第46章

'She is very fond of animals,' he said, 'and she sings and plays well--really extremely well.'

'That must be charming,' murmured Madeline, privately iterating, 'He doesn't mean to damn her--he doesn't mean to damn her.' 'Have you a photograph of her?'

'Quantities of them,' he said, with simplicity.

'You have never shown me one.But how could you?' she added in haste; 'a photograph is always about the size of a door nowadays.

It is simply impossible to keep one's friends and relations in a pocketbook as one used to do.'

They might have stopped there, but some demon of persistence drove Madeline on.She besought help from her imagination; she was not for the moment honest.It was an impulse--an equivocal impulse--born doubtless of the equivocal situation, and it ended badly.

'She will bring something of the spring out to you,' said Madeline--'the spring in England.How many years is it since you have seen it? There will be a breath of the cowslips about her, and in her eyes the soft wet of the English sky.Oh, you will be very glad to see her.' The girl was well aware of her insincerity, but only dimly of her cruelty.She was drawn on by something stronger than her sense of honesty and humanity, a determination to see, to know, that swept these things away.

Innes's hand tightened on the rickshaw, and he made at first no answer.Then he said:

'She has been staying in town, you know.'

There was just a quiver of Madeline's eyelid; it said nothing of the natural rapacity behind.This man's testimony was coming out in throes, and yet--it must be said--again she probed.

'Then she will put you in touch again,' she cried; 'you will remember when you see her all the vigour of great issues and the fascination of great personalities.For a little while, anyway, after she comes, you will be in a world--far away from here--where people talk and think and live.'

He looked at her in wonder, not understanding, as indeed how could he?

'Why,' he said, 'you speak of what YOU have done'; and before the truth of this she cast down her eyes and turned a hot, deep red, and had nothing to say.

'No,' he said, 'my wife is not like that.'

He walked along in absorption, from which he roused himself with resentment in his voice.

'I can not leave such a fabric of illusion in your mind.It irritates me that it should be there--about anybody belonging to me.

My wife is not in the least what you imagine her.She has her virtues, but she is--like the rest.I can not hope that you will take to her, and she won't like you either--we never care about the same people.And we shall see nothing of you--nothing.I can hardly believe that I am saying this of my own wife, but--I wish that she had stayed in England.'

'Mrs.Mickie!' cried Madeline to a passing rickshaw, 'what are you rushing on like that for? Just go quietly and peaceably along with us, please, and tell us what Mrs.Vesey decided to do about her part in 'The Outcast Pearl'.I'm dining out tonight--I must know.' And Mrs.Mickie was kind enough to accompany them all the rest of the way.

Miss Anderson dined out, and preferred to suppose that she had no time to think until she was on her way home along the empty road round Jakko at eleven o'clock that night.Then it pleased her to get out of her rickshaw and walk.There was an opulent moon, the vast hills curving down to the plains were all grey and silvery, and the deodars overhead fretted the road with dramatic shadows.About her hung the great stillness in a mighty loneliness in which little Simla is set, and it freed her from what had happened, so that she could look at it and cry out.She actually did speak, pausing in the little pavilion on the road where the nursemaids gather in the daytime, but very low, so that her words fell round her even in that silence, and hardly a deodar was aware.'I will not go now,' she said.'I will stay and realize that he is another woman's husband.

That should cure me if anything will--to see him surrounded by the commonplaces of married life, that kind of married life.I will stay till she comes and a fortnight after.Besides, I want to see her--I want to see how far she comes short.' She was silent for a moment, and the moonlight played upon her smile of quiet triumph.

'He cares too,' she said; 'he cares too, but he doesn't know it, and I promise you one thing, Madeline Anderson, you won't help him to find out.And in five weeks I will go away and leave my love where I found it--on a mountaintop in the middle of Asia!'