The Pool in the Desert
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Sara Jeanette Duncan >> The Pool in the Desert
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'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!'
Chapter 3.IV.
Madeline did her best to make certain changes delicately,
imperceptibly, so that Innes would not, above all things, be
perplexed into seeking for their reason. The walks and rides came
to a vague conclusion, and Miss Anderson no longer kept the Viceroy
or anybody else waiting, while Innes finished what he had to say to
her in public, since his opportunities for talking to her seemed to
become gradually more and more like everybody else's. So long as
she had been mistress of herself she was indifferent to the very
tolerant and good-natured gossip of the hill capital; but as soon as
she found her citadel undermined, the lightest kind of comment
became a contingency unbearable. In arranging to make it
impossible, she was really over-considerate and over-careful. Her
soldier never thought of analyzing his bad luck or searching for
motive in it. To him the combinations of circumstances that seemed
always to deprive him of former pleasures were simply among the
things that might happen. Grieving, she left him under that
impression for the sake of its expediency, and tried to make it by
being more than ever agreeable on the occasions when he came and
demanded a cup of tea, and would not be denied. After all, she
consoled herself, no situation was improved by being turned too
suddenly upside down.
She did not wholly withdraw his privilege of taking counsel with
her, and he continued to go away freshened and calmed, leaving her
to toss little sad reflections into the fire, and tremulously wonder
whether the jewel of her love had flashed ever so little behind the
eyes. They both saw it a conspicuous thing that as those three
weeks went on, neither he nor she alluded even remotely to Mrs.
Innes, but the fact remained, and they allowed it to remain.
Nevertheless, Madeline knew precisely when that lady was expected,
and as she sauntered in the bazaar one morning, and heard Innes's
steps and voice behind her, her mind became one acute surmise as to
whether he could possibly postpone the announcement any longer. But
he immediately made it plain that this was his business in stopping
to speak to her. 'Good morning,' he said, and then, 'My wife comes
tomorrow.' He had not told her a bit of personal news, he had made
her an official communication, as briefly as it could be done, and
he would have raised his hat and gone on without more words if
Madeline had not thwarted him. 'What a stupidity for him to be
haunted by afterward!' was the essence of the thought that visited
her; and she put out a detaining hand.
'Really! By the Bombay mail, I suppose--no, an hour or so later;
private tongas are always as much as that behind the mail.'
'About eleven, I fancy. You--you are not inclined for a canter
round Summer Hill before breakfast?'
'I am terrified of Summer Hill. The Turk always misbehaves there.
Yesterday he got one leg well over the khud--I WAS thankful he had
four. Tell me, are you ready for Mrs. Innes--everything in the
house? Is there anything I can do?
'Oh, thanks very much! I don't think so. The house isn't ready, as
a matter of fact, but two or three people have offered to put us up
for a day or so until it is. I've left it open till my wife comes,
as I dare say she has already arranged to go to somebody. What are
you buying? Country tobacco, upon my word! For your men? That's
subversive of all discipline!'
The lines on his face relaxed; he looked at her with fond
recognition of another delightful thing in her.
'You give sugar-cane to your horses,' she declared; 'why shouldn't I
give tobacco to mine? Goodbye; I hope Mrs. Innes will like "Two
Gables". There are roses waiting for her in the garden, at all
events.'
'Are there?' he said. 'I didn't notice. Goodbye, then.'
He went on to his office thinking of the roses, and that they were
in his garden, and that Madeline had seen them there. He thought
that if they were good roses--in fact, any kind of roses--they
should be taken care of, and he asked a Deputy Assistant Inspector-
General of Ordnance whether he knew of a gardener that was worth
anything.
'Most of them are mere coolies,' said Colonel Innes, 'and I've got
some roses in this little place I've taken that I want to look
after.'
Next day Madeline took Brookes, and 'The Amazing Marriage', and a
lunch-basket, and went out to Mashobra, where the deodars shadow
hardly any scandal at all, and the Snows come, with perceptible
confidence, a little nearer.
'They almost step,' she said to Brookes, looking at them, 'out of
the realm of the imagination.'
Brookes said that they did indeed, and hoped that she hadn't by any
chance forgotten the mustard.
'The wind is keen off the glaciers over there--anybody would think
of a condiment,' Miss Anderson remarked in deprecation, and to this
Brookes made no response. It was a liberty she often felt compelled
to take.
The Snows appealed to Madeline even more than did Carintha, Countess
of Fleetwood, to whose fortunes she gave long pauses while she
looked across their summits at renunciation, and fancied her spirit
made strong and equal to its task. She was glad of their sanctuary;
she did not know where she should find such another. Perhaps the
spectacle was more than ever sublime in its alternative to the one
she had come away to postpone the sight of; at all events it drove
the reunion of the Inneses from her mind several times for five
minutes together, during which she thought of Horace by himself, and
went over, by way of preparation for her departure, all that had
come and gone between them. There had been luminous moments,
especially as they irradiated him, and she dwelt on these. There
was no reason why she should not preserve in London or in New York a
careful memory of them.
So the lights were twinkling all up and down and round about Simla
when she cantered back to it and it was late when she started for
the Worsleys, where she was dining. One little lighted house looked
much like another perched on the mountainside, and the wooden board
painted 'Branksome Hall, Maj.-Gen. T.P. Worsley, R.E.,' nailed to
the most conspicuous tree from the main road, was invisible in the
darkness. Madeline arrived in consequence at the wrong dinner-
party, and was acclaimed and redirected with much gaiety, which gave
her a further agreeable impression of the insouciance of Simla, but
made her later still at the Worsleys. So that half the people were
already seated when she at last appeared, and her hostess had just
time to cry, 'My dear, we thought the langurs must have eaten you!
Captain Gordon, you are not abandoned after all. You know Miss
Anderson?' when she found herself before her soup.
Captain Gordon heard her account of herself with complacence, and
declared, wiping his moustache, that a similar experience had
befallen him only a fortnight before.
'Did you ever hear the story of that absent-minded chap, Sir James
Jackson, who went to the RIGHT dinner-party by mistake?' he asked,
'and apologized like mad, by Jove! and insisted he couldn't stay.
The people nearly had to tie him down in his--' Captain Gordon
stopped, arrested by his companion's sudden and complete
inattention.
'I see a lady,' interrupted Madeline, with odd distinctness,
'curiously like somebody I have known before.' Her eyes convinced
themselves, and then refused to be convinced of the inconceivable
fact that they were resting on Violet Prendergast. It was at first
too amazing, too amazing only. Then an old forgotten feeling rose
in her bosom; the hand on the stem of her wine-glass grew tense.
The sensation fell away; she remembered her emancipation, the years
arose and reassured her during which Violet Prendergast, living or
dead, had been to her of absolutely no importance. Yet there was a
little aroused tremour in her voice as she went on, 'She is on the
General's right--he must have taken her in. Can you see from where
you are sitting?'
'These narrow oval tables are a nuisance that way, aren't they? You
don't know who you're dining with till the end of the function. Oh!
I see--that's Mrs. Innes, just out, and fresh as paint, isn't she?
The Colonel'--Captain Gordon craned his head again--'is sitting
fourth from me on this side.'
'Mrs. Innes! Really!' said Madeline. 'Then--then of course I must
be mistaken.'
She removed her eyes almost stealthily from the other woman's face
and fixed them on the pattern of the table-cloth. Her brain guided
her clearly through the tumult of her perception, and no emotion
could be observed in the smiling attention which she gave to Captain
Gordon's account of the afternoon's tandem racing; but there was a
furious beating in her breast, and she thought she could never draw
a breath long enough to control it. It helped her that there was
food to swallow, wine to drink, and Captain Gordon to listen to; and
under cover of these things she gradually, consciously, prepared
herself for the shock of encounter which should be conclusive.
