The lady guests at Peliti’s—Mrs. Jack Owen and the rest—were giving a tea in the hotel pavilion. They had the band, the wife of the Commander-in-Chief, the governess from Viceregal Lodge and one little Viceregal girl, three A.D.C.‘s, one member of council, and the Archdeacon. These were the main features, moving among a hundred or so of people more miscellaneous, who, like the ladies at Peliti’s, had come up out of the seething Plains to the Paradise of the summer capital. The Pavilion overhung the Mall; looking down one could see the coming and going of leisurely Government peons in scarlet and gold, Cashmiri vendors of great bales of embroideries and skins, big-turbaned Pahari horse-dealers, chaffering in groups, and here and there a mounted Secretary-sahib trotting to the Club. Beyond, the hills dipped blue and bluer to the plains, and against them hung a single waving yellow laburnum, a note of imagination. Madeline Anderson was looking at it when Mrs. Mickie and Mrs. Gammidge came up with an affectionate observation upon the cut of her skirt, after which Mrs. Mickie harked back to what they had been talking about before.
‘She’s straight enough now, I suppose,’ this lady said.
‘She goes down. But she gives people a good deal of latitude for speculation.’
‘Who is this?’ asked Madeline. ‘I ask for information, to keep out of her way. I find I am developing the most shocking curiosity. I must be in a position to check it.’
The ladies exchanged hardly perceptible glances. Then Mrs. Gammidge said, ‘Mrs. Innes,’ and looked as if, for the moment, at any rate, she would withhold further judgment.
‘But you mustn’t avoid the poor lady,’ put in Mrs. Mickie, ‘simply because of her past. It wouldn’t be fair. Besides—’
‘Her past?’ Madeline made one little effort to look indifferent, and then let the question leap up in her.
‘My dear,’ said Mrs. Gammidge, with brief impatience, ‘he married her in Cairo, and she was—dancing there. Case of chivalry, I believe, though there are different versions. Awful row in the regiment—he had to take a year’s leave. Then he succeeded to the command, and the Twenty-third were ordered out here. She came with him to Lucknow—and made slaves of every one of them. They’ll swear to you now that she was staying at Shepheard’s with an invalid mother when he met her. And now she’s accepted like everybody else; and that’s all there is about it.’
‘There’s nothing in that,’ said Madeline, determinedly, ‘to prove that she wasn’t—respectable.’
‘N—no. Of course not,’ and again the eye of Mrs. Gammidge met that of Mrs. Mickie.
‘Though, you see love,’ added the latter lady, ‘it would have been nicer for his people—they’ve never spoken to him since—if she had been making her living otherwise in Cairo.’
‘As a barmaid, for instance,’ said Madeline, sarcastically.
‘As a barmaid, for instance,’ repeated Mrs. Gammidge, calmly.
‘But Simla isn’t related to him—Simla doesn’t care!’ Mrs. Mickie exclaimed. ‘Everybody will be as polite as possible when she turns up. You’ll see. You knew, didn’t you, that she was coming out in the Caledonia?’
‘No,’ said Madeline. She looked carefully where she was going to put her coffee-cup, and then she glanced out again at the laburnum hanging over the plains. ‘I—I am glad to hear it. These separations you take so lightly out here are miserable, tragic.’
The other ladies did not exchange glances this time. Miss Anderson’s change of tone was too marked for comment which she might have detected.
‘Colonel Innes got the telegram this morning. She wired from Brindisi,’ Mrs. Gammidge said.
‘Does he seem pleased?’ asked Mrs. Mickie, demurely.
‘He said he was afraid she would find it very hot coming up here from Bombay. And, of course, he is worried about a house. When a man has been living for months at the Club—’
‘Of course, poor fellow! I do love that dear old Colonel Innes, though I can’t say I know him a bit. He won’t take the trouble to be nice to me, but I am perfectly certain he must be the dearest old thing inside of him. Worth any dozen of these little bow-wows that run round after rickshaws,’ said Mrs. Mickie, with candour.
‘I think he’s a ridiculous old glacier,’ Mrs. Gammidge remarked, and Mrs. Mickie looked at Madeline and said, ‘Slap her!’
‘What for?’ asked Miss Anderson, with composure. ‘I dare say he is—occasionally. It isn’t a bad thing to be, I should think, in Indian temperatures.’
‘I guess you got it that time, dear lady,’ said Mrs. Mickie to Mrs. Gammidge, as Madeline slipped toward the door.
‘Meant to be cross, did she? How silly of her! If she gives her little heart away like that often, people will begin to make remarks.’
‘The worst of that girl is,’ Mrs. Mickie continued, ‘that you never can depend upon her. For days together she’ll be just as giddy and jolly as anybody and then suddenly she’ll give you a nasty superior bit of ice down the back of your neck like that. I’ve got her coming to tea tomorrow afternoon,’ Mrs. Mickie added, with sudden gloom, ‘and little Lord Billy and all that set are coming. They’ll throw buns at each other—I know they will. What, in heaven’s name, made me ask her?’
‘Oh, she’ll have recovered by then. You must make allowance for the shock we gave her, poor dear. Consider how you would feel if Lady Worsley suddenly appeared upon the scene, and demanded devotion from Sir Frank.’
‘She wouldn’t get it,’ Mrs. Mickie dimpled candidly. ‘Frank always loses his heart and his conscience at the same time. But you don’t suppose there’s anything serious in this affair? Pure pretty platonics, I should call it.’
Mrs. Gammidge lifted her eyebrows. ‘I dare say that is what they imagine it. Well, they’re never in the same room for two minutes without being aware of it, and their absorption when they get in a corner—I saw her keep the Viceroy waiting, the other night after dinner, while Colonel Innes finished a sentence. And then she was annoyed at the interruption. Here’s Kitty Vesey, lookin’ SUCH a dog! Hello, Kitty! where did you get that hat, where did you get that tile? But that wasn’t the colour of your hair last week, Kitty!’
‘Don’t feel any kind of a dog’—Mrs. Vesey’s pout, though becoming, was genuine. ‘I’m in a perfectly furious rage, my dears, and I’m coming home to cry, just as soon as I’ve had an ice. What do you think—they won’t let me have Val for Captain Wynne’s part in ‘The Outcast Pearl’—they say he’s been tried before, and he’s a stick. Did you ever hear of such brutes? They want me to act with Major Dalton, and he’s MUCH too old for the part.’
‘Kitten,’ said Mrs. Mickie, with conviction, ‘Valentine Drake on the stage would be fatal to your affection for him.’
‘I don’t care, I won’t act with anybody else—I’ll throw up the part. Haven’t I got to make love to the man? How am I to play up to such an unkissable-looking animal as Major Dalton? I shall CERTAINLY throw up the part.’
‘Don’t do anything rash, Kitty. If you do, they’ll probably offer it to me, and I warn you I won’t give it back to you.’
‘Oh, refuse it, like a dear! I am dying to put them in a hole. It’s jealousy, that’s what it is. Goodbye, Mrs. Jack, I’ve had a lovely time. Val and I have been explaining our affection to the Archdeacon, and he says it’s perfectly innocent. We’re going to get him to put it on paper to produce when Jimmy sues for a divorce, aren’t we, Val?’
‘You’re not going?’ said Mrs. Jack Owen.
‘Oh, yes, I must. But I’ve enjoyed myself awfully, and so has everybody I’ve been talking to. I say, Mickie, dear—about tomorrow afternoon—I suppose I may bring Val?’
‘Oh, dear, yes,’ Mrs. Mickie replied. ‘But you must let me hold his hand.’
‘I don’t know which of you is the most ridiculous,’ Mrs. Owen remarked; ‘I shall write to both your husbands this very night,’ but as the group shifted and left her alone with Mrs. Gammidge, she said she didn’t know whether Mrs. Vesey would be quite so chirpy three weeks hence. ‘When Mrs. Innes comes out,’ she added in explanation. ‘Oh, yes, Valentine Drake is quite her property. My own idea is that Kitty won’t be in it.’
Where the road past Peliti’s dips to the Mall Madeline met Horace Innes. When she appeared in her rickshaw he dismounted, and gave the reins to his syce. She saw in his eyes the look of a person who has been all day lapsing into meditation and rousing himself from it. ‘You are very late,’ she said as he came up.
‘Oh, I’m not going; at least, you are just coming away, aren’t you? I think it is too late. I’ll turn back with you.’
‘Do,’ she said, and looked at his capable, sensitive hand as he laid it on the side of her little carriage. Miss Anderson had not the accomplishment of palm-reading, but she took general manual impressions. She had observed Colonel Innes’s hand before, but it had never offered itself so intimately to her inspection. That, perhaps, was why the conviction seemed new to her, as she thought ‘He is admirable—and it is all there.’
When they got to the level Mall he kept his hold, which was a perfectly natural and proper thing for him to do, walking alongside; but she still looked at it.
‘I have heard your good news,’ she said, smiling congratulation at him.
‘My good news? Oh, about my wife, of course. Yes, she ought to be here by the end of the month. I thought of writing to tell you when the telegram came, and then I—didn’t. The files drove it out of my head, I fancy.’
