With a low sound, Quita captured the hand lying near her own.

"Oh, you utter woman!" she murmured. "Is it still so beautiful . . .

after three years?"

Honor's colour deepened. "It's more beautiful. Much more beautiful.

Because now . . there are two of them."

There was a moment of silence, while Quita fidgeted with the great square sapphire on her friend's wedding-finger.

"You'll think me dreadful," she said at last. "But I'm not quite sure that I see the logic of that. For the present, at all events, I only want Eldred, and these . . my spirit children," she indicated her pictures with a little nervous laugh. "You must make allowances for the artist woman, Honor. She so seldom feels and does the things she ought to feel and do!"

"That's just why she is apt to be so refreshing!--But believe me, Quita, the most perfect marriage is not quite perfect till it becomes 'the trio perfect,' three persons and one love. That's not fantastic idealism but simple fact. Besides," she hesitated and caressed a stray tendril of Quita's hair, "doesn't it seem to you a bigger thing, on the whole, to make men and women to the best of one's power, than to make books or pictures, even fine ones?"

"Yes, in some ways . . it does. And for that very reason I doubt whether I am fitted to make them. It's a gift, an art, like everything else. Not the creating of them, of course. That's a privilege, or a fatality, as the case may be! But the moulding of them, after they are created. You can't deny that they complicate things: and even at this stage, I find marriage a far more complicated affair than I imagined it to be. Didn't you?"

Honor's smile was sufficient evidence to the contrary. But she was old-fashioned enough to have a difficulty in talking about the hidden poem of her life.

"Perhaps we were exceptions, Theo and I," she said at last. "We knew one another . . intimately, before starting; and to live with him, and . . in him, seemed to come as natural as breathing. But then, my dear, I'm simply a wife and a mother: not a woman of genius, like you."

"Aren't you, indeed? Don't pulverise me with sarcasms, please! In my opinion this exquisite pa.s.sion of yours for being 'simply a wife and a mother' is in itself a kind of genius: perhaps the highest there is.

You see and feel the essential beauty of both relations so vividly that you make one see and feel it also; just as certain other kinds of women make one half-ashamed of being a woman at all! Yours is the temperament that gives, Honor, . . gives royally; and is always sure of return because it looks for none. While as for me, my present complications are the natural outcome,--multiplied by six years,--of my long-ago blindness and folly, that sprang from my capacity for taking, without a thought of giving in return. You see, Eldred and I have both an ample time to crystallise in different directions: and the years we let slip may be trusted to exact their debt to the uttermost farthing.--Ah, there he is!"

The words were a mere throb of the heart. She was on her feet when the man entered: and Honor, watching her face, thought she had never seen it so nearly beautiful. She herself rose also, with a prompt excuse for departure.

"I haven't even _seen_ Theo since breakfast," she said as they shook hands. "Tent-pegging days are hopeless: and I promised to go down early. Don't trouble to come out with me, please."

But Lenox insisted: and on his return found Quita back at her canvas, to all appearance working diligently at a difficult bit of detail in one corner. She greeted him with lifted brows.

"Finished your article already?"

"No."

"Then what on earth are you doing, loafing about in here? I'm busy. I want to get this bit done before I go out."

"Do you though?" but instead of retreating, he came closer, deliberately confiscated palette and brushes, and drew her into his arms.

"Shall I send Desmond a 'chit,' to say 'I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come'?"

"Yes,--do. He'll forgive you."

"And shall we go for a long ride across country, when I'm through with my work: and look in at the tent-pegging later?"

For answer she leaned against him with a sigh of content.

CHAPTER XXVII.

"Elfin and human, airy and true; * * * * * *

Your flowers and thorns you bring with you."

--R.L.S.

But the stumbling-block rea.s.serted itself, and prevailed.

The articles on Tibet were solid affairs, for a solid journal; twelve of them, to be paid for on acceptance; and since Lenox needed the money to clear off debts incurred when furnishing and pay for their trip to Kashmir, he decided to get them written as soon as might be, before the stealthy increase of heat made mental effort a burden. Thus, while the Battery absorbed his mornings, Tibet made unlawful inroads upon his afternoons and evenings; and the narrow margin of leisure thus left to him did not by any means satisfy Quita's healthy appet.i.te for companionship. More than once she attempted remonstrance, pitched in the wrong key, only to be routed by the unanswerable argument that the work must be done, and that there was no other time in which to do it.

Finally, in a mood between pride and resignation, she shrugged her shoulders and turned elsewhere for companionship; for interests to fill the long hours which Eldred's devotion to work left empty on her hands.

