"Soon after Kapurthala, he was angry again. And that time, I'm afraid I reminded him that our engagement was only 'on' conditionally; that if he started worrying at me, it would soon be unconditionally off----"

"So it _should_ have been!" Roy jerked up on to his elbow, and confronted her with challenging directness. "Once you could speak like that, feel like that, you'd no _right_ to keep him hanging on--hoping when there was practically no hope. It wasn't playing the game----"

This time she kept her eyes averted, and a slow colour invaded her face.

There was a point beyond which feminine frankness could not go. She could not--would not--tell this unflatteringly critical lover of hers that it was not in her nature to let the one man go till she felt morally sure of the other.

Roy had only a profile view of her warm cheek, her sensitive nostril a-quiver, her lip drawn in. And when she spoke, it was in the tense, pa.s.sionate tone of that evening at Anarkalli.

"Oh yes--it's easy work sitting in judgment on other people. I told you I hadn't much of a case--I asked you to make allowances. You clearly can't. _He_ asked you--not to hurt me. You clearly feel you must.

Yet--in justice to you both--I'm doing what I can. I've never before condescended to explain myself--almost excuse myself--to _any_ man; and I certainly never shall again. It strikes me you'd better apply your own indictment ... to your own case. If _you_ can think and feel ... as you seem to do, better face the fact and be done with it----"

But Roy, startled and penitent, was sitting upright by now; and, when she would have risen, he seized her, crushing her to him, would she or no. In her pain and anger she more than ever drew him. In his utter heart-loneliness, he more than ever needed her. And the reminder of Lance crowned all.

"My darling--don't go off at a tangent, that way," he implored her, his lips against her hair. "For me--it's a sacred bond. It can't be snapped in a fit of temper--like a bit of knotted thread. I'll accept ... what I can't see clear. We'll stand by each other, as you said. Learn one another--Rose...! My dearest girl--_don't_----!"

He strained her closer, in mingled bewilderment and distress. For Rose--who trod lightly on the hearts of men, Rose--the serene and self-a.s.sured--was sobbing brokenly in his arms....

Before the end of the evening, they were more or less themselves again; the threatened storm averted; the trouble patched up and summarily dismissed, as only lovers can dismiss a cloud that intrudes upon their heaven of blue.

CHAPTER XIII.

"Le pire douleur est de ne pas, pleurer ce qu'on a perdu."

--DE COULEVAIN.

But as days pa.s.sed, both grew increasingly aware of the patch; and both very carefully concealed the fact. They spent a week of peaceful seclusion from Simla and her restless activities. Roy scarcely set eyes on Mrs Elton; but--Rose having skilfully prepared the ground--he merely gave her credit for her mother's unusual display of tact.

Neither was in the vein for dances or tennis parties. They rode out to Mashobra and f.a.gu. They spent long days, picnicking in the Glen. Roy discovered, with satisfaction, that Rose had a weakness for being read to and a fair taste in literature, so long as it was not poetry. He also discovered--with a twinge of dismay--that if they were many hours together, he found reading easier than talking.

On the whole, they spent a week that should, by rights, have been ideal for new-made lovers; yet, at heart, both felt vaguely troubled and disillusioned.

Pain and parting and harsh realities seemed to have rubbed the bloom off their exotic romance. And for Rose the trouble struck deep. She had deliberately willed to put aside her own innate shrinking from the Indian strain in Roy. But she reckoned without the haunting effect of her mother's plain speaking. At first she had flatly ignored it; then she fortified her secret qualms by devising a practical plan for getting away to a friend in Kashmir. There was a sister in Simla going to join her. They could travel together. Roy could follow on. And there they two could be quietly married without fuss or audible comment from their talkative little world.

It was not precisely her idea of the manner in which she--Rose Arden--should be given in marriage. But the main point was that--if she could help it--her mother should not score in the matter of Roy. _Could_ she help it? That was the question persistently knocking at her heart.

And she was only a degree less troubled by the perverse revival of her feeling for Lance. Vanished--his hold on her deeper nature seemed mysteriously to strengthen. Memories crowded in, unbidden, of their golden time together just before Roy appeared on the scene; till she almost arrived at blaming her deliberately chosen lover for having come between them and landed her in her present distracting position. For now it was the ghost of Lance that threatened to come between her and Roy; and the irony of it cut her to the quick. If she had dealt unfairly by these two men, whose standards were leagues above her own, she was not, it seemed, to escape her share of suffering....