Presently she leaned a little forward and let her glance, in which
no outsider could see the steady recognition, rest upon the lady on
the General's right, until that person's agreeable blue eyes
wandered down the table and met it. Perhaps Madeline's own eyelids
fluttered a little as she saw the sudden stricture in the face that
received her message, and the grimace with which it uttered, pallid
with apprehension, its response to a pleasantry of General
Worsley's. She was not consummate in her self-control, but she was
able at all events to send the glance travelling prettily on with a
casual smile for an intervening friend, and bring it back to her
dinner-roll without mischief. It did not adventure again; she knew,
and she set herself to hold her knowledge, to look at it and
understand it, while the mechanical part of her made up its mind
about the entrees, and sympathized with Captain Gordon on his hard
luck in having three ponies laid up at once. She did not look
again, although she felt the watching of the other woman, and was
quite aware of the moment at which Mrs. Innes allowed herself the
reprieve of believing that at the Worsley's dinner-party at least
there would be no scandal. The belief had its reflex action, doing
something to calm her. How could there be--scandal--she asked
herself, and dismissed with relief the denunciations which crowded
vague but insistent in her brain. Even then she had not grasped the
salient points of the situation; she was too much occupied with its
irony as it affected her personally; her impressions circled
steadily round the word 'twice' and the unimaginable coincidence.
Her resentment filled her, and her indignation was like a clear
flame behind her smiling face. Robbed twice, once in New York and--
oh! preposterous--the second time in Simla! Robbed of the same
things by the same hand! She perceived in the shock of it only a
monstrous fatality, a ludicrously wicked chance. This may have been
due to the necessity of listening to Captain Gordon.
At all events it was only as she passed Colonel Innes on her way to
the drawing-room and saw ahead of her the very modish receding back
of Mrs. Innes that she realized other things--crime and freedom.
It was the reversion of power; it brought her a great exultation.
She sat down under it in a corner, hoping to be left alone, with a
white face and shining eyes. Power and opportunity and purpose--
righteous purpose!
The circumstances had come to her in a flash; she brought them up
again steadily and scrutinized them. The case was absolutely clear.
Frank Prendergast had been dead just seven months. Colonel Innes
imagined himself married four years. Violet Prendergast was a
bigamist, and Horace Innes had no wife.
That was the marvellous transcendent fact; that was what lifted her
and carried her on great pulsing waves that rolled beyond the walls
of the little fripperied drawing-room and its collection of low-
necked women, out into her life, which had not these boundaries.
She lived again in a possible world. There was no stone wall
between herself and joy.
The old Mussulman butler who offered her coffee looked at her with
aroused curiosity--here was certainly a memsahib under the favour of
God--and as she stirred it, the shadow that Violet Prendergast had
thrown upon her life faded out of her mind in the light that was
there. Then she looked up and met that lady's vivid blue eyes.
Mrs. Innes's colour had not returned, but there was a recklessness
in the lines of her mouth. In the way she held her chin, expressing
that she had been reflecting on old scores, and anticipated the
worst. Meeting this vigilance Miss Anderson experienced a slight
recoil. Her happiness, she realized, had been brought to her in the
hands of ugly circumstance.
'And so melodramatic,' she told herself. 'It is really almost
vulgar. In a story I should have no patience with it.' But she
went on stirring her coffee with a little uncontrollable smile.
A moment later she had to contemplate the circumstance that her
hostess was addressing her. Mrs. Innes wished to be introduced.
Mrs. Innes, incarnate, conscious sensation, was smiling at her,
saying that she must know so great a friend of her husband's. He
made so few friends, and she was so grateful to anybody who was good
to him. Eyes and voice tolerably in rein, aware of the situation at
every point, she had a meretricious daring; and it occurred to
Madeline, looking at her, that she was after all a fairly competent
second-class adventuress. She would not refuse the cue. It would
make so little difference.
'On the contrary, I am tremendously indebted to Colonel Innes. He
has been so very kind about ponies and jhampanies and things. Simla
is full of pitfalls for a stranger, don't you think?' And Miss
Anderson, unclosing her fan, turned her reposeful head a little in
the direction of three married schoolgirls voluble on her left.
'Not when you get to know the language. You must learn the
language; it's indispensable. But of course it depends on how long
you mean to stay.'
'I think I will learn the language,' said Madeline.
'But General Worsley told me you were leaving Simla in a fortnight.'
'Oh no. My plans are very indefinite; but I shall stay much longer
than that.'
'It is Miss Anderson, isn't it?--Miss Madeline Anderson, of New
York--no, Brooklyn?'
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