And here, in a virtue pushed to the confines of vice, in the man's blind unintentional neglect of the woman for whom he would wring the last blood-drop out of his heart, you have the nucleus of more than half the pitiful domestic tragedies of India. It is the crucial moment, the genesis of a hundred unsuspected possibilities, this first divergence of the man and woman, along separate paths of interest.

Love may be strong enough to stand the strain, but it will be love debarred from that intimate fusion of heart and brain which alone const.i.tutes true marriage. The other kind is at best a permanent 'friendship recognised by the police':--a tacit confession of failure which this high-hearted, if contrarious couple were by no means minded to arrive at, now or ever. But there is no warning sign-post at the turn of the road; and already their feet were nearing it, without knowledge that its easy gradient slips into the Valley of Dry Bones.

Quita, however, was in a better case than many wives so circ.u.mstanced; in that her art was no mere distraction for spare hours, but a living reality; though, unhappily, a capricious one. And now when she would have returned to it in earnest after months of philandering with brush and pencil, it stood aloof, unmanageable as Eldred himself! She was too genuinely an artist to attempt the completion of an imaginative picture against the stream; and for fresh work, fresh mental stimulus was needed. This was not readily to be found in the everyday happenings--the riding, tennis, and gatherings at the Club Gardens--that made up the cold-weather life at Dera Ishmael; and she had little taste for small social or domestic amenities, in themselves.

The call of the wild was in her blood. One might as well hope to domesticate a sea-gull as a woman of this type. She managed her household on broad lines, ignoring minor details, and Zyarulla, to his secret relief, found himself still the lynx-eyed custodian of the Sahib's _Izzat_[1] in houses and compound, still the controller of his petty cash. Quita received his monthly account--plus a minute percentage on each item--in perfect good faith. His visions of possible dismissal evaporated. He heartily commended his master's choice of a wife; and, in moments of expansion over the evening hookah, confided to the Khansamah--a friend and ally in the matter of accounts--his conviction that Mem Sahibs who made pictures were of a different _jat_ to those who played tennis, harried their ayahs, and rode rough-shod over the sensibilities of honest bearers like himself!

[Transcriber's note: The "a" in "_jat_" is an a-macron, Unicode U+0101.]

And, in truth, the Bohemian and cosmopolitan elements in Quita made her airily contemptuous of trifles, of the petty point of view, the 'local'

att.i.tude of mind often found in isolated Indian stations, more especially among the women. And setting aside Honor and Frank, the half-dozen officers' wives belonging to the Infantry Regiments were for the most part colourless average types of femininity such as Quita was something too ready to despise.

But the woman element had never played a large part in her life; and it was to the men she turned instinctively for mental companionship; for the larger outlook, the saner grasp of things big and small. She drew them by a natural magnetism; and held them by a talent for comradeship which never degenerated into familiarity or freedom. The four Battery subalterns, headed by Richardson, surrendered at discretion. And there were others also; notably George Rivers, Desmond's subaltern, a promising Lothario with a profile, a tenor voice, and an unimpeachable taste in ties and waistcoats. But Quita gave the preference to Eldred's brother officers; and to their open delight made them free of the house. One or more of them dined with her at least three nights a-week; and her instantaneous gravitation to Max Richardson had already resulted in an informal friendship equally delightful for both.

Lenox accepted these developments without comment, yet not without inward regret. For he craved the restfulness of quiet evenings alone with his wife, after a hard day's work: and indeed saw more than enough of his subalterns--always excepting d.i.c.k--on the parade-ground and in the orderly room every morning. Very soon he took to excusing himself early, on these convivial evenings, with the result that before long the old habit of working at night had him in its clutches once again, the charm of it heightened by months of abstinence. For a while he held out against it; but the quiet within and without, the certainty of freedom from interruption, the lucidity of thought that brains of a certain order seem only able to arrive at in the small hours, were powerful advocates for surrender; and little by little habit conquered.

He smoked more and slept less; and the quality of his work improved in great strides.

But Quita objected strongly to this barefaced revival of 'bachelor habits' within six months of marriage; and more than once--waking in the small hours to find herself alone--she had slipped on her dressing-gown and boldly invaded his study; a disarming vision enough, her face flushed with sleep, looking absurdly young in a halo of tumbled hair, her eyes alight with tenderness and enjoyment of her own daring. On each occasion she was reproved without severity; established herself in the deck-lounge of old days; fell asleep promptly, and was carried protesting back to bed; but not until she had seen the lamp put out and the detestable litter of papers tidied up for the night.

