From One Generation to Another
by
Henry Seton Merriman
Part 1 out of 4
Produced by Distributed Proofreaders
FROM ONE GENERATION TO ANOTHER
BY
HENRY SETON MERRIMAN
CHAPTER
I. THE SEED
II. SUBURBAN
III. MERCURY
IV. FREIGHTED
V. AFTER NINETEEN YEARS
VI. FOR HIS COