The Pool in the Desert by Sara Jeannette Duncan (100 best novels of all time txt) 📕

casual.

'Quite right. The ayah was silly about coming--didn't want to leave her babies or something--so I had to leave her behind. Everything else is either here or in the ekkas.'

'The brute! Never mind--they're not much use in a railway journey. You can pick up another at Bombay. Then I suppose I'd better get in.'

'I suppose you better had. Unless you think of walking,' she laughed, and he took the place beside her.

Ram Singh again unquestioningly took up the reins.

'Nobody else going down?'

'Not another soul. We might just as well have started together.'

'Oh, well, we couldn't tell. Beastly awkward if there had been anybody.'

'Yes,' she said, but thrust up her under lip indifferently.

Then, with the effect of turning to the business in hand, she bent her eyes upon him understandingly and smiled in frank reference to something that had not been mentioned. 'It's goodbye Simla, isn't it?' she said. He smiled in response and put his hand upon her firm, round arm, possessively, and they began to talk.

Ram Singh, all unaware, kept his horses at their steady clanking downward gallop, and Simla, clinging to the hilltops, was brushed by the first rays of the sun.

It came a gloriously clear morning; early riders round Jakko saw the real India lying beyond the outer ranges, flat and blue and pictured with forests and rivers like a map. The plains were pretty and interesting in this aspect, but nobody found them attractive. Sensitive people liked it better when the heat mist veiled them and it was possible to look abroad without a sudden painful thought of contrasting temperatures. We may suppose that the inhabitants of Paradise sometimes grieve over their luck. Even Madeline Anderson, whose heart knew no constriction at the remembrance of brother or husband at some cruel point in the blue expanse, had come to turn her head more willingly the other way, towards the hills rolling up to the snows, being a woman who suffered by proxy, and by observation, and by Rudyard Kipling.

On this particular morning, however, she had not elected to do either. She slept late instead, and was glad to sleep. I might as well say at once that on the night before she had made up her mind, had brought herself to the point, and had written to Mrs. Innes, at 'Two Gables', all the facts, in so far as she was acquainted with them, connected with Frederick Prendergast's death. She was very much ashamed of herself, poor girl; she was aware that, through her postponement, Horace Innes would now see his problem in all its bitterness, make his choice with his eyes wide open. If it had only happened before he knew--anything about her!

She charged herself with having deliberately waited, and then spent an exhausting hour trying to believe that she had drifted unconsciously to the point of their mutual confession. Whatever the truth was, she did not hesitate to recognize a new voice in her private counsels from that hour, urging her in one way or another to bring matters to an end. It was a strong instinct; looking at the facts, she saw it was the gambler's. When she tried to think of the ethical considerations involved she saw only the chances. The air seemed to throb with them all night; she had to count them finally to get rid of them.

Brookes was up betimes, however, and sent off the letter. It went duly, by Surnoo, to Mrs. Innes at 'Two Gables'. Madeline woke at seven with a start, and asked if it had gone, then slept again contentedly. So far as she was concerned the thing was finished. The breakfast gong had sounded, and the English mail had arrived before she opened her eyes again upon the day's issues; she gave it her somewhat desultory attention while Brookes did her hair. There was only one scrap of news. Adele mentioned in a postscript that poor Mr. Prendergast's money was likely to go to a distant relative, it having transpired that he died without leaving a will.

'She is sure, absolutely sure,' Madeline mused, 'to answer my letter in person. She will be here within an hour. I shall have this to tell her, too. How pleased she will be! She will come into it all, I suppose--if she is allowed. Though she won't be allowed, that is if--' But there speculation began, and Madeline had forbidden herself speculation, if not once and for all, at least many times and for fifteen minutes.

No reasonable purpose would be served by Mrs. Innes's visit, Madeline reflected, as she sat waiting in the little room opening on the veranda; but she would come, of course she would come. She would require the satisfaction of the verbal assurance; she would hope to extract more details; she would want the objectionable gratification of talking if over.

In spite of any assurance, she would believe that Madeline had not told her before in order to make her miserable a little longer than she need be; but, after all, her impression about that did not particularly matter. It couldn't possibly be a pleasant interview, yet Madeline found herself impatient for it.

'Surnoo,' she said of her messenger, 'must be idling on his way back in the bazaar. I must try to remember to fine him two pice. Surnoo is incorrigible.'

She forgot, however, to fine Surnoo. The pad of his bare feet sounded along the veranda almost immediately, and the look in his Pahari eyes was that of expected reproach, and ability to defend himself against it.