For Roy's heart also knew the chill of secret disillusion. The ardour and thrill of his courtship seemed fatally to have suffered eclipse.

When they were together, the lure of her was potent still. It was in the gaps between that he felt irked, more and more, by incipient criticism.

In the course of that first talk, she had unwittingly stripped herself of the glamour that was more than half her charm; and at bottom his Eastern subconsciousness was jarred by her casual att.i.tude to the sanct.i.ties of the man and woman relation, as instilled into him by his mother. When he quarrelled with her treatment of Lance, she saw it merely as a rather exaggerated concern for his friend. There was that in it, of course; but there was more.

Yet undeniably Desmond's urgent plea influenced his own effort to ignore the still small voice within him, that protested against the whole affair. At another time he would have taken it for a clear intimation from his mother; but she seemed to have lost, or deserted him, these days. All he could firmly hold on to, at present, was his loyalty to Lance, his duty to Rose; and both seemed to point in the same direction.

It struck him as strange that she did not mention the wedding; and she had been so full of it that very first evening. Once, when he casually asked if any fixtures were decided on yet, she had smiled and answered, "No; not yet." And some other topic had intervened.

It was only a degree less strange that she spoke so often of Lance, without attempting to disguise her admiration--and something more. And in himself--strangest of all--this surprising manifestation stirred no flicker of jealousy. It seemed a link, rather, drawing, them nearer together. She frankly encouraged talk of their school-days that involved fresh revealings of Lance at every turn: talk that was anodyne or anguish according to his mood.

She also encouraged him to unearth his deserted novel and read her the opening chapters. In Lah.o.r.e, he had longed for that moment; now he feared lest it too sharply emphasise their inner apartness. For the Indian atmosphere was strong in the book; and the Indian atmosphere jarred. The effect of the riots had merely been repressed. It still simmered underneath.

Only once she had broken out on the subject; and had been distinctly restive when he demurred at the injustice of sweeping indictments against the whole country, because a handful of extremists were trying to wreck the ship. Personally he blamed England for virtually a.s.sisting in the process. It had come near to an altercation--very rare event with Rose; and it had left Roy feeling more unsettled than ever.

A few readings of his novel made him feel more uncomfortable still. Like all true artists, he listened, as he read, with the mind of his audience; and intuitively, he felt her antagonism to the Indian element in his characters, his writing, his theme.

For three days he persisted. Then he gave it up.

They were sitting in their nook; Rose leaning back, her eyes half closed, gazing across the valley. In the middle of a flagrantly Indian chapter, he broke off: determined to take it lightly; not to make a grievance of it: equally determined she should hear no more.

For a few seconds she did not realise. Then she turned and looked up at him. "Well----? Is that all?"

"Yes. That's all--so far as you're concerned!"

Her brows went up in the old beguiling way. He felt her trying to hide her thought, and held up a warning finger.

"Now, don't put it on! Frankly--isn't she relieved? Hasn't she borne the infliction like a saint?"

The blood stirred visibly under her pallor. "It was _not_ an infliction.

Your writing's wonderful. Quite uncanny--the way you get inside people and things. If there's more--go on."

"There's a lot more. But I'm not going on--even at her Majesty's express command!--Look here, Rose ... let be." He suddenly changed his tone. "I can feel how it bothers you. So--why pretend...?"

She looked down; twisting her opal ring, making the delicate colours flash and change.

"It's a pity--isn't it?"--she seemed to muse aloud--"that more than half of life is made up of pretending. It becomes rather a delicate problem--fixing boundary lines. I _do_ admire your gift, Roy. And you're so intensely human. But I confess, I--I _am_ jerked by parts of your theme. Doesn't all this animosity and open vilification affect your own feeling about--things, the least bit?"

"Yes. It does. Only--not in your way. It makes me unhappy, because the real India--snowed under with specious talk and bitter invective--has less chance now than ever of being understood by those who can't see below the surface."

"Me--for instance?"

He sighed. "Oh, scores and scores of you, here and at Home. And scores of others, who have far less excuse. That's why one feels bound to do what one can...."

His thoughts on that score went too deep for utterance.

But Rose was engaged in her own purely personal deliberations.

"You might want to come out again ... afterwards?"

"Yes--I should hope to. Besides ... there are my cousins...."

"Indian ones----?"

"Yes. Very clever. Very charming. Rose ... you've been six years in India. Have you ever met, in a friendly way, a cultivated, well-born Indian--man or woman?"

"N-no. Not worth mentioning."

"And ... you haven't wanted to?"