第72章

The price was too heavy; I would have denuded her, at the moment, of all that had led her into this, and turned her out a clod with fine shoulders like fifty other women in Peshawur.Then, perhaps, because I held myself silent and remote and she had no emotion of fear from me, she did not immediately go.

'It will beat itself away, I suppose, like the rest of the unreasonable pain of the world,' she said at last; and that, of course, brought me to her side.'Things will go back to their proportions.This,' she touched an open rose, 'will claim its beauty again.And life will become--perhaps--what it was before.'

Still I found nothing to say, I could only put my arm in hers and walk with her to the edge of the veranda where the syce was holding her horse.She stroked the animal's neck.'Everything in me answered him,' she informed me, with the grave intelligence of a patient who relates a symptom past.As she took the reins she turned to me again.'His spirit came to mine like a homing bird,'

she said, and in her smile even the pale reflection of happiness was sweet and stirring.It left me hanging in imagination over the source and the stream, a little blessed in the mere understanding.

Too much blessed for confidence, or any safe feeling that the source was bound.Rather I saw it leaping over every obstacle, flashing to its destiny.As I drove to the Club next day I decided that I would not tell Anna Chichele of Colonel Harbottle's projected furlough.

If to Judy telling her would be like taking an oath that they would go, to me it would at least be like assuming sponsorship for their intention.That would be heavy indeed.From the first of April--we were then in March.Anna would hear it soon enough from the General, would see it soon enough, almost, in the 'Gazette', when it would have passed into irrecoverable fact.So I went by her with locked lips, kept out of the way of those eyes of the mother that asked and asked, and would have seen clear to any depth, any hiding-place of knowledge like that.As I pulled up at the Club I saw Colonel Harbottle talking concernedly to the wife of our Second-in-Command, and was reminded that I had not heard for some days how Major Watkins was going on.So I, too, approached Mrs.Watkins in her victoria to ask.Robert Harbottle kindly forestalled her reply.

'Hard luck, isn't it? Watkins has been ordered home at once.Just settled into their new house, too--last of the kit came up from Calcutta yesterday, didn't it, Mrs.Watkins? But it's sound to go--Peshawur is the worst hole in Asia to shake off dysentery in.'

We agreed upon this and discussed the sale-list of her new furniture that Mrs.Watkins would have to send round the station, and considered the chances of a trooper--to the Watkinses with two children and not a penny but his pay it did make it easier not to have to go by a liner--and Colonel Harbottle and I were halfway to the reading-room before the significance of Major Watkins's sick-leave flashed upon me.

'But this,' I cried, 'will make a difference to your plans.You won't--'

'Be able to ask for that furlough Judy wants.Rather not.I'm afraid she's disappointed--she was tremendously set on going--but it doesn't matter tuppence to me.'

I sought out Mrs.Harbottle, at the end of the room.She looked radiant; she sat on the edge of the table and swung a light-hearted heel.She was talking to people who in themselves were a witness to high spirits, Captain the Hon.Freddy Gisborne, Mrs.Flamboys.

At sight of me her face clouded, fell suddenly into the old weary lines.It made me feel somehow a little sick; I went back to my cart and drove home.

For more than a week I did not see her except when I met her riding with Somers Chichele along the peach-bordered road that leads to the Wazir-Bagh.The trees were all in blossom and made a picture that might well catch dreaming hearts into a beatitude that would correspond.The air was full of spring and the scent of violets, those wonderful Peshawur violets that grow in great clumps, tall and double.Gracious clouds came and trailed across the frontier barrier; blue as an idyll it rose about us; the city smiled in her gardens.

She had it all in her face, poor Judy, all the spring softness and more, the morning she came, intensely controlled, to announce her defeat.I was in the drawing-room doing the flowers; I put them down to look at her.The wonderful telegram from Simla arrived--that was the wonderful part--at the same time; I remembered how the red, white, and blue turban of the telegraph peon bobbed up behind her shoulder in the veranda.I signed and laid it on the table; Isuppose it seemed hardly likely that anything could be important enough to interfere at the moment with my impression of what love, unbound and victorious, could do with a face I thought I knew.Love sat there careless of the issue, full of delight.Love proclaimed that between him and Judith Harbottle it was all over--she had met him, alas, in too narrow a place--and I marvelled at the paradox with which he softened every curve and underlined every vivid note of personality in token that it had just begun.He sat there in great serenity, and though I knew that somewhere behind lurked a vanquished woman, I saw her through such a radiance that I could not be sure of seeing her at all...

She went back to the very first of it; she seemed herself intensely interested in the facts; and there is no use in pretending that, while she talked, the moral consideration was at all present with me either; it wasn't.Her extremity was the thing that absorbed us;she even, in tender thoughtfulness, diagnosed it from its definite beautiful beginning.

'It was there, in my heart, when I woke one morning, exquisite and strange, the assurance of a gift.How had it come there, while Islept? I assure you when I closed my eyes it did not exist for me.

..Yes, of course, I had seen him, but only somewhere at dinner..