The Daughter of Brahma by I. A. R. Wylie (to read list txt) 📕

"Me? The Lord knows." He swung his horse between the compound gates with a sure hand. "Anyhow, what do you expect me to do? Settle down in Cheltenham, eh? No, thanks. I'm better here, acting nursery-maid to the youngsters and making myself generally useful. Besides, the place has got an infernal fascination for me can't shake it off. Queer thing, isn't it?"

"I don't know--I can understand. But my mother told me you had been warned--"

The judge interrupted him with a snort of indignation.

"That's that d doctor again!" he said viciously. "What business is it of his? If I choose to die a few years before he considers I ought to, I shall. It's my life, I suppose, and my funeral. Anyhow, I have no respect for people who go about nursing their last days in hot-houses. There, get out; there's your mother."

They had drawn up at the verandah steps, and David Hurst clambered down clumsily enough from the high dog-cart. For an instant a blur obscured his vision, and when it cleared he saw Mrs. Hurst standing in front of him, and behind her what seemed to him a sea of curious faces. But they passed or rather, seemed to resolve themselves into a pale background for the one figure of a woman. She kissed him. He felt the cold pressure of her lips on his cheek, and wondered dully why she had done it. The kiss made him indefinably ashamed. He knew that it had cost her an effort, although no line in her pale face betrayed reluctance. She drew back from him and looked at him. With her the years had stood still. Their placid, unchanging course had neither softened nor weakened her; but he, her son, had become a man, and he stood before her now, awaiting judgment. But she gave no sign. She took him by the hand and led him up the steps to the verandah.

"This is my son," she said quietly. "Colonel Chichester, you remember David?"

Colonel Chichester came forward with outstretched hand.

"Of course I remember," he said briskly. "Pleased to see you." He had stuck his eye-glass firmly in one bright eye, and his sunburnt, alert face expressed an awkward kindliness. "It's a long time since we saw each other last," he added. The remark was not original, but it served to bridge over a threatening silence.

Hurst was conscious that the little group of men and women lounging on the verandah were studying him, not unkindly, but with the aloofness of utter strangers. His mother formed no link between them and him. He saw Mrs. Chichester and went up to her, and, as he went, he knew that they had all seen that he limped, and his self-consciousness sent a wave of hot, unjust resentment to his cheeks. Mrs. Chichester kissed him. The embrace would have surprised him had it come from any other woman, but Mrs. Chichester did things which no one else did, and her acquaintance had given up feeling astonished, as an exhausting practice. She was a small woman, gracefully built, with a pretty face which age had withered but not deprived of a mischievous, monkey-like charm. Her bright, wide-open eyes were rarely fixed on any particular object for long, but their expression could change to an alert attention which could be unpleasantly disconcerting, and the startling acrobatics displayed in her conversation were apt to leave her listeners in a state of breathless confusion. She dressed well, but in a way that suggested that her clothes suited her more by accident than of intention, and, had it been a degree less attractive her mop of wavy grey hair might have been called disorderly. David Hurst was fond of her as fond of her as her erratic temperament allowed and at the present moment her bold welcome acted as balsam on the young man's vanity.

"Delighted, delighted, David," she said in her quick, indistinct way. "I wasn't expecting you, you know. Of course your mother told me you were coming, but I forgot the date. I always do forget dates dates and faces and names, they always slip my memory. So awkward."

There was a general laugh, in which her husband joined somewhat ruefully. It was an old story that Mrs. Chichester had once forgotten her own invitation to the Inspecting General, and at the last moment had regaled that surprised officer with a repast of her own invention. They had got on excellently, in spite of an extemporary and original " curry," but the next day at polo she had absent-mindedly cut him and afterwards apologised to the wrong man details which reduced the prim and exact colonel to a state of speechless frenzy. The laugh at her expense left her unmoved.

"You must tell me about Di," she went on. "She wrote to me that she had seen you, and I am so anxious to hear all about her. You know she is going to join us soon. And she has been having such a gay time especially at your uncle's house, David. A delightful man and his son, too. Isn't he in the army? Somebody told me he was. Why didn't you go into the army, David? Oh no, of course not. How silly of me! It was the civil service, or something, wasn't it? A very good thing, I believe. You must tell me all about it."

Hurst glanced across at his mother. She was talking to the judge, but she was looking at him and he knew that she listened. He drew himself upright.

"I failed twice," he said.

He need not have answered, for Mrs. Chichester was not listening. Questions with her were only a means of leading on her own conversation, and answers were superfluous.

"I'm so glad," she said vaguely. "So nice for you."