In this fashion the first half of March slipped uneventfully by, each day bringing with it that imperceptible advance of heat which strikes an undernote of dread through the rose-scented languor of a Punjab March. For in the vast Northern Plains of India, it is autumn, not spring, that bears the winged word of resurrection. But Quita was still at that enviable stage in love's progress when times and seasons and places shrink to mere pin-points beside the one supreme fact. A Frontier hot weather in Eldred's company held no terrors for her.

Possibly two months' leave would be available later on, when they would spend the honeymoon--of which they had been twice defrauded--in Kashmir; and, in the meantime, so long as one roof covered them, all was well; in spite of her secret wish that Tibet and the Pamirs could be expunged from the map of Asia by means of a private deluge!

But if Quita were inclined to quarrel with her husband's industry, Max Richardson was not. He was enjoying, for the first time in his life, the mere pleasantness of a woman's intimate companionship;--in Quita's case a companionship full of incident, of delicate reticences, alternating with unexpected revelations of thought and feeling; and through it all a frank interest in everything that concerned himself, which is perhaps the subtlest form of coquetry. Not that Quita meant it as such. In her entire devotion to her husband, she simply did not consider her effect upon other men; to whom, in consequence, she showed her true self almost with the freedom and spontaneity of a child.

Richardson's own simplicity of character, and the ease with which one slips into a pleasant path, helped matters forward; and before long, they had fallen quite naturally into the habit of riding or driving together when Lenox happened to be very much engaged. Quita saw no reason to conceal her pleasure in these outings. Lenox thanked his friend once or twice, bluntly enough, yet with evident sincerity; and Richardson accepted his own good fortune with an unquestioning appreciation very characteristic of the man.

His thoughts were running definitely upon this pleasant state of things, as he drove Quita Lenox homeward through the main street of the native city, on a glowing evening, some two weeks after Honor's visit to the studio. Behind them clattered a small guard of native police, without whom it would not be advisable to explore a frontier city; and on either hand stretched a narrowing vista of open shop fronts noisy with vituperative buyers and sellers; brilliant with piled vessels of bra.s.s and copper, with the rainbow tints of dyed silks and muslins, piles of parched corn and spices, oranges, bananas, and pomegranates; their upper storeys breaking out into quaintly carved windows and balconies, strange splashes of colour, or rough childish pictures, innocent of proportion. And, better than these, in Quita's esteem, was the wide street itself, packed with the noisy, leisurely life of an Indian city:--goats and cattle; women and children; open bullock-carts that seemed to have all eternity to travel in; princely-looking Afghan traders in long coats and peaked turbans; Waziris, with keen, Jewish faces framed in greasy locks that fell upon their shoulders; the _sais_ from his tail-board shouting ineffectual commands to make way for the Sahib; long-legged fowls, leaping and fluttering up under the pony's nose; pariahs, lazily insolent, almost allowing the wheel to graze thigh-bone or paw, before they condescended to loaf away to a fresh resting-place; and over all an arch of blue, so deep and pa.s.sionate as to be almost vocal; and pervading all, the indefinable, unforgettable smell of the East:--a smell compounded of musk, spices, open drains, and humanity.

When at last they emerged into the open, and quickened their pace, Quita drew a breath of satisfaction, and smiled up at her companion, who allowed his eyes to linger in hers a moment longer than the occasion required.

Their outing had been an unusually long one; for whenever she could find her way into the city Quita was insatiable. Again and again Richardson had sat waiting in the sun, while she made thumb-nail sketches of street corners, bargained with curio-sellers for the Alexander coins and relics which abound at Dera Ishmael, or extracted information from shy, smiling women, whose faces happened to take her fancy in pa.s.sing.

"You have been a miracle of patience!" she a.s.sured him, as they neared cantonments. "And I daresay you hated it half the time, and scorned my globe-trotter behaviour! I've noticed how quickly most Anglo-Indians get bored if one asks questions, or shows the smallest interest in the country and the people."

"Probably they don't enjoy airing their own ignorance," he suggested, with lazy amus.e.m.e.nt in his eyes. "_I'm_ not bored with you, though.

Shouldn't be, even if you were to pelt me with questions till midnight."

She laughed lightly.

"Don't dare me to put you to the test! It might make us enemies for life. And it's really capital that we get on so well. Just think how awkward for Eldred if I had taken one of my strong unreasoning dislikes to you!"