Ten minutes later Rhoda stood fastening her glove at her father’s door
and looking out upon a world of suddenly novel charm. The door opened,
as it were, upon eternity, with a patch of garden between, but eternity
was blue and sun-filled and encouraging. The roses and sweet-williams
stood sheer against the sky, with fifty yellow butterflies dancing above
them. Over the verge of the garden—there was not more than ten feet of
it in any direction—she saw tree-tops and the big green shoulders of the
lower hills, and very far down a mat of fleecy clouds that hid the
flanks of some of these. The sunlight was tempting, enticing. It made
the rubble path warm beneath her feet and drew up the scent of the
garden until the still air palpitated with it. Rhoda took little
desultory steps to the edge of the ledge the house was built on, and
down the steep footway to the road. The white oaks met over her head,
and far up among the tree-ferns she heard a cuckoo. Its note softened
and accented her unreasoned gladness, seemed to give it a form and a
metre. She looked up into the fragrant leafy shadows and listened till
it came again, vaguely aware that it was enough to live for. If she had
another thought it was that Philip Doyle had come too late to see the
glory of the rhododendrons, there was only, here and there, a red rag of
them left.
She stepped with a rattle of pebbles into the wide main road round the
mountain, and there stood for a moment undecided. It was the chief road,
the Mall; and if she turned to the right it would lead her past the
half-dozen tiny European shops that clung to the side of the hill, past
the hotels and the club, and through the expansion where the band played
in the afternoon, where there were benches and an admirable view, and
where new-comers to Darjiling invariably sat for two or three days and
contentedly occupied themselves with processes of oxygenation. This part
of the Mall was frequented and fashionable; even at that hour she would
meet her acquaintances on hill ponies and her mother’s friends in
dandies and her mother’s friends’ babies in perambulators, with a
plentiful background of slouching Bhutia coolies, their old felt hats
tied on with their queues, and red-coats from a recuperating regiment,
and small black-and-white terriers. It was not often that this prospect
attracted her; she had discovered a certain monotony in its cheerfulness
some time before; but to-day she had to remind herself of that discovery
before she finally decided to turn to the left instead. She had another
reason: if she went that way it might look to Philip Doyle as if she
wanted to meet him. Why this gentleman should have come to so
extraordinary a conclusion on the data at his disposal Miss Daye did not
pause to explain. She was quite certain that he would, so she turned to
the left.
It suited her mood, when once she had taken that direction, to walk very
fast. She had an undefined sense of keeping pace with events; her
vigorous steps made a rhythm for her buoyant thought, and helped it out.
She was entirely occupied with the way in which she would explain to Mr.
Doyle how it was that she was not married to Lewis Ancram. She
anticipated a pleasure in this, and she thought it was because Doyle
would be gratified, on his friend’s account. He had never liked the
match—she clung to that impression in all humility—he would perhaps
approve of her breaking it off. Rhoda felt a little excited satisfaction
at the idea of being approved of by Philip Doyle. She put the words with
which she would tell him into careful phrases as she walked,
constructing and reconstructing them, while Buzz kept an erratic course
before her with inquisitive pauses by the wayside and vain chasing of
little striped squirrels that whisked about the boles of the trees.
Buzz, she thought, had never been more idiotically amusing.
The road grew boskier and lonelier. Miss Daye met a missionary lady in a
jinricksha, and then a couple of schoolboys sprinting, and then for a
quarter of a mile nobody at all. The little white houses stopped
cropping out on ledges above her head, the wall of rock or of rubble
rose solidly up, wet and glistening, and tapestried thick with tiny
ferns and wild begonias. All at once, looking over the brink, she saw
that the tin roofs of the cottages down the khud-side no longer shone in
the sun; the clouds had rolled between it and them—very likely down
there it was raining. Presently the white mist smoked up level with the
road, and she and the trees and the upper mountain stood in dappled
sunlight for a moment alone above a phantasmally submerged world. Then
the crisp leaf-shadows on the road grew indistinct and faded, the
sunlight paled and went out, and in a moment there was nothing near or
far but a wandering greyness, and here and there perhaps the shadowed
hole of an oak-tree or the fantastic outline of a solitary nodding fern.
“It’s going to rain, Buzz,” she said, as the little dog mutely inquired
for encouragement and direction, “and neither of us have got an
umbrella. So we’ll both get wet and take our death of cold. _Sumja_,[E]
Buzz?”
-----
Footnote E:
“Do you understand?”
-----
As she spoke they passed the blurred figure of a man, walking rapidly in
the other direction. “Buzz!” Rhoda cried, as the dog turned and trotted
briskly after: “Come back, sir!” Buzz took no notice whatever, and
immediately she heard him addressed in a voice which made a sudden
requirement upon her self-control. She had a divided impulse—to betake
herself on as fast as she could into remote indistinguishability, and to
call the dog again. With a little effort of hardihood she turned and
called him, turned with a thumping heart, and waited for his restoration
and for anything else that might happen. The mist drifted up for a
moment as Philip Doyle heard her and came quickly back; and when they
shook hands they stood in a little white temple with uncertain walls and
a ceiling decoration of tree-ferns in high relief.
She asked him when he had come, although she knew that already, and he
inquired for her mother, although he was quite informed as to Mrs.
Daye’s well-being. He explained Buzz’s remembering him, as if he had
taken an unfair advantage of it, and they announced simultaneously that
it was going to rain. Then conversation seemed to fail them wholly, and
Rhoda made a movement of departure.
“I suppose you are going to some friend in the neighbourhood,” he said,
lifting his hat, “if there is any neighbourhood—which one is inclined to
doubt.”
“Oh, no, I’m only walking.”
“All alone?”
“Buzz,” she said, with a downcast smile.
“Buzz is such an effective protection that I’m inclined to ask you to
share him.” His voice was even more tentative than his words. He fancied
he would have made a tremendous advance if she allowed him to come with
her.
“Oh, yes,” she said foolishly, “you may have half.”
“Thank you. I am three miles from my club, twenty-four hours from my
office, and four thousand feet above sea-level—and I don’t mind
confessing that I’m very frightened indeed. How long, I wonder, does it
take to acquire the magnificent indifference to the elements which you
display? But the storm is indubitably coming: don’t you think we had
better turn back?”
“Yes,” she said again, and they turned back; but they sauntered along
among the clouds at precisely the pace they might have taken in the
meadows of the world below.
She asked him where he had spent his leave and how he had enjoyed it,
and she gathered from his replies that one might stay too long in India
to find even Italy wholly paradisaical, although Monte Carlo had always
its same old charm. “You should see Monte Carlo before some cataclysm
overtakes it,” he said. “You would find it amusing. I spent a month at
Homburg,” he went on humorously, “with what I consider the greatest
possible advantage to my figure. Though my native friends have been
openly condoling with me on my consequent loss of prestige, and I have
no doubt my sylph-like condition will undermine my respectability.” He
felt, as he spoke, deplorably middle-aged, and to mention these things
seemed to be a kind of apology for them.
Rhoda looked at him with the conviction that he had left quite ten years
in Europe, but she found herself oddly reluctant to say so. “Mummie will
tell you,” she said. “Mummie always discovers the most wonderful changes
in people when they have been home. And why did you come back so soon?”
“Why?” he repeated, half facing round, and then suddenly dropping back
again. “I came to see about something.”
“Oh, yes, of course you did. I know about it. And do you think you will
win?”
She looked at him with a smile of timid intelligence. Under it she was
thinking that she had never had such a stupid conversation with Mr.
Doyle before. He smiled back gravely, and considered for a moment.
“I don’t in the least know,” he said with courageous directness; “but I
mean to try—very hard.”
If he had thought, he might have kept the suggestion out of his voice—it
was certainly a little premature—but he did not think, and the
suggestion was there. Rhoda felt her soul leap up to catch its full
significance; then she grew very white, and shivered a little. The
shiver was natural enough: two or three big drops had struck her on the
shoulders, and others were driving down upon the road, with wide spaces
between them, but heavily determined, and making little splashes where
they struck.
“It is going to pour,” she said; and, as they walked on with a futile
quickening of pace, she heard him talk of something else, and called
herself a fool for the tumult in her heart. The rain gathered itself
together and pelted them. She was glad of the excuse to break blindly
into a run, and Doyle needed all his newly acquired energy to keep up
with her. The storm was behind them, and as it darkened and thickened
and crashed and drove them on, Rhoda’s blood tingled with a wild sweet
knowledge that she fled before something stronger and stranger than the
storm, and that in the end she would be overtaken, in the end she would
cede. Her sense of this culminated when Philip Doyle put a staying hand
upon her arm—she could not have heard him speak—and she sped on faster,
with a little frightened cry.
“Come back!” he shouted; and, without knowing why, she did as he bade
her, struggling at every step, it seemed, into a chaos out of which the
rain smote her on both cheeks, with only one clear sensation—that he had
her hand very closely pressed to his side, and that somewhere or other,
presently, there would be shelter. They found it not ten yards
behind—one of those shallow caves that Sri Krishna scooped out long ago
to lodge his beggar priests in. Some Bhutia coolies had been cooking a
meal there; a few embers still glowed on a heap of ashes in the middle
of the place. Doyle explained, as he thrust her gently in, that these
had caught his eye.
“You won’t mind my leaving you here,” he said, “while I go on for a
dandy and wraps and things? I shall not be a moment longer than I can
help. You won’t be afraid?”
“In this rain! It would be wicked. Yes, I shall—I shall be horribly
afraid! You must stay here too, until it is over. Please come inside _at
once_.”
