Amazing! What did it mean? She wasn't--going back on things...?

Curiosity--sharpened by a p.r.i.c.k of fear--impelled him to open her letter first. And the moment he had read the opening line, compunction smote him.

"Roy--my Dear, I couldn't help remembering the ninth. So I feel I must write and wish you 'many happy returns' of it--happier than this one--with all my heart. I have worried over you a good deal.

For I'm sure you must have been ill. Do go home soon and be properly taken care of, by your own people. I'm going in the autumn with my friend, Mrs Hilton. Some day you will surely find a wife worthier of you than I would have been. When your good day comes, let me know and I'll do the same by you. Good luck to you always.--ROSE."

Roy slipped the note into his pocket and sat staring at the fire, deeply moved. A vision of her--too alluring for comfort--was flashed upon his brain. She was confoundedly attractive. She had no end of good points: but ... with a very big B....

His gaze rested absently on the parcel from his father. What the deuce could it be? To the imaginative, an unopened parcel never quite loses its intriguing air of mystery. The shape suggested a picture. His mother...?

With a luxury of deliberation he cut the strings; removed wrapper after wrapper to the last layer of tissue....

Then he drew a great breath--and sat spellbound; gazing--endlessly gazing--at Tara's face:--the wild roses in her cheeks faded a little; the glory of her hair undimmed; the familiar way it rippled back from her low, wide brow; a hint of hidden pain about the sensitive lips and in the hyacinth blue of her eyes. Only his father could have wrought a vision so appealingly alive. And the effect on Roy was instantaneous ...

overwhelming....

Tara--dearest and loveliest! Of course it was her--always had been, down in the uttermost depths. The treasure he had been far to seek had blossomed beside him since the beginning of things: and he, with his eyes always on the horizon, had missed the one incomparable flower at his feet....

_Had_ he missed it? Had there ever been a chance? What, precisely, had she meant by her young, vehement refusal of him? And--if it were not the dreaded reason--was there still hope? Would she ever understand ... ever forgive ... the inglorious episode of Rose? If, at heart, he could plead the excuse of Adam, he could not plead it to her.

Reverently he took that miracle of a picture between his hands and set it on the broad mantelpiece, that distance might quicken the illusion of life.

Then the spell was on him again. Her sweetness and light seemed to illumine the unbeautiful room. Of a truth he knew, now, what it meant to love and be in love with every faculty of soul and body; knew it for a miracle of renewal, the elixir of life. And--the light of that knowledge revealed how secondary a part of it was the craving with which he had craved possession of Rose. Steeped in poetry as he was, there stole into his mind a fragment of Tagore--'She who had ever remained in the depths of my being, in the twilight of gleams and glimpses ... I have roamed from country to country, keeping her in the core of my heart.'

All the jangle of jarred nerves and shaken faith; all the confusion of shattered hopes and ideals would resolve itself into coherence at last--if only ... if only----!

And dropping suddenly from the clouds, he remembered his letters ...

_her_ letter.

A sealed envelope had fallen unheeded from his father's parcel: but it was hers he seized--and half hesitated to open. What if she were announcing her own engagement to some infernal fellow at home? There must be scores and scores of them....

His hand was not quite steady as he unfolded the two sheets that bore his father's crest and the home stamp, 'Bramleigh Beeches.'

"My Dear Roy (he read),

"_Many_ happy returns of June the Ninth. It was one of our great days--wasn't it?--once upon a time. All your best and dearest wishes we are wishing for you--over here. And of course I've heard your tremendous news; though you never wrote and told me--why? You say she is beautiful. I hope she is a lot more besides. You would need a lot more, Roy, unless you've changed very much from the boy I used to know.

"It is _cruel_ having to write--in the same breath--about Lance.

From the splendid boy he was, one can guess the man he became. To me it seems almost like half of you gone. And I'm sure it must seem so to you--my _poor_ Roy. I don't wonder you felt bad about the way of it; but it was the essence of him--that kind of thing. A verse of Charles Sorley keeps on in my head ever since I heard it:--

'Surely we knew it long before; Knew all along that he was made For a swift radiant morning; for A sacrificing swift night shade.'

"I _can't_ write all I feel about it. Besides, I'm hoping your pain may be eased a little now; and I don't want to wake it up again.

"But not even these two big things--not even your Birthday--are my reallest reason for writing this particular letter to my Bracelet-Bound Brother. _Do_ you remember? Have you kept it, Roy?

Does it still mean anything to you? It does to me--though I've never mentioned it and never asked any service of you. _But_--I'm going to, now. Not for myself. Don't be afraid! It's for Uncle Nevil--and I ask it in Aunt Lilamani's name.

"Roy, when I came home, the change in him made me miserable. He's never really got over losing her. And you've been sort of lost too--for the time being. I can see how he's wearing his heart out with wanting you: though I don't suppose he has ever said so. And you--out there, probably thinking he doesn't miss you a mite. I _know_ you--and your ways. Also I know him--which is my ragged shred of excuse for rushing in where an angel would probably think better of it!

