The Pool in the Desert
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Sara Jeanette Duncan >> The Pool in the Desert
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'Are you not coming, mamma?'
I was well wrapped up in an extremely comfortable corner. I had 'La
Duchesse Bleue' uncut in my lap, and an agreeable person to talk to.
I fear that in any case I should not been inclined to attend the
service, but there was something in my daughter's intonation that
made me distinctly hostile to the idea. I am putting things down as
they were, extenuating nothing.
'I think not, dear.'
'I've turned up two such nice seats.'
'Stay, Miss Farnham, and keep us in countenance,' said Dacres, with
his charming smile. The smile displaced a look of discreet and
amused observation. Dacres had an eye always for a situation, and
this one was even newer to him than to me.
'No, no. She must run away and not bully her mamma,' I said. 'When
she comes back we will see how much she remembers of the sermon;'
and as the flat tinkle from the companion began to show signs of
diminishing, Cecily, with one grieved glance, hastened down.
'You amazing lady!' said Dacres. 'A daughter--and such a tall
daughter! I somehow never--'
'You knew we had one?'
'There was theory of that kind, I remember, about ten years ago.
Since then--excuse me--I don't think you've mentioned her.'
'You talk as if she were a skeleton in the closet!'
'You DIDN'T talk--as if she were.'
'I think she was, in a way, poor child. But the resurrection day
hasn't confounded me as I deserved. She's a very good girl.'
'If you had asked me to pick out your daughter--'
'She would have been the last you would indicate! Quite so,' I
said. 'She is like her father's people. I can't help that.'
'I shouldn't think you would if you could,' Dacres remarked
absently; but the sea air, perhaps, enabled me to digest his
thoughtlessness with a smile.
'No,' I said, 'I am just as well pleased. I think a resemblance to
me would confuse me, often.'
There was a trace of scrutiny in Dacres's glance. 'Don't you find
yourself in sympathy with her?' he asked.
'My dear boy, I have seen her just twice in twenty-one years! You
see, I've always stuck to John.'
'But between mother and daughter--I may be old-fashioned, but I had
an idea that there was an instinct that might be depended on.'
'I am depending on it,' I said, and let my eyes follow the little
blue waves that chased past the hand-rail. 'We are making very good
speed, aren't we? Thirty-five knots since last night at ten. Are
you in the sweep?'
'I never bet on the way out--can't afford it. Am I old-fashioned?'
he insisted.
'Probably. Men are very slow in changing their philosophy about
women. I fancy their idea of the maternal relation is firmest fixed
of all.'
'We see it a beatitude!' he cried.
'I know,' I said wearily, 'and you never modify the view.'
Dacres contemplated the portion of the deck that lay between us.
His eyes were discreetly lowered, but I saw embarrassment and
speculation and a hint of criticism in them.
'Tell me more about it,' said he.
'Oh, for heaven's sake don't be sympathetic!' I exclaimed. 'Lend me
a little philosophy instead. There is nothing to tell. There she
is and there I am, in the most intimate relation in the world,
constituted when she is twenty-one and I am forty.' Dacres started
slightly at the ominous word; so little do men realize that the
women they like can ever pass out of the constated years of
attraction. 'I find the young lady very tolerable, very creditable,
very nice. I find the relation atrocious. There you have it. I
would like to break the relation into pieces,' I went on recklessly,
'and throw it into the sea. Such things should be tempered to one.
I should feel it much less if she occupied another cabin, and would
consent to call me Elizabeth or Jane. It is not as if I had been
her mother always. One grows fastidious at forty--new intimacies
are only possible then on a basis of temperament--'
I paused; it seemed to me that I was making excuses, and I had not
the least desire in the world to do that.
'How awfully rough on the girl!' said Dacres Tottenham.
'That consideration has also occurred to me,' I said candidly,
'though I have perhaps been even more struck by its converse.'
'You had no earthly business to be her mother,' said my friend, with
irritation.
I shrugged my shoulders--what would you have done?--and opened 'La
Duchesse Bleue'.
Chapter 1.III
Mrs. Morgan, wife of a judge of the High Court of Bombay, and I sat
amidships on the cool side in the Suez Canal. She was outlining
'Soiled Linen' in chain-stitch on a green canvas bag; I was admiring
the Egyptian sands. 'How charming,' said I, 'is this solitary
desert in the endless oasis we are compelled to cross!'
'Oasis in the desert, you mean,' said Mrs. Morgan; 'I haven't
noticed any, but I happened to look up this morning as I was putting
on my stockings, and I saw through my port-hole the most lovely
mirage.'
I had been at school with Mrs. Morgan more than twenty years agone,
but she had come to the special enjoyment of the dignities of life
while I still liked doing things. Mrs. Morgan was the kind of
person to make one realize how distressing a medium is middle age.
Contemplating her precipitous lap, to which conventional attitudes
were certainly more becoming, I crossed my own knees with energy,
and once more resolved to be young until I was old.
'How perfectly delightful for you to be taking Cecily out!' said
Mrs. Morgan placidly.
'Isn't it?' I responded, watching the gliding sands.
'But she was born in sixty-nine--that makes her twenty-one. Quite
time, I should say.'
'Oh, we couldn't put it off any longer. I mean--her father has such
a horror of early debuts. He simply would not hear of her coming
before.'
'Doesn't want her to marry in India, I dare say--the only one,'
purred Mrs. Morgan.
'Oh, I don't know. It isn't such a bad place. I was brought out
there to marry, and I married. I've found it very satisfactory.'
'You always did say exactly what you thought, Helena,' said Mrs.
Morgan excusingly.
'I haven't much patience with people who bring their daughters out
to give them the chance they never would have in England, and then
go about devoutly hoping they won't marry in India,' I said. 'I
shall be very pleased if Cecily does as well as your girls have
done.'
'Mary in the Indian Civil and Jessie in the Imperial Service
Troops,' sighed Mrs. Morgan complacently. 'And both, my dear,
within a year. It WAS a blow.'
'Oh, it must have been!' I said civilly.
There was no use in bandying words with Emily Morgan.
'There is nothing in the world like the satisfaction and pleasure
one takes in one's daughters,' Mrs. Morgan went on limpidly. 'And
one can be in such CLOSE sympathy with one's girls. I have never
regretted having no sons.'
'Dear me, yes. To watch oneself growing up again--call back the
lovely April of one's prime, etcetera--to read every thought and
anticipate every wish--there is no more golden privilege in life,
dear Emily. Such a direct and natural avenue for affection, such a
wide field for interest!'
I paused, lost in the volume of my admirable sentiments.
'How beautifully you talk, Helena! I wish I had the gift.'
'It doesn't mean very much,' I said truthfully.
'Oh, I think it's everything! And how companionable a girl is! I
quite envy you, this season, having Cecily constantly with you and
taking her about everywhere. Something quite new for you, isn't
it?'
'Absolutely,' said I; 'I am looking forward to it immensely. But it
is likely she will make her own friends, don't you think?' I added
anxiously.
'Hardly the first season. My girls didn't. I was practically their
only intimate for months. Don't be afraid; you won't be obliged to
go shares in Cecily with anybody for a good long while,' added Mrs.
Morgan kindly. 'I know just how you feel about THAT.'
The muddy water of the Ditch chafed up from under us against its
banks with a smell that enabled me to hide the emotions Mrs. Morgan
evoked behind my handkerchief. The pale desert was pictorial with
the drifting, deepening purple shadows of clouds, and in the midst a
blue glimmer of the Bitter Lakes, with a white sail on them. A
little frantic Arab boy ran alongside keeping pace with the ship.
Except for the smell, it was like a dream, we moved so quietly; on,
gently on and on between the ridgy clay banks and the rows of piles.
Peace was on the ship; you could hear what the Fourth in his white
ducks said to the quartermaster in his blue denims; you could count
the strokes of the electric bell in the wheel-house; peace was on
the ship as she pushed on, an ever-venturing, double-funneled
impertinence, through the sands of the ages. My eyes wandered along
a plank-line in the deck till they were arrested by a petticoat I
knew, when they returned of their own accord. I seemed to be always
seeing that petticoat.
'I think,' resumed Mrs. Morgan, whose glance had wandered in the
same direction, 'that Cecily is a very fine type of our English
girls. With those dark grey eyes, a LITTLE prominent possibly, and
that good colour--it's rather high now perhaps, but she will lose
quite enough of it in India--and those regular features, she would
make a splendid Britannia. Do you know, I fancy she must have a
great deal of character. Has she?'
'Any amount. And all of it good,' I responded, with private
dejection.
'No faults at all?' chaffed Mrs. Morgan.
I shook my head. 'Nothing,' I said sadly, 'that I can put my finger
on. But I hope to discover a few later. The sun may bring them
out.'
