CHAPTER XII.

"G.o.d uses us to help each other so."

--BROWNING.

It was distinctly one of Roy's great moments when, at last, they four stood together in Sir Lakshman's room: the old man, outwardly impa.s.sive--as became a Rajput--profoundly moved in the deep places of his heart; Aruna, in Oxford gown and sari, radiant one moment; the next--in spite of stoic resolves--crying softly in Dyan's arms. And Roy understood only too well. The moment he held her hand and met her eyes--he knew. It was not only joy at Dyan's return that evoked the veiled blush, the laugh that trembled into tears. Conceit or no conceit, his intuition was not to be deceived.

And the conviction did not pa.s.s. It was confirmed by every day, every hour he spent in her company. On the rare occasions, when they were alone together, the very thing that must be religiously stifled and hid, emanated from her like fragrance from a flower; sharply reawakening his own temptation to respond--were it only to ease her pain. And there was more in it than that--or very soon would be, if he hesitated much longer to clinch matters by telling her the truth; though every nerve shrank from the ordeal--for himself and her. Running away from oneself was plainly a futile experiment. To have so failed with her, disheartened him badly and dwarfed his proud achievement to an insignificant thing.

To the rest, unaware, his triumph seemed complete, his risky adventure justified beyond cavil. They all admitted as much;--even Vincent, who abjured superlatives and had privately taken failure for granted. Roy, in a fit of modesty, ascribed it all to 'luck.' By the merest chance he had caught Dyan, on his own confession, just as the first flickers of doubt were invading his hypnotised soul; just when it began to dawn on him that alien hands were pulling the strings. He had already begun to feel trapped; unwilling to go forward; unable to go back; and the fact that no inner secrets were confided to him, had galled his Rajput vanity and pride. In the event, he was thankful enough for the supposed slight; since it made him feel appreciably safer from the zeal of his discarded friends.

Much of this he had confided to Roy, in fragments and jerks, on the night of their amazing exit from Delhi; already sufficiently himself again to puzzle frankly over that perverted Dyan; to marvel--with a simplicity far removed from mere foolishness--"how one man can make a magic in other men's minds so that he shall appear to them an eagle when he is only a crow."

"That particular form of magic," Roy told him, "has made half the history of the world. We all like to flatter ourselves we're safe from it--till we get bitten! You've been no more of a fool than the others, Dyan--if that's any consolation."

The offending word rankled a little. The truth of it rankled more. "By Indra, I am no fool now. Perhaps he has discovered that already. I fancy my letter will administer a shock. I wonder what he will do?"

"He won't 'do.' You can bank on that. He may fling vitriol over you on paper. But you won't have the pleasure of his company at Jaipur. He left his card on us before the Dewali. And there's been trouble since; leaflets circulating mysteriously; an exploded attempt to start a seditious 'rag.' So they're on the _qui vive._ He'll count that one up against me: but I'll manage to survive."

And Dyan, in the privacy of his heart, had felt distinctly relieved. Not that he lacked the courage of his race; but, having seen the man for years, as it were, through a magnifying lens, he could not, all in a moment, see him for the thing he was:--dangerous as a snake, yet swift as a snake to wriggle out of harm's way.

He had not been backward, however, in awakening his grandfather to purdah manoeuvres. Strictly in private--he told his cousin--there had been ungoverned storms of temper, ungoverned abuse of Roy, who was suspected by 'the Inside' of knowing too much and having undue influence with the old man. 'The Inside,' he gathered, had from early days been jealous of the favourite daughter and all her belongings. Naturally, in Dyan's opinion, his sister ought to marry; and the sooner the better.

Perhaps he had been unwise, after all, insisting on postponement. By now she would have been settled in her lawful niche instead of making trouble with this craze for hospital nursing and keeping outside caste.

Not surprising if she shrank from living at home, after all she had been through. Better for them both, perhaps, to break frankly with orthodox Hinduism and join the Brahma Samaj.