He held out two letters at arm's-length, for as he was expected to bring only one there was a fault in this; and all his domestic traditions told him that he might be chastened. One was addressed to Madeline in Mrs. Innes's handwriting; the other, she saw with astonishment, was her own communication to that lady, her own letter returned. Surnoo explained volubly all the way along the veranda, and in the flood of his unknown tongue Madeline caught a sentence or two.

'The memsahib was not,' said Surnoo. Clearly he could not deliver a letter to a memsahib who was not. 'Therefore,' Surnoo continued, 'I have brought back your honour's letter, and the other I had from the hand of the memsahib's runner, the runner with one eye, who was on the road to bring it here. More I do not know, but it appears that the memsahib has gone to her father and mother in Belaat, being very sorrowful because the Colonel-sahib has left her to shoot.'

'The letter will tell me,' said Madeline to herself, fingering it. 'Enough, Surnoo.'

The man went away, and Madeline closed and locked the door of her sitting-room. The letter would tell her--what? She glanced about her with dissatisfaction, and sought the greater privacy of her bedroom, where also she locked the door and drew the muslin curtain across the window. She laid the letter on the dressing-table and kept her eyes upon it while she unfastened, with trembling hands, the brooch at her neck and the belt at her waist. She did one or two other meaningless things, as if she wanted to gain time, to fortify her nerves even against an exhibition before herself.

Then she sat down with her back towards the light and opened the letter. It had a pink look and a scented air. Even in her beating suspense Madeline held it a little farther away from her, as she unfolded it, and it ran:

'Dear Miss Anderson--What will you say, I wonder, and what will Simla say, when you know that Captain Drake and I have determined to DISREGARD CONVENTIONALITIES, and live henceforward only for one another! I am all packed up, and long before this meets your eye we shall have taken the step which society condemns, but which I have a feeling that you, knowing my storm-tossed history, will be broad-minded enough to sympathize with, at least to some extent. That is the reason I am writing to you rather than to any of my own chums, and also of course to have the satisfaction of telling you that I no longer care what you do about letting out the secret of my marriage to Frederick Prendergast. I am now ABOVE AND BEYOND IT. Any way you look at it, I do not see that I am much to blame. As I never have been Colonel Innes's wife there can be no harm in leaving him, though if he had ever been sympathetic, or understood me the LEAST LITTLE BIT, I might have felt bound to him. But he has never been able to evoke the finer parts of my nature, and when this is the case marriage is a mere miserable fleshly failure. You may say, "Why try it a third time?"--but my union with Val will be different. I have never been fond of the opposite sex--so far as that goes I should have made a very good nun--but for a long time Valentine Drake has been the only man I cared to have come within a mile of me, and lately we have discovered that we are absolutely necessary to each other's existence on the higher plane. I don't care much what Simla thinks, but if you happen to be talking about it to dear Lady Bloomfield, you might just mention this. Val has eight hundred a year of his own, so it is perfectly practicable. Of course, he will send in his papers. WHATEVER HAPPENS, Val and I will never bind ourselves in any way. We both think it wrong and enslaving. I have nothing more to add, except that I am depending on you to explain to Simla that I never was Mrs. Innes.

'Yours sincerely,

'Violet Prendergast.

'P.S.--I have written to Horace, telling him everything about everything, and sent my letter off to him in the wilds by a runner. If you see him you might try and smooth him down. I don't want him coming after Val with a revolver.'

Madeline read this communication through twice. Then quietly and deliberately she lay down upon the bed, and drew herself out of the control of her heart by the hard labour of thought. When she rose, she had decided that there were only two things for her to do, and she began at once to do them, continuing her refuge in action. She threw her little rooms open again, and walked methodically round the outer one, collecting the odds and ends of Indian fabrics with which she had garnished it.

As the maid came in, she looked up from folding them.

'I have news, Brookes,' she said, 'that necessitates my going home at once. No, it is not bad news, but--important. I will go now and see about the tonga. We must start tomorrow morning.'

Brookes called Surnoo, and the rickshaw came round.

Madeline looked at her watch.

'The telegraph office,' she said; 'and as quickly as may be.'

As the runners panted over the Mall, up and down and on, Madeline said to herself, 'She shall have her chance. She shall choose.'

The four reeking Paharis pulled up at the telegraph office, and Madeline sped up the steps. There was a table, with forms printed 'Indian Telegraphs,' and the usual bottle of thickened ink and pair of rusty pens. She sat down to her intention as if she dared not let it cool; she wrote her message swiftly, she had worded it on the way.

'To Mrs. Innes, Dak Bungalow, Solon.

'From M. Anderson, Simla.

'Frederick Prendergast died on January 7th, at Sing Sing. Your letter considered