'Like freckles. Well, you are a lucky woman. Mine had plenty, I
assure you. Untidiness was no name for Jessie, and Mary--I'm SORRY
to say that Mary sometimes fibbed.'
'How lovable of her! Cecily's neatness is a painful example to me,
and I don't believe she would tell a fib to save my life.'
'Tell me,' said Mrs. Morgan, as the lunch-bell rang and she gathered
her occupation into her work-basket, 'who is that talking to her?'
'Oh, an old friend,' I replied easily; 'Dacres Tottenham, a dear
fellow, and most benevolent. He is trying on my behalf to reconcile
her to the life she'll have to lead in India.'
'She won't need much reconciling, if she's like most girls,'
observed Mrs. Morgan, 'but he seems to be trying very hard.'
That was quite the way I took it--on my behalf--for several days.
When people have understood you very adequately for ten years you do
not expect them to boggle at any problem you may present at the end
of the decade. I thought Dacres was moved by a fine sense of
compassion. I thought that with his admirable perception he had put
a finger on the little comedy of fruitfulness in my life that
laughed so bitterly at the tragedy of the barren woman, and was
attempting, by delicate manipulation, to make it easier. I really
thought so. Then I observed that myself had preposterously deceived
me, that it wasn't like that at all. When Mr. Tottenham joined us,
Cecily and me, I saw that he listened more than he talked, with an
ear specially cocked to register any small irony which might appear
in my remarks to my daughter. Naturally he registered more than
there were, to make up perhaps for dear Cecily's obviously not
registering any. I could see, too, that he was suspicious of any
flavour of kindness; finally, to avoid the strictures of his upper
lip, which really, dear fellow, began to bore me, I talked
exclusively about the distant sails and the Red Sea littoral. When
he no longer joined us as we sat or walked together, I perceived
that his hostility was fixed and his parti pris. He was brimful of
compassion, but it was all for Cecily, none for the situation or for
me. (She would have marvelled, placidly, why he pitied her. I am
glad I can say that.) The primitive man in him rose up as Pope of
nature and excommunicated me as a creature recusant to her
functions. Then deliberately Dacres undertook an office of
consolation; and I fell to wondering, while Mrs. Morgan spoke her
convictions plainly out, how far an impulse of reparation for a
misfortune with which he had nothing to do might carry a man.
I began to watch the affair with an interest which even to me seemed
queer. It was not detached, but it was semi-detached, and, of
course, on the side for which I seem, in this history, to be
perpetually apologizing. With certain limitations it didn't matter
an atom whom Cecily married. So that he was sound and decent, with
reasonable prospects, her simple requirements and ours for her would
be quite met. There was the ghost of a consolation in that; one
needn't be anxious or exacting.
I could predict with a certain amount of confidence that in her
first season she would probably receive three or four proposals, any
one of which she might accept with as much propriety and
satisfaction as any other one. For Cecily it was so simple;
prearranged by nature like her digestion, one could not see any
logical basis for difficulties. A nice upstanding sapper, a dashing
Bengal Lancer--oh, I could think of half a dozen types that would
answer excellently. She was the kind of young person, and that was
the summing up of it, to marry a type and be typically happy. I
hoped and expected that she would. But Dacres!
Dacres should exercise the greatest possible discretion. He was not
a person who could throw the dice indifferently with fate. He could
respond to so much, and he would inevitably, sooner or later, demand
so much response! He was governed by a preposterously exacting
temperament, and he wore his nerves outside. And what vision he
had! How he explored the world he lived in and drew out of it all
there was, all there was! I could see him in the years to come
ranging alone the fields that were sweet and the horizons that
lifted for him, and ever returning to pace the common dusty mortal
road by the side of a purblind wife. On general principles, as a
case to point at, it would be a conspicuous pity. Nor would it lack
the aspect of a particular, a personal misfortune. Dacres was
occupied in quite the natural normal degree with his charming self;
he would pass his misery on, and who would deserve to escape it less
than his mother-in-law?