As Roy knew precisely how much--or rather, how little--Aruna liked working in the wards, he suffered a pang at the pathos of her innocent guile. And if Dyan had his own suspicions, he kept them to himself. He also kept to himself the vitriolic outpouring which he had duly found awaiting him at Jaipur. It contained too many lurid allusions to 'that conceited, imperialistic half-caste cousin of yours'; and Roy might resent the implied stigma as much as Dyan resented it for him. So he tore up the effusion, intended for the eye of Roy, merely remarking that it had enraged him. It was beneath contempt.

Roy would like to have seen it, all the same; for he knew himself quicker than Dyan at reading between the lines. The beggar would not hit back straight. But given the chance, he might try it on some other way--witness the pistol-shot in the arcade; a side light--or a side flash--on the pleasant sort of devil he was!

Back in the Jaipur Residency, in the garden that was 'almost England,'

back in his good familiar tweed coat and breeches, the whole Delhi interlude seemed strangely theatrical and unreal; more like a vivid dream than an experience in the flesh.

But there was Dyan to prove it no dream; and the perilous charm of Aruna, that must be resisted to the best of his power....

All this stir and ferment within; yet not a surface ripple disturbed the flow of those uneventful weeks between the return of Roy and the coming of Lance Desmond for Christmas leave.

It is thus that drama most often happens in life--a light under a bushel; set in the midst, yet unseen. Vincent, delving in ethnological depths, saw little or nothing outside his ma.n.u.script and maps. Floss Eden--engrossed in her own drawing-room comedy with Captain Martin--saw less than nothing, except that 'Mr Sinclair's other native cousin' came too often to the house. For she turned up her a.s.sertive nose at 'native gentlemen'; and confided to Martin her private opinion that Aunt Thea went too far in that line. She bothered too much about other people all round--which was true.

She had bothered a good deal more about Floss Eden, in early days, than that young lady at all realised. And now--in the intervals of organising Christmas presents and Christmas guests--she was bothering a good deal over Roy, whose absence had obviously failed to clear the air.

Not that he was silent or aloof. But his gift of speech overlaid a reticence deeper than that of the merely silent man; the kind she had lived with and understood. Once you got past their defences, you were unmistakably inside:--Vinx, for instance. But with Roy she was aware of reserves within reserves, which made him the more interesting, but also the more distracting, when one felt ent.i.tled to know the lie of the land. For, Aruna apart, wasn't he becoming too deeply immersed in his Indian relations--losing touch, perhaps, with those at home? Did it--or did it not matter--that, day after day, he was strolling with Aruna, riding with Dyan, pig-sticking and buck-hunting with the royal cheetahs and the royal heir to the throne; or plunging neck deep in plans and possibilities, always in connection with those two? His mail letters were few and not bulky, as she knew from handling the contents of the Residency mail-bag. And he very rarely spoke of them all: less than ever of late. To her ardent nature it seemed inexplicable. Perhaps it was just part of his peculiar 'inwardness.' She would have liked to feel sure, however....

Vinx would say it was none of her business. But Lance would be a help.

She was counting on him to readjust the scales. Thank goodness for Lance--giving up the Lah.o.r.e 'week' and the Polo Tournament to spend Christmas with her and Roy in the wilds of Rajputana. Just to have him about the place again--his music, his big laugh, his radiant certainty that, in any and every circ.u.mstance, it was a splendid thing to be alive--would banish worries and lift her spirits sky-high. After the still, deep waters of her beloved Vinx--whose strain of remoteness had not been quite dispelled by marriage--and the starlit mysteries of Aruna and the intriguing complexities of Roy, a breath of Lance would be tonic as a breeze from the Hills. He was so clear and sure; not in flashes and spurts, but continuously, like sunshine; because the clearness and sureness had his whole personality behind them. And he could be counted on to deal faithfully with Roy; perhaps lure him back to the Punjab. It would be sad losing him; but in the distracting circ.u.mstances, a clean cut seemed the only solution. She would just put in a word to that effect: a weakness she had rarely been known to resist, however complete her faith in the man of the moment.

She simply dared not think of Aruna, who trusted her. It seemed like betrayal--no less. And yet...?

CHAPTER XIII.