The little imperious note thrilled Doyle; but he stayed where he was.
“My dear child,” he said, “this may last for hours, and, if you don’t
get home somehow, you are bound to get a chill. Besides, I must let your
mother know.”
“It will probably be over by the time you reach the house. And my mother
is always quite willing to entrust me to Providence, Mr. Doyle. And if
you go I’ll come, too.”
She looked so resolute that Doyle hesitated. “Won’t you be implored to
stay here?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Not if you go,” she said. And, without further
parley, he stooped and came in.
They could not stand upright against the shelving sides and roof of the
place, so perforce they sat upon the ground—she, with her feet tucked
under her, leaning upon one hand, in the way of her sex, he hugging his
knees. There might have been thirty cubic feet of space in the cave, but
it was not comfortably apportioned, and he had to crouch rather
awkwardly to keep himself at what he considered a proper distance. It
was warm and dry there, and the dull fire of the embers in the middle
gave a centre and a significance to the completeness of their shelter.
The clouds hung like a grey curtain before the entrance, bordered all
round with trailing vines and drooping ferns; the beat of the rain came
in to them in a heavy distant monotone, and even the thunder seemed to
be rolling in a muffled way among the valleys below. Doyle felt that
nothing could be more perfect than their solitude. He would not speak,
lest his words should people it with commonplaces; he almost feared to
move, lest he should destroy the accident that gave him the privilege of
such closeness to her. The little place was filled, it seemed to him,
with a certain divine exhalation of her personality, of her freshness
and preciousness; he breathed it, and grew young again, and bold. In the
moments of silence that fell their love arose before them like a
presence. The girl saw how beautiful it was without looking, the man
asked himself how long he could wait for its realisation.
“Are you very wet?” he asked her at last.
“No; only my jacket.”
“Then you ought to take it off, oughtn’t you? Let me help you.”
He had to lean closer to her for that. The wet little coat came off with
difficulty; and then he put an audacious hand upon the warm shoulder in
its cambric blouse underneath, with a suddenly taught confidence that it
would not shrink away.
“Only a little damp,” he said. It was the most barefaced excuse for his
caressing fingers. “Tell me, darling, when a preposterously venerable
person like me wishes to make a proposal of marriage to somebody who is
altogether sweet and young and lovable like you, has he any business to
take advantage of a romantic situation to do it in?”
She did not answer. The lightness of his words somewhat disturbed her
sense of their import. Then she looked into his face, and saw the
wonderful difference that the hope of her had written there, and,
without any more questioning, she permitted herself to understand.
“Think about it for a little while,” he said, and came a good deal
nearer, and drew her head down upon his breast. He knew a lifetime of
sweet content in the space it rested there, while he laid his lips
softly upon her hair and made certain that no other woman’s was so
sweet-scented.
“Well?” he said at last.
“But——”
“But?”
“But you never did approve of me.”
“Didn’t I? I don’t know. I have always loved you.”
“I have never loved anybody—before.”
That was as near as she managed to get, then or for long thereafter, to
the matter of her previous engagement.
“No. Of course not. But for the future?”
Without taking her head from his shoulder, she lifted her eyes to his;
and he found the pledge he sought in them.
And that upturning of her face brought her lips, her newly grave, sweet,
submissive lips, very near, and the gladness within him was newborn and
strong. And so the storm swept itself away, and the purple-necked doves
cooed and called again where the sunlight glistened through the dripping
laurels, and these two were hardly aware. Then suddenly a Bhutia girl
with a rose behind her ear came and stood in the door of the cave and
regarded them. She was muscular and red-cheeked and stolid; she wore
many strings of beads as well as the rose behind her ear, and as she
looked she comprehended, with a slow and foolish smile.
“It is her tryst!” Rhoda cried, jumping up. “Let us leave it to her.”
Then they went home through a world of their own, which the piping birds
and the wild roses and the sun-decked mosses reflected fitly. The clouds
had gone to Thibet; all round about, in full sunlight, the great
encompassing, gleaming Snows rose up and spoke of eternity, and made a
horizon not too solemn and supreme for the vision of their happiness.
* * * * *
“My dearest child.” said Mrs. Daye that night—she had come late to her
daughter’s room with her hair down—“don’t think I’m not as pleased as
possible, because I _am_. I’ve always had the greatest admiration for
Mr. Doyle, and you couldn’t have a better—unofficial—position in
Calcutta. But I _must_ warn you, dear—I’ve seen such misfortune come of
it, and I knew I shouldn’t sleep if I didn’t—before this engagement is
announced——”
“I’ll go to church in a cotton blouse and a serge skirt this time, if
that’s what you’re thinking of, mummie.”
“There! I was sure of it! Do think seriously, Rhoda, of the injustice to
poor Mr. Doyle, if you’re merely marrying him for _pique_!”