I listened to Emily Morgan, who gleaned in the ship more information
about Dacres Tottenham's people, pay, and prospects than I had ever
acquired, and I kept an eye upon the pair which was, I flattered
myself, quite maternal. I watched them without acute anxiety,
deploring the threatening destiny, but hardly nearer to it than one
is in the stalls to the stage. My moments of real concern for
Dacres were mingled more with anger than with sorrow--it seemed
inexcusable that he, with his infallible divining-rod for
temperament, should be on the point of making such an ass of
himself. Though I talk of the stage there was nothing at all
dramatic to reward my attention, mine and Emily Morgan's. To my
imagination, excited by its idea of what Dacres Tottenham's
courtship ought to be, the attentions he paid to Cecily were most
humdrum. He threw rings into buckets with her--she was good at
that--and quoits upon the 'bull' board; he found her chair after the
decks were swabbed in the morning and established her in it; he
paced the deck with her at convenient times and seasons. They were
humdrum, but they were constant and cumulative. Cecily took them
with an even breath that perfectly matched. There was hardly
anything, on her part, to note--a little discreet observation of his
comings and goings, eyes scarcely lifted from her book, and later
just a hint of proprietorship, as the evening she came up to me on
deck, our first night in the Indian Ocean. I was lying in my long
chair looking at the thick, low stars and thinking it was a long
time since I had seen John.
'Dearest mamma, out here and nothing over your shoulders! You ARE
imprudent. Where is your wrap? Mr. Tottenham, will you please
fetch mamma's wrap for her?'
'If mamma so instructs me,' he said audaciously.
'Do as Cecily tells you,' I laughed, and he went and did it, while I
by the light of a quartermaster's lantern distinctly saw my daughter
blush.
Another time, when Cecily came down to undress, she bent over me as
I lay in the lower berth with unusual solicitude. I had been
dozing, and I jumped.
'What is it, child?' I said. 'Is the ship on fire?'
'No, mamma, the ship is not on fire. There is nothing wrong. I'm
so sorry I startled you. But Mr. Tottenham has been telling me all
about what you did for the soldiers the time plague broke out in the
lines at Mian-Mir. I think it was splendid, mamma, and so does he.'
'Oh, Lord!' I groaned. 'Good night.'
Chapter 1.IV.
It remained in my mind, that little thing that Dacres had taken the
trouble to tell my daughter; I thought about it a good deal. It
seemed to me the most serious and convincing circumstances that had
yet offered itself to my consideration. Dacres was no longer
content to bring solace and support to the more appealing figure of
the situation; he must set to work, bless him! to improve the
situation itself. He must try to induce Miss Farnham, by telling
her everything he could remember to my credit, to think as well of
her mother as possible, in spite of the strange and secret blows
which that mother might be supposed to sit up at night to deliver to
her. Cecily thought very well of me already; indeed, with private
reservations as to my manners and--no, NOT my morals, I believe I
exceeded her expectations of what a perfectly new and untrained
mother would be likely to prove. It was my theory that she found me
all she could understand me to be. The maternal virtues of the
outside were certainly mine; I put them on with care every morning
and wore them with patience all day. Dacres, I assured myself, must
have allowed his preconception to lead him absurdly by the nose not
to see that the girl was satisfied, that my impatience, my
impotence, did not at all make her miserable. Evidently, however,
he had created our relations differently; evidently he had set
himself to their amelioration. There was portent in it; things
seemed to be closing in. I bit off a quarter of an inch of wooden
pen-handle in considering whether or not I should mention it in my
letter to John, and decided that it would be better just perhaps to
drop a hint. Though I could not expect John to receive it with any
sort of perturbation. Men are different; he would probably think
Tottenham well enough able to look after himself.
I had embarked on my letter, there at the end of a corner-table of
the saloon, when I saw Dacres saunter through. He wore a very
conscious and elaborately purposeless air; and it jumped with my
mood that he had nothing less than the crisis of his life in his
pocket, and was looking for me. As he advanced towards me between
the long tables doubt left me and alarm assailed me. 'I'm glad to
find you in a quiet corner,' said he, seating himself, and confirmed
my worst anticipations.
'I'm writing to John,' I said, and again applied myself to my pen-
handle. It is a trick Cecily has since done her best in vain to
cure me of.
'I am going to interrupt you,' he said. 'I have not had an
opportunity of talking to you for some time.'
'I like that!' I exclaimed derisively.
'And I want to tell you that I am very much charmed with Cecily.'
'Well,' I said, 'I am not going to gratify you by saying anything
against her.'
'You don't deserve her, you know.'
'I won't dispute that. But, if you don't mind--I'm not sure that
I'll stand being abused, dear boy.'
'I quite see it isn't any use. Though one spoke with the tongues of
men and of angels--'
'And had not charity,' I continued for him. 'Precisely. I won't go
on, but your quotation is very apt.'
'I so bow down before her simplicity. It makes a wide and beautiful
margin for the rest of her character. She is a girl Ruskin would
have loved.'
