"Now, you've got your choice, my friend. This engagement has to be
broken off; and the Mannerings don't want to be too hard on you. Was
it broken through D. T. or epileptic fits? Sorry I can't offer you a
better exchange unless you'd prefer hereditary insanity. Say the
word and I'll tell 'em it's fits. All Simla knows about that scene
on the Ladies' Mile. Come! I'll give you five minutes to think over
it."
During those five minutes I believe that I explored thoroughly the
lowest circles of the Inferno which it is permitted man to tread on
earth. And at the same time I myself was watching myself faltering
through the dark labyrinths of doubt, misery, and utter despair. I
wondered, as Heatherlegh in his chair might have wondered, which
dreadful alternative I should adopt. Presently I heard myself
answering in a voice that I hardly recognized:
"They're confoundedly particular about morality in these parts. Give
'em fits, Heatherlegh, and my love. Now, let me sleep a bit longer."
Then my two selves joined, and it was only I (half crazed,
devil-driven I) that tossed in my bed, tracing step by step the
history of the past month.
"But I am in Simla," I kept repeating to myself. "I, Jack Pansay, am
in Simla, and there are no ghosts here. It's unreasonable of that
woman to pretend there are. Why couldn't Agnes have left me alone?
I never did her any harm. It might just as well have been me as
Agnes. Only I'd never have come back on purpose to kill her. Why
can't I be left alone--left alone and happy?"
It was high noon when I first awoke; and the sun was low in the sky
before I slept--slept as the tortured criminal sleeps on his rack,
too worn to feel further pain.
Next day I could not leave my bed. Heatherlegh told me in the
morning that he had received an answer from Mr. Mannering, and that,
thanks to his (Heatherlegh's) friendly offices, the story of my
affliction had traveled through the length and breadth of Simla,
where I was on all sides much pitied.
"And that's rather more than you deserve," he concluded, pleasantly,
"though the Lord knows you've been going through a pretty severe
mill. Never mind; we'll cure you yet, you perverse phenomenon."
I declined firmly to be cured. "You've been much too good to me
already, old man," said I; "but I don't think I need trouble you
further."
In my heart I knew that nothing Heatherlegh could do would lighten
the burden that had been laid upon me.
With that knowledge came also a sense of hopeless, impotent rebellion
against the unreasonableness of it all. There were scores of men no
better than I whose punishments had at least been reserved for
another world; and I felt that it was bitterly, cruelly unfair that I
alone should have been singled out for so hideous a fate. This mood
would in time give place to another where it seemed that the
'rickshaw and I were the only realities in a world of shadows; that
Kitty was a ghost; that Mannering, Heatherlegh, and all the other men
and women I knew were all ghosts; and the great, gray hills
themselves but vain shadows devised to torture me. From mood to mood
I tossed backward and forward for seven weary days; my body growing
daily stronger and stronger, until the bedroom looking-glass told me
that I had returned to every day life, and was as other men once
more. Curiously enough my face showed no signs of the struggle I had
gone through. It was pale indeed, but as expressionless and
commonplace as ever. I had expected some permanent
alteration--visible evidence of the disease that was eating me away.
I found nothing.
On the 15th of May I left Heatherlegh's house at eleven o'clock in
the morning; and the instinct of the bachelor drove me to the club.
There I found that every man knew my story as told by Heatherlegh,
and was, in clumsy fashion, abnormally kind and attentive.
Nevertheless, I recognized that for the rest of my natural life I
should be among but not of my fellows; and I envied very bitterly
indeed the laughing coolies on the Mall below. I lunched at the
club, and at four o'clock wandered aimlessly down the Mall in the
vague hope of meeting Kitty. Close to the band-stand the black and
white liveries joined me; and I heard Mrs. Wessington's old appeal at
my side. I had been expecting this ever since I came out; and was
only surprised at her delay. The phantom 'rickshaw and I went side
by side along the Chota Simla road in silence. Close to the bazaar,
Kitty and a man on horseback overtook and passed us. For any sign
she gave I might have been a dog in the road. She did not even pay
me the compliment of quickening her pace; though the rainy afternoon
had served for an excuse.
So Kitty and her companion, and I and my ghostly light-o'-love, crept
round Jakko in couples. The road was streaming with water; the pines
dripped like roof-pipes on the rocks below, and the air was full of
fine, driving rain. Two or three times I found myself saying to
myself almost aloud: "I'm Jack Pansay on leave at Simla--at Simla!
Everyday, ordinary Simla. I mustn't forget that--I mustn't forget
that." Then I would try to recollect some of the gossip I had heard
at the club; the prices of So-and-So's horses--anything, in fact,
that related to the workaday Anglo-Indian world I knew so well. I
even repeated the multiplication table rapidly to myself, to make
quite sure that I was not taking leave of my senses. It gave me much
comfort; and must have prevented my hearing Mrs. Wessington for a
time.
Once more I wearily climbed the convent slope and entered the level
road. Here Kitty and the man started off at a canter, and I was left
alone with Mrs. Wessington. "Agnes," said I, "will you put back your
hood and tell me what it all means?" The hood dropped noiselessly,
and I was face to face with my dead and buried mistress. She was
wearing the dress in which I had last seen her alive; carried the
same tiny handkerchief in her right hand, and the same card-case in
her left. (A woman eight months dead with a card-case!) I had to
pin myself down to the multiplication table, and to set both hands on
the stone parapet of the road, to assure myself that at least was
real.
"Agnes," I repeated, "for pity's sake tell me what it all means."
Mrs. Wessington leaned forward, with that odd, quick turn of the head
I used to know so well, and spoke.
If my story had not already so madly overleaped the bounds of all
human belief I should apologize to you now. As I know that no
one--no, not even Kitty, for whom it is written as some sort of
justification of my conduct--will believe me, I will go on. Mrs.
Wessington spoke and I walked with her from the Sanjowlie road to the
turning below the Commander-in-chief's house as I might walk by the
side of any living woman's 'rickshaw, deep in conversation. The
second and most tormenting of my moods of sickness had suddenly laid
hold upon me, and, like the prince in Tennyson's poem, "I seemed to
move amid a world of ghosts." There had been a garden-party at the
commander-in-chief's, and we two joined the crowd of homeward-bound
folk. As I saw them then it seemed that they were the
shadows--impalpable fantastic shadows--that divided for Mrs.
Wessington's 'rickshaw to pass through. What we said during the
course of that weird interview I can not--indeed, I dare not--tell.
Heatherlegh's comment would have been a short laugh and a remark that
I had been "mashing a brain-eye-and-stomach chimera." It was a
ghastly and yet in some indefinable way a marvelously dear
experience. Could it be possible, I wondered, that I was in this
life to woo a second time the woman I had killed by my own neglect
and cruelty?