"One made out of the better part of earth, A man born as at sunrise."

--SWINBURNE.

It was all over--the strenuous joy of planning and preparing. Christmas itself was over. From the adjacent borders of British India, five lonely ones had been gathered in. There was Mr Mayne, Commissioner of Delhi, Vincent's old friend of Kohat days, unmarried and alone in camp with a stray Settlement Officer, whose wife and children were at Home. There was Mr Bourne--in the Ca.n.a.ls--large-boned and cadaverous, with a sardonic gleam in his eye. Rumour said there had once been a wife and a friend; now there remained only work and the whisky bottle; and he was overdoing both. To him Thea devoted herself and her fiddle with particular zest. The other two lonelies--a Mr and Mrs Nair--were medical missionaries, fighting the influenza scourge in the Delhi area; drastically disinfected--because of the babies; more than thankful for a brief respite from their daily diet of tragedy, and from labours Hercules' self would not have disdained. For all that, they had needed a good deal of pressing. They had 'no clothes.' They were very shy. But Thea had insisted; so they came--clothed chiefly in shyness and grat.i.tude, which made them shyer than ever.

Roy, still new to Anglo-India, was amazed at the way these haphazard humans were thawed into a pa.s.sing intimacy by the sunshine of Thea's personality. For himself, it was the nearest approach to the real thing that he had known since that dear and dreamlike Christmas of 1916. It warmed his heart, and renewed the well-spring of careless happiness that had gone from him utterly since the blow fell; gone, so he believed, for ever.

Something of this she divined--and was glad. Yet her exigent heart was not altogether at ease. His reaction to Lance, though unmistakable, fell short of her confident expectation. He was still squandering far too much time on the other two. Sometimes she felt almost angry with him: jealous--for Lance. She knew how deeply he cared underneath; because she too was a Desmond. And Desmonds could not care by halves.

This morning, for instance, the wretch was out riding with Dyan; and there was Lance, alone in the drawing-room strumming the accompaniments of things they would play to-night: just a wandering succession of chords in a minor key; but he had his father's gift of touch, that no training can impart, and the same trick of playing pensively to himself, almost as if he were thinking aloud. It was five years since she had seen her father; and those pensive chords brought sudden tears to her eyes.

What did Lance mean by it--mooning about the piano like that? Had he fallen in love? That was one of the few questions she did not dare ask him. But here was her chance to 'put in a word' about Roy.

So she strolled into the drawing-room and leaned over the grand piano.

His smile acknowledged her presence, and his pensive chords went wandering softly away into the ba.s.s.

"Idiot--what _are_ you doing?" she asked briskly, because the music was creeping down her spine. "Talking to yourself?"

"More or less."

"Well--give over. I'm here. And it's a bad habit."

He shook his head, and went wandering on. "In this form I find it soothing and companionable."

"Well, you oughtn't to be needing either at Christmas time under _my_ roof, with Roy here and all--if he'd only behave. Sometimes I want to shake him----"

"Why--what's the matter with Roy?"--That innocent query checked her rush of protest in mid career. Had he not even noticed? Men were the queerest, dearest things!----"He looks awfully fit. Better all round.

He's pulling up. _You_ never saw him--you don't realise----"

"But, my dear boy, do _you_ realise that he's getting rather badly bitten with all this--Indian problems and Indian cousins----"

Lance nodded. "I've been afraid of that. But one can't say much."

"I can't. I was counting on you as the G.o.d-given antidote. And there he is, still fooling round with Dyan, when _you've_ come all this way ...

It makes me wild. It isn't _fair_----"

Her genuine distress moved Lance to cease strumming and bestow a friendly pat on her hand. "Don't be giving yourself headaches and heartaches over Roy and me, darlint. We're going strong, thanks very much! It would take an earthquake to throw us out of step. If he chose to chuck his boots at me, I wouldn't trouble--except to return the trees if they were handy! Strikes me women don't yet begin to understand the n.o.ble art of friendship----"

"_Which_ is a libel--but let that pa.s.s! Besides--hasn't it struck you?

Aruna----"