'I wonder,' said I. 'He did seem fond of the simple type, didn't
he?'
'Her mind is so clear, so transparent. The motive spring of
everything she says and does is so direct. Don't you find you can
most completely depend upon her?'
'Oh yes,' I said; 'certainly. I nearly always know what she is
going to say before she says it, and under given circumstances I can
tell precisely what she will do.'
'I fancy her sense of duty is very beautifully developed.'
'It is,' I said. 'There is hardly a day when I do not come in
contact with it.'
'Well, that is surely a good thing. And I find that calm poise of
hers very restful.'
'I would not have believed that so many virtues could reside in one
young lady,' I said, taking refuge in flippancy, 'and to think that
she should be my daughter!'
'As I believe you know, that seems to me rather a cruel stroke of
destiny, Mrs. Farnham.'
'Oh yes, I know! You have a constructive imagination, Dacres. You
don't seem to see that the girl is protected by her limitations,
like a tortoise. She lives within them quite secure and happy and
content. How determined you are to be sorry for her!'
Mr. Tottenham looked at the end of this lively exchange as though he
sought for a polite way of conveying to me that I rather was the
limited person. He looked as if he wished he could say things. The
first of them would be, I saw, that he had quite a different
conception of Cecily, that it was illuminated by many trifles,
nuances of feeling and expression, which he had noticed in his talks
with her whenever they had skirted the subject of her adoption by
her mother. He knew her, he was longing to say, better than I did;
when it would have been natural to reply that one could not hope to
compete in such a direction with an intelligent young man, and we
should at once have been upon delicate and difficult ground. So it
was as well perhaps that he kept silence until he said, as he had
come prepared to say, 'Well, I want to put that beyond a doubt--her
happiness--if I'm good enough. I want her, please, and I only hope
that she will be half as willing to come as you are likely to be to
let her go.'
It was a shock when it came, plump, like that; and I was horrified
to feel how completely every other consideration was lost for the
instant in the immense relief that it prefigured. To be my whole
complete self again, without the feeling that a fraction of me was
masquerading about in Cecily! To be freed at once, or almost, from
an exacting condition and an impossible ideal! 'Oh!' I exclaimed,
and my eyes positively filled. 'You ARE good, Dacres, but I
couldn't let you do that.'
His undisguised stare brought me back to a sense of the proportion
of things. I saw that in the combination of influences that had
brought Mr. Tottenham to the point of proposing to marry my daughter
consideration for me, if it had a place, would be fantastic.
Inwardly I laughed at the egotism of raw nerves that had conjured it
up, even for an instant, as a reason for gratitude. The situation
was not so peculiar, not so interesting, as that. But I answered
his stare with a smile; what I had said might very well stand.
'Do you imagine,' he said, seeing that I did not mean to amplify it,
'that I want to marry her out of any sort of GOODness?'
'Benevolence is your weakness, Dacres.'
'I see. You think one's motive is to withdraw her from a relation
which ought to be the most natural in the world, but which is, in
her particular and painful case, the most equivocal.'
'Well, come,' I remonstrated. 'You have dropped one or two things,
you know, in the heat of your indignation, not badly calculated to
give one that idea. The eloquent statement you have just made, for
instance--it carries all the patness of old conviction. How often
have you rehearsed it?'
I am a fairly long-suffering person, but I began to feel a little
annoyed with my would-be son-in-law. If the relation were achieved
it would give him no prescriptive right to bully me; and we were
still in very early anticipation of that.
'Ah!' he said disarmingly. 'Don't let us quarrel. I'm sorry you
think that; because it isn't likely to bring your favour to my
project, and I want you friendly and helpful. Oh, confound it!' he
exclaimed, with sudden temper. 'You ought to be. I don't
understand this aloofness. I half suspect it's pose. You
undervalue Cecily--well, you have no business to undervalue me. You
know me better than anybody in the world. Now are you going to help
me to marry your daughter?'
'I don't think so,' I said slowly, after a moment's silence, which
he sat through like a mutinous schoolboy. 'I might tell you that I
don't care a button whom you marry, but that would not be true. I
do care more or less. As you say, I know you pretty well. I'd a
little rather you didn't make a mess of it; and if you must I should
distinctly prefer not to have the spectacle under my nose for the
rest of my life. I can't hinder you, but I won't help you.'
'And what possesses you to imagine that in marrying Cecily I should
make a mess of it? Shouldn't your first consideration be whether
SHE would?'
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