"Wherefore, Ramu? Even a _buniah_ leaves old scores alone when there is a receipt-stamp on the paper," chuckled the usurer. "Pray that thou hast not the same warder, oh my son! and come back to me, if thou wilst, when the time is over." He happened to be in high good spirits that morning owing to a slip on John Raby's part in regard to the signing of some contract which promised to put rupees into the Lala's private pocket. So much so, that he went to the rest-house in order to gloat over the prospect in his unconscious partner's presence. It was the first time that the latter had seen him since Kirpo's appeal and confession, for John Raby had purposely avoided an interview until the trial, with its possibility of unpleasantness, was over. Now he calmly shut the door, and made the practical joker acquire a thorough and yet superficial knowledge of the ways of the ruling race, finishing up by a contemptuous recommendation to vinegar and brown paper.

"I've been fighting your battles, dear," he said, coming into his wife's room, and leaning over to kiss her as she lay resting on the sofa. A pile of dainty lace and muslin things on the table beside her, told tales for the future.

"My battles, John? I didn't know I had any enemies here." Or any friends she might have added, for those three months in the rest-house had been inexpressibly lonely; her husband away all day, and no white face within fifty miles.

"Enemies? No, Belle, I should say not; but I have, and what's mine's yours, you know." Then, half amused, half irritated, he told her of Kirpo's visit.

Her eyes sought his with the puzzled look which life was beginning to put into them. "I suppose it was intended as an insult," she said; "but when a man has half a dozen wives, some married one, some another way, it,--it doesn't seem to matter if they are married or not."

"My dear!" cried he, aghast. "I do hope you haven't been reading my French novels."

She smiled, a trifle bitterly. "No; they bore me. It's the gazeteer of this district which is to blame. How many kinds of marriage? I forget; one is called a kicking-strap, I know. It is a mere question of names all through. What difference can it make?"

John Raby walked up and down the room in, for him, quite a disturbed manner. "I'm sorry to hear you speak that way, Belle. It's always a mistake. If you can't see the insult, you will at least allow that it confirms what I have always maintained, the undesirability of mixing yourself up with a social life that doesn't fit in with ours. It has put me into rather a hole at all events."

"A hole, John? What do you mean?"

"Why, even the Lala won't work with me after this, and I must take all the risk; there isn't much of course; but somehow I've been hustled all through. First by that foolish trial--"

"I thought we had agreed to leave that alone, John?" interrupted his wife with a heightened colour.

"True, O queen! And you needn't be afraid, Belle. You and the babies shall be millionaires, billionaires if you like." And a speech like this, accompanied as it was by the half-careless, half-affectionate glance she knew so well, would start her self-reproach on the road to that sanctuary from all her vague puzzles; the fixed belief that she and John were the most attached of couples.

It would, nevertheless, be almost impossible to over-colour the absolute loneliness of the girl's life at this time. Her husband away from dawn till sundown, her only companions a people whose uncouth _patois_ she hardly understood, whose broad simplicity of purpose and pa.s.sion positively confused her own complexity. It was utter isolation, combined with the persistent reflection that close by in the native town, humanity went to and fro full to the brim with the same emotions of joy and sorrow, hope and fear, though the causes were different. It made her feel as if she had dropped from another world; and being, from physical causes, fanciful, she often thought, when looking over the wide level plain, without one tree to break its contour, which stretched away from her to the horizon, that, but for the force of gravity, she could walk over its visible curve into s.p.a.ce. One of her chief amus.e.m.e.nts was what her husband laughingly called her _jardin d'acclimatisation_; a dreary row of pots where, in defiance of a daily efflorescence of Glaubers salt, she coaxed a dozen or so of disheartened pansies into producing feeble flowers half the size of a wild heart's-ease. She was extremely patient, was Belle Raby, and given to watering and tending all things which she fancied should adorn a woman's house and home; and among them grat.i.tude.