"He has been an angel to me ever since I got back; and it seems to cheer him up when I run round here. So I do--pretty often. But I'm not Roy! And perhaps you'll forgive my bold demand, when I tell you Aunt Jane's looming--positively _looming_! She's becoming a perfect ogre of sisterly solicitude. As he won't go to London, she's threatening to cheer him up by making the dear Beeches her headquarters after the season! And he--poor darling--with not enough spirit in him to kick against the p.r.i.c.ks. If _you_ were coming, he would have an excuse. Alone--he's helpless in her conscientious talons!

"If _that_ won't bring you, nothing will--not even my bracelet command.

"I _know_ the journey in June will be a nightmare. And you won't like leaving Indian friends or Miss Arden. But think--here he is alone, wanting what only you can give him. And the bangle I sent you That Day--_if_ you've kept it--gives me the right to say 'Come--_quickly_.' It may be a wrench. But I promise you won't regret it. Wire, if you can.

"Always your loving TARA."

By the time he had finished reading that so characteristic and endearing letter his plans were cut and dried. Her irresistible appeal--and the no less irresistible urge within him--left no room for the deliberations of his sensitive complex nature. It flung open all the floodgates of memory; set every nerve aching for Home--and Tara, late discovered; but not too late, he pa.s.sionately prayed....

The nightmare journey had no terrors for him now. In every sense he was 'hers to command.'

He drew out his old, old letter-case--her gift--and opened it. There lay the bracelet, folded inside her quaint, childish note; the 'ribbin' from her 'petticote' and the gleaming strands of her hair. The sight of it brought tears of which he felt not the least ashamed.

It also brought a vision of himself standing before his mother, demurring at possible obligations involved in their 'game of play.' And across the years came back to him her very words, her very look and tone: 'Remember, Roy, it is for always. If she shall ask from you any service, you must not refuse--ever.... By keeping the bracelet you are bound ...'

Wire? Of course he would.

Before the day was out his message was speeding to her: "Engagement off.

Coming first possible boat. Yours to command--ROY."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 40: English mail.]

CHAPTER III.

"Did you not know that people hide their love, Like a flower that seems too precious to be picked?"

--WU-TI.

Sanctuary--at last! The garden of his dreams--of the world before the deluge--in the quiet--coloured end of a July evening; the garden vitally inwoven with his fate--since it was responsible for the coming of Joe Bradley and his 'beaky mother.'

Such gardens bear more than trees and flowers and fruit. Human lives and characters are growth of their soil. With the wholesale demolishing of boundaries and hedges, their influence may wane; and it is an influence--like the un.o.btrusive influence of the gentleman--that human nature, especially English nature, can ill afford to fling away.

Roy, poet and fighter--with the lure of the desert and the horizon in his blood--knew himself, also, for a spiritual product of this particular garden--of the vast lawn (not quite so vast as he remembered), the rose-beds and the beeches in the full glory of their incomparable leaf.a.ge; all steeped in the delicate clarity of rain-washed air--the very aura of England, as dust was the aura of Jaipur.

Dinner was over. They were sitting out on the lawn, he and his father; a small table beside them, with gla.s.s coffee-machine and chocolates in a silver dish; the smoke of their cigars hovering, drifting, unstirred by any breeze. No Terry at his feet. The faithful creature--vision of abject misery--had been carried off to eat his heart out in quarantine.

Tangled among tree-tops hung the ghost of a moon, almost full.

Somewhere, in the far quiet of the shrubberies, a nightingale was communing with its own heart in liquid undertones; and in Roy's heart there dwelt an iridescence of peace and pain and longing shot through with hope----

That very morning, at an unearthly hour, he had landed in England, after an absence of three and a half years: and precisely what that means in the way of complex emotions, only they know who have been there. The purgatorial journey had eclipsed expectation. Between recurrent fever and sea-sickness, there had been days when it seemed doubtful if he would ever reach Home at all. But a wiry const.i.tution and the will to live had triumphed: and, in spite of the early hour, his father had not failed to be on the quay.

The first sight of him had given Roy a shock for which--in spite of Tara's letter--he was unprepared. This was not the father he remembered--humorous, unruffled, perennially young; but a man so changed and tired-looking that he seemed almost a stranger, with his empty coat-sleeve and hair touched with silver at the temples.

The actual moment of meeting had been difficult; the joy of it so deeply tinged with pain that they had clung desperately to surface commonplaces, because they were Englishmen, and could not relieve the inner stress by falling on one another's necks.

And there had been a secret pang (for which Roy sharply reproached himself) that Tara was not there too. Idiotic to expect it, when he knew Sir James had gone to Scotland for fishing. But to be idiotic is the lover's privilege; and his not phenomenal gift of patience had been unduly strained by the letter awaiting him at Port Said.