the burden they
carried, and, without looking round, began to dig a grave. The hour,
the absence of wailing, gave Philip a momentary thought that he might
be assisting at the concealment of some crime, but his knowledge of
the people reassured him. Yet as he approached, all the party--save a
very old man mumbling his beads--scurried into the jungle, and so he
judged it wiser to stop and give the orthodox salutation. The
patriarch rose in feeble haste. "Allah be praised! we thought you were
the ghost already. Come back; come back!" he cried in louder quavering
voice. "'Tis only a Presence, seeking sport, doubtless. Come back, and
get her under earth ere dawn, or 'twill be the worse for all."
Then, as one by one his companions crept back to their task, he
answered Philip's curious looks with waggling head. "Only a wanton
woman, _Huzoor_. Seven months ago meek as a dove, playing about the
village with maiden-plaited hair. But when the matrons unbound it for
the bridegroom, as in due course of duty, the wickedness came out. It
is so with some women; a fancy that hath not bit nor bridle; a
wantonness of mind when God made them to be mothers. And she would
have been one--ay, a happy one--for all her fancies, had she not wept
herself into a wasting and died with her unborn child. Cursed
creature, bringing evil on the whole village with her whims! Quick,
quick, my sons! Hide her before dawn, with the irons round her thumbs,
and the nails through her feet. Then will I sow the mustard-seed in
her path homewards, so that cock-crow will ever send her back to the
worms ere she hath done gathering. And all for a fancy when God made
women to be mothers! A wanton mind! A wanton mind!"
The broken, quavering voice went on accusingly as Philip turned away
sick at heart. Here was the other side of the shield; and which was
the truth?
He went home feeling he had gained very little from the wilderness.