Even the spirit of the globe-trotter was stirred, and he said, 'Ithink you Anglo-Indians live in a kind of little paradise.'
There was an instant's silence, and then Judy turned her face into the lamplight from the drawing-room.'With everything but the essentials,' she said.
We stayed late; Mr.Chichele and ourselves were the last to go.
Judy walked with us along the moonlit drive to the gate, which is so unnecessary a luxury in India that the servants always leave it open.She swung the stiff halves together.
'Now,' she said, 'it is shut.'
'And I,' said Somers Chichele, softly and quickly, 'am on the other side.'
Even over that depth she could flash him a smile.'It is the business of my life,' she gave him in return, 'to keep this gate shut.' I felt as if they had forgotten us.Somers mounted and rode off without a word.We were walking in a different direction.
Looking back, I saw Judy leaning immovable on the gate, while Somers turned in his saddle, apparently to repeat the form of lifting his hat.And all about them stretched the stones of Kabul valley, vague and formless in the tide of the moonlight...
Next day a note from Mrs.Harbottle informed me that she had gone to Bombay for a fortnight.In a postscript she wrote, 'I shall wait for the Chicheles there, and come back with them.' I remember reflecting that if she could not induce herself to take a passage to England in the ship that brought them, it seemed the right thing to do.
She did come back with them.I met the party at the station.Iknew Somers would meet them, and it seemed to me, so imminent did disaster loom, that someone else should be there, someone to offer a covering movement or a flank support wherever it might be most needed.And among all our smiling faces disaster did come, or the cold premonition of it.We were all perfect, but Somers's lip trembled.Deprived for a fortnight he was eager for the draft, and he was only twenty-six.His lip trembled, and there, under the flickering station-lamps, suddenly stood that of which there never could be again any denial, for those of us who saw.
Did we make, I wonder, even a pretense of disguising the consternation that sprang up among us, like an armed thing, ready to kill any further suggestion of the truth? I don't know.Anna Chichele's unfinished sentence dropped as if someone had given her a blow upon the mouth.Coolies were piling the luggage into a hired carriage at the edge of the platform.She walked mechanically after them, and would have stepped in with it but for the sight of her own gleaming landau drawn up within a yard or two, and the General waiting.We all got home somehow, taking it with us, and I gave Lady Chichele twenty-four hours to come to me with her face all one question and her heart all one fear.She came in twelve.
'Have you seen it--long?' Prepared as I was her directness was demoralizing.
'It isn't a mortal disease.'
'Oh, for Heaven's sake--'
'Well, not with certainty, for more than a month.'
She made a little spasmodic movement with her hands, then dropped them pitifully.'Couldn't you do ANYthing?'
I looked at her, and she said at once, 'No, of course you couldn't.'
For a moment or two I took my share of the heavy sense of it, my trivial share, which yet was an experience sufficiently exciting.
'I am afraid it will have to be faced,' I said.
'What will happen?' Anna cried.'Oh, what will happen?'
'Why not the usual thing?' Lady Chichele looked up quickly as if at a reminder.'The ambiguous attachment of the country,' I went on, limping but courageous, 'half declared, half admitted, that leads vaguely nowhere, and finally perishes as the man's life enriches itself--the thing we have seen so often.'
'Whatever Judy is capable of it won't be the usual thing.You know that.'
I had to confess in silence that I did.
'It flashed at me--the difference in her--in Bombay.' She pressed her lips together and then went on unsteadily.'In her eyes, her voice.She was mannered, extravagant, elaborate.With me! All the way up I wondered and worried.But I never thought--' She stopped;her voice simply shook itself into silence.I called a servant.
'I am going to give you a good stiff peg,' I said.I apologize for the 'peg,' but not for the whisky and soda.It is a beverage on the frontier, of which the vulgarity is lost in the value.While it was coming I tried to talk of other things, but she would only nod absently in the pauses.
'Last night we dined with him, it was guest night at the mess, and she was there.I watched her, and she knew it.I don't know whether she tried, but anyway, she failed.The covenant between them was written on her forehead whenever she looked at him, though that was seldom.She dared not look at him.And the little conversation that they had--you would have laughed--it was a comedy of stutters.The facile Mrs.Harbottle!'
'You do well to be angry, naturally,' I said; 'but it would be fatal to let yourself go, Anna.'
'Angry?' Oh, I am SICK.The misery of it! The terror of it! If it were anybody but Judy! Can't you imagine the passion of a temperament like that in a woman who has all these years been feeding on herself? I tell you she will take him from my very arms.
And he will go--to I dare not imagine what catastrophe! Who can prevent it? Who can prevent it?'
'There is you,' I said.
Lady Chichele laughed hysterically.'I think you ought to say, "There are you." I--what can I do? Do you realize that it's JUDY?
My friend--my other self? Do you think we can drag all that out of it? Do you think a tie like that can be broken by an accident--by a misfortune? With it all I ADORE Judy Harbottle.I love her, as Ihave always loved her, and--it's damnable, but I don't know whether, whatever happened, I wouldn't go on loving her.'
'Finish your peg,' I said.She was sobbing.