"My dear little lady!" Colonel Chichester interposed, tugging nervously at his trim little moustache; but Mrs. Chichester's mind was already roving on faroff pastures, and she paid no attention to the customary protest. David Hurst stood forgotten at her side. She had not hurt him, but he had hurt himself, and he became suddenly aware that he was weary and travel-stained, and that he was out of place among these gay, welldressed men and women. He went back to Mrs. Hurst's side. No one noticed him now. The slight excitement of his arrival had been swallowed up in the usual local gossip; but his sense of loneliness had increased to an almost physical discomfort.

"I think I'll go and change and make myself a little more respectable, mother," he said awkwardly. "Do you mind?"

She turned and looked at him with a grave attention.

"Of course not. You must be tired--I had meant to introduce you to Professor Heilig, but he appears to have wandered off, and another time will do. Dinner is at seven. I have asked the judge to stay."

"That's nice." The knowledge that he would not have to be alone with her on that first night relieved him, and he knew that it relieved her. "I'll go round to my room by the garden," he added. "I have a trifling headache, and the fresh air may take it away."

"I hope so. Do as you like. You are not a little boy any more."

Hurst went down the verandah steps. He had caught a glimpse of the judge's face, and the latter's expression of mingled pain and pity had taken him back to the hour when he had first known that the mother he adored despised him. He went down the avenue to the gates of the compound. Evening was close at hand, and long cool shadows stretched themselves across his path. Behind him he heard the murmur of voices and Mrs. Chichester's gay, insouciant laughter; but all around him was the peculiar sleepy hush which heralds nightfall. On just such an evening he had set out on the great adventure of his life. It had ended in grey disillusionment, but it stood out in his memory with all the gorgeous colouring of an Eastern fairy-tale, and now in this atmosphere of subdued mystery it came back to him still as a half-discredited legend of his childhood, but intensely, painfully beautiful. He lifted his face to the distant hills and recognised them; but there was pain also in that recognition. They had remained unchanged. Now, as then, they kept their solemn watch over the wide valley, shutting within their forest-grown walls the secrets of centuries; but he who came back to them no longer answered to their appeal.

The boy who had found God in the sunset had lost the power of worship in a world which called God its own. Something in him had hardened, frozen. The world around him was as the sound of music to a deaf musician. The vibrations of its beauty beat against his physical being, but he heard no sound, though his whole soul listened with the longing of starvation. Yet at least he felt himself at peace. The hills no longer spoke to him, but their silence was majestic, contemplative, without contempt. To his embittered fancy they accepted him uncomplainingly as a part of the eternal, unknown Mother in whom they still had their being; they asked no explanation, no excuse from him; he belonged to them by all the ties of their common origin. Thus he reached the gates, and there paused, conscious for the first time that he was not alone. A man came towards him from out the shadows and stood quietly by his side, laying his fingers to his lips as though to command silence.

"You must be quite--quiet," he said in an imperative whisper. "Listen and you will hear and see. They like it not when there are watchers. Do you not hear already?"

Hurst listened. In the far distance there was a faint throbbing sound like the regular beating of a drum and the high wail of a pipe. He glanced questioningly at his companion, but the latter seemed to have forgotten his existence. He had drawn back into the shadow of the gateway, and David could only perceive the short, somewhat thick-set figure and the dim outline of a bearded face. But the stranger showed no inclination to talk, and David waited with the patient acquiescence of mental and physical weariness.

The sounds had grown louder. Along the broad white road a myriad of dancing lights had sprung up in fantastic disorder and come towards the bungalow, rising and falling like fiery insects to the beat of the discordant music. As they approached David saw that they were torches held by a crowd of half-naked natives who came on, now and again breaking into a loud, monotonous chant. In front, apparently leading them, a man marched alone. He walked quietly, with a grave composure which separated him from his noisier followers, and, as he passed, his eyes set immovably in front of him, David caught a glimpse of a face startlingly familiar. Where he had first seen it he did not know, but the clear-cut, even noble features, belonged to his memories as surely as did the hills, the valley, the very torch-light; even their expression, sombrely impassive, was known to him as something which had lain, temporarily forgotten, amongst his mind's pictures of the past. The man passed on, and gradually the throb of the drum died away in the distance, but David's eyes followed the dancing lights until the dusk swallowed them. He had half forgotten his unknown companion, and when he at last turned he was startled to find the broad shoulders almost touching his own.

"You saw that man?" the stranger asked eagerly.

David nodded.

"The leader? yes."

"A fine face, was it not? An interesting face the face of a fallen Lucifer. Yes, I saw you thought as I do. That proved you are not a fool. But those--those--" He jerked his head towards the balcony with a ferocious contempt which found no words to express itself. "What, think you, do they know of such