Scarcely a day pa.s.sed but the thought of Philip Marsden's ill-requited kindness set this irreclaimable hero-worshipper into metaphorically besprinkling his grave with her tears, until countless flowers of fact and fancy grew up to weave a crown for his memory, a frame for his virtues. The extent to which she idealised him never came home to her, for the fact of his having pa.s.sed finally from life prevented her from having to decide his exact position in her Pantheon. Another thing which intensified her inclination to over-estimate the benefits she had received at Philip's hands was her husband's evident desire for complete silence on this subject. Naturally in one so impulsively generous as Belle, this seemed to make her remembrance, and her grat.i.tude, all the more necessary.

So time pa.s.sed until, as women have to do, she began to set her house in order against life or death. To-day, to-morrow, the next day, everything familiar, commonplace,--and then? How the heart beats in swift wonder and impatience even though the cradle may be the grave!

A hint of spring was in the air; that sudden spring which in Northern India follows close on the first footsteps of the new year. Belle, with a light heart, sat sorting her husband's wardrobe, and laying aside in camphor and peppercorns, things not likely to be required; for who could tell how long it might be ere she could look after John's clothes again? As she paused to search the pockets of a coat, a building sparrow hopped across the floor to tug at a loose thread in the pile of miscellaneous garments among which she was sitting, and a bright-eyed squirrel, hanging on the open door, cast watchful glances on a skein of Berlin wool, which appeared utterly desirable for a nest. The whole world, she thought, seemed preparing for new life, working for the unknown, and she smiled at the fancy as she began methodically to fold and smooth. More carefully than usual, for this was John's political uniform, and the sight of it invariably brought her a pang of regret for the career that had been given up. Suddenly her half-caressing fingers distinguished something unusual between the linings; something that must have slipped from the pocket, for she had to unrip a rough mend in the latter ere she could remove a sheet of thin paper folded in two, smooth, uncrushed.

The writing startled her; it was Philip Marsden's, and she sat there for a minute staring at it blankly. In after years the smell of camphor always brought her back to that moment of life; the sunlight streaming on the floor beside her, the twittering bird, the watchful squirrel.

The draft of a will,--surely _the_ will--and yet! How came it in her husband's pocket, in the coat that he must have worn? Then he had known--he _must_ have known about the money! Money! Yes, the one pa.s.sion she had ever seen on his face; the one love--

The sparrow came back again and again robbing one life for another.

The squirrel, emboldened at her silence, made off with its heart's desire; but still poor Belle lay in a dead faint on the floor. And there she might have remained, with the accusing paper in her hand to face her husband, had not pain, sharp compelling pain, roused her. To what? To a new life, to something beyond, yet of herself, something to defy fate and carry hope and fear from the present to the future.

A vague understanding of her own position came to her as she lay slowly gathering consciousness, until she rose to her feet and looked round her almost fearfully. "It must not alter anything," she muttered, as the torn shreds of paper fell from her shaking hand. "It cannot,--oh, dear G.o.d! it shall not. Not now, not now; I could not bear it; not now, not now!"

All that night Belle Raby fought a strange, uncertain battle, fought hard for the old life and the new, for life or death, scarcely knowing why she did either, and caring little, thinking little, of anything save the blind instinct of fight. And with the dawn the child which was hers, but which she was never to see, gave up its feeble desire, and left nothing but a pitiful waxen image to tell of life that had been and was gone.

But Belle, fast clasping her husband's hand, was in the Land of Dreams; the land to which many things besides the dead child must belong forever.

CHAPTER XVIII.

Death, we are told, changes our vile bodies and minds. It is at any rate to be hoped so, if orthodox heaven is to be endurable to some of us. And when mind and body have gone nigh to death, so nigh that he has stilled us in his arms for long days and nights, when he has kissed the sight of all things mortal from our eyes, and charmed away love and dread till soul could part from flesh without one sigh; does not that sometimes send us back, as it were, to a new life, and make us feel strangers even to ourselves?

Belle Raby felt this as she came back discreetly, decently, according to her wont in all things, from the Valley of the Shadow. Everything was changed, and she herself was no longer the girl who had cried uselessly, "Not now! Ah, dear G.o.d, not now!"

When she first floated up to consciousness through the dim resounding sea which for days and nights had seemed to lull her to sleep, it had been to find herself in John's arms, while he fed her with a teaspoon, and she had drifted down again into the dark, carrying with her a faint, half-amused wonder why a man who had so deceived his wife should trouble himself about her beef-tea. Neither was it a fit season for tragedy when, with hair decently brushed for the first time, and a bit of pink ribbon disposed somewhere to give colour to the pale face, she lay propped up on the pillow at last, fingering a bunch of roses brought her by the traitor. Nor when he had carried her to the sofa with pleasant smiles at the ease of the task, could she begin the dreadful accusation, "You knew I was an heiress,--that was why you married me." Horrible, hateful! The blood would surge over her face, the tears come into her eyes at the thought of the degradation of such a mutual understanding. Better, far better, that the offender should go scot-free. And after all, where was the difference? What had she lost? Only ignorance; the thing itself had always been the same. And yet she had not found it out--yet she had been content! That was the saddest, strangest part of all, and in her first bitterness of spirit she asked herself, more than once, if she had any right to truth, when lies satisfied her so easily. He had not chosen her out of all the world because he loved her, and yet she had not found him out. Was it not possible that she had not found herself out either? And what then?

Did it make any difference, any difference at all?

During her tedious convalescence she lay turning these things over and over in her mind, almost as if the problem referred to the life of some one else. It was a critical time for the new venture, and long before she could leave the sofa, her husband had to spend a day here, two days there, arranging for labour and machinery; above all for the new house into which he was so anxious for her to settle comfortably before the hot weather came on. All was very natural and right; nevertheless it marked the beginning of the epoch which comes about in most marriages; the time when Adam and Eve leave the garden of Eden, and face the world; the time when different dispositions naturally drift apart to different interests. Belle, still weak and unstrung, found a morbid significance in her husband's growing absorption in the business; she seemed to see the greed of gold in his handsome face as he sat descanting, over his cigarette, on the many projects of his busy brain. Yet she said no word of blame or warning, for she began to lack the courage of criticism. The fact was, she did not want to know the extent of the gulf between them; therefore she kept silence on all points which might serve as a landmark to their relative positions.

Even so she came on the knowledge unawares.

"I'm glad you don't fret over the baby," he said to her one day; "but you were always sensible. The poor little thing might have got ill, you know, and it would have been a bore if you had had to go to the hills this year, when there is so much to be done."

After that she would have died sooner than mention a grief that was always with her, despite her smiling face. Yet, when he was away, she wept unrestrained tears over a forlorn little spot in the dreary garden where they told her the lost hope lay hidden away, for ever, from her eyes. If she had only seen it once, she used to think; if she could only have shed one tear over the little face of which she used to dream! If she could only have whispered to it that she was sorry, that it was not her fault. Such grief, she told herself, was natural even in the happiest wife; it could not be construed into a complaint, or counted as a surrender to Fate. She was not going to do that, whatever happened. Never, never! That was the ruling idea to which even her own unhappiness gave place; and the cause of this fixed purpose was a curious one. Nothing more or less than a pa.s.sionate desire not to defeat the purpose of Philip Marsden's legacy. He had meant kindly by her; when, she thought with the glow of ardent grat.i.tude which his memory invariably aroused, had he not meant kindly by her and hers! And no one, least of all she herself, should turn that kindness to unkindness. Poor Belle! She was bound hand and foot to hero-worship, and life had shown her unmistakably that it was safer to canonise the dead. She lived, it must be remembered, in a solitude hard even of explanation to those unacquainted with out-station life in India. The growing gulf between her and her husband had to be bridged over a dozen times a day by their mutual dependence on each other even for bare speech. The saying, "It takes two to make a quarrel," falls short of truth. It takes three; two to fight, and one to hold the sponge, and play umpire. After a few days of silence consequent on his frequent absences, Belle was quite ready to welcome John back with smiles; and this very readiness gave her comfort.

Things could not be so far wrong after all. And so every time he went away, she set herself to miss his company with a zest that would have seemed to the spectators--had there been any--right-minded, wrong-headed, and purely pitiful. It was so even to herself, at times, when, for instance, the shadows of day lifted in the night-time, and she woke to find her pillow wet with tears,--why, she knew not. Perhaps because those who had loved her best were lying in unknown graves far away among the everlasting hills. It seemed so strange that they should have met such similar fates; their very deaths mysterious, if all too certain. In her mind they seemed indissolubly mixed up with each other, living and dying, and her thoughts were often with them. Not in sadness, in anything but sadness; rather in a deep unreasoning content that they had loved and trusted her.

And all the while Fate was arranging a cunning blow against her hard-contested peace.

She was expecting her husband one evening when the rapid Indian twilight had begun to fill the large bare room with shadows, and as, driven by the waning light from her books, she sat down at the piano, her fingers found one theme after another on the keys. Quite carelessly they fell on the _Fruhlingslied_, which three years before had wrought poor d.i.c.k's undoing. And then, suddenly, she seemed to feel the touch of his warm young lips on hers, to see the fire and worship of his eyes. Was _that_ Love? she wondered, as her fingers stilled themselves to silence; or was _that_ too nothing but a lie?

Dear, dear old d.i.c.k! The shadows gathered into an eager protesting face, the empty room seemed full of the life that was dead for ever.

Ah, if it could be so really? If those dear dead could only come back just to know how sorely the living longed for them.

A sound behind made her rise hastily. "Is that you, John? How late you are!" she said with face averted, for, dark as it was, the unbidden tears in her eyes craved concealment.

"No! it is I, Philip Marsden."

Her hand fell on the keys with a jarring clang that set the room ringing. Philip! Nervous, overwrought, unstrung as she was by long months of silence and repression, it seemed to her that the dead had heard her wish. How terribly afraid she was! Afraid of Philip? A swift denial in her heart made her turn slowly and strain her eyes into the shadow by the door. He was there, tall and still, for darkness dazzles like day and Philip Marsden's eyes were seeking her in vain by the sound of her voice until he saw a dim figure meeting him with outstretched hands. "Philip, oh, Philip! kindest! best! dearest!"

In the shadows their hands met, warm clinging hands; and at the touch a cry, half-fear, half-joy, dominated the still echoing discord. The next instant like a child who, frightened in the dark, sees a familiar face, she was in his arms sobbing out her relief and wonder. "Ah, Philip, it is you yourself! You are not dead! You have come back to me, my dear, my dear!"

He had entered the room cynically contemptuous over the inevitable predicament into which Fate and his impulsive actions had led him.

During his long captivity he had so often faced the extreme probability of her marrying John Raby that the certainty which had met him on his arrival at Kohat two days before had brought no surprise, and but little pain. The past, he had said, was over. She had never liked him; and he? That too was over; had been over for months if, indeed, it had ever existed. He must go down at once, of course, explain about d.i.c.k's legacy and settle what was to be done in the meantime--that was all. And now she was in his arms and everything was swept away in the flood of a great tenderness that never left him again.

"Oh, Belle! You are glad, you are glad that I have come back!"

The wonder and joy of his voice seemed to rouse her to realities; she drew away from him, and stood with one hand raised to her forehead in perplexity. "How dark it is!" she cried, petulantly. "I did not see. I cannot,--Why did you come like a thief in the night? Why did you not write? Why?--you should not have come, you should not!"

"I did write," he answered gently, the blame in her tone seeming to escape his ear. "I wrote from Kohat to tell you. The dog-cart was at the station and I thought--"

"It was for John, not for you," she interrupted almost fiercely. "It was for my husband--" She broke off into silence.

"Yes; I heard at Kohat you were married."

He could not see her face, nor she his, and once more her voice was petulant in complaint. "You startled me. No one could have seen in the dark."

"Shall I call for lights now?"

"If you please."

When he returned, followed by a servant bringing the lamp, she was standing where he had left her. Great Heavens, how she had changed!

Was this little Belle Stuart with her beautiful grey eyes? This woman with the nameless look of motherhood, the nameless dignity of knowledge in her face; and yet with a terror, such as the tyranny of truth brings with it, in the tired eyes which used to be so clear of care.