‘Heavy day?’
‘Yes,’ he said, absently. They went along together in an intimacy of silence, and Madeline was quite aware of the effort with which she said:
‘I shall look forward to meeting Mrs. Innes.’
It was plain that his smile was perfunctory, but he put it on with creditable alacrity.
‘She will be delighted. My wife is a clever woman,’ he went on, ‘very bright and attractive. She keeps people well amused.’
‘She must be a great success in India, then.’
‘I think she is liked. She has a tremendous fund of humour and spirits. A fellow feels terribly dull beside her sometimes.’
Madeline cast a quick glance at him, but he was only occupied to find other matters with which he might commend his wife.
‘She is very fond of animals,’ he said, ‘and she sings and plays well—really extremely well.’
‘That must be charming,’ murmured Madeline, privately iterating, ‘He doesn’t mean to damn her—he doesn’t mean to damn her.’ ‘Have you a photograph of her?’
‘Quantities of them,’ he said, with simplicity.
‘You have never shown me one. But how could you?’ she added in haste; ‘a photograph is always about the size of a door nowadays. It is simply impossible to keep one’s friends and relations in a pocketbook as one used to do.’
They might have stopped there, but some demon of persistence drove Madeline on. She besought help from her imagination; she was not for the moment honest. It was an impulse—an equivocal impulse—born doubtless of the equivocal situation, and it ended badly.
‘She will bring something of the spring out to you,’ said Madeline—‘the spring in England. How many years is it since you have seen it? There will be a breath of the cowslips about her, and in her eyes the soft wet of the English sky. Oh, you will be very glad to see her.’ The girl was well aware of her insincerity, but only dimly of her cruelty. She was drawn on by something stronger than her sense of honesty and humanity, a determination to see, to know, that swept these things away.
Innes’s hand tightened on the rickshaw, and he made at first no answer. Then he said:
‘She has been staying in town, you know.’
There was just a quiver of Madeline’s eyelid; it said nothing of the natural rapacity behind. This man’s testimony was coming out in throes, and yet—it must be said—again she probed.
‘Then she will put you in touch again,’ she cried; ‘you will remember when you see her all the vigour of great issues and the fascination of great personalities. For a little while, anyway, after she comes, you will be in a world—far away from here—where people talk and think and live.’
He looked at her in wonder, not understanding, as indeed how could he?
‘Why,’ he said, ‘you speak of what YOU have done’; and before the truth of this she cast down her eyes and turned a hot, deep red, and had nothing to say.
‘No,’ he said, ‘my wife is not like that.’
He walked along in absorption, from which he roused himself with resentment in his voice.
‘I can not leave such a fabric of illusion in your mind. It irritates me that it should be there—about anybody belonging to me. My wife is not in the least what you imagine her. She has her virtues, but she is—like the rest. I can not hope that you will take to her, and she won’t like you either—we never care about the same people. And we shall see nothing of you—nothing. I can hardly believe that I am saying this of my own wife, but—I wish that she had stayed in England.’
‘Mrs. Mickie!’ cried Madeline to a passing rickshaw, ‘what are you rushing on like that for? Just go quietly and peaceably along with us, please, and tell us what Mrs. Vesey decided to do about her part in ‘The Outcast Pearl’. I’m dining out tonight—I must know.’ And Mrs. Mickie was kind enough to accompany them all the rest of the way.
Miss Anderson dined out, and preferred to suppose that she had no time to think until she was on her way home along the empty road round Jakko at eleven o’clock that night. Then it pleased her to get out of her rickshaw and walk. There was an opulent moon, the vast hills curving down to the plains were all grey and silvery, and the deodars overhead fretted the road with dramatic shadows. About her hung the great stillness in a mighty loneliness in which little Simla is set, and it freed her from what had happened, so that she could look at it and cry out. She actually did speak, pausing in the little pavilion on the road where the nursemaids gather in the daytime, but very low, so that her words fell round her even in that silence, and hardly a deodar was aware. ‘I will not go now,’ she said. ‘I will stay and realize that he is another woman’s husband. That should cure me if anything will—to see him surrounded by the commonplaces of married life, that kind of married life. I will stay till she comes and a fortnight after. Besides, I want to see her—I want to see how far she comes short.’ She was silent for a moment, and the moonlight played upon her smile of quiet triumph. ‘He cares too,’ she said; ‘he cares too, but he doesn’t know it, and I promise you one thing, Madeline Anderson, you won’t help him to find out. And in five weeks I will go away and leave my love where I found it—on a mountaintop in the middle of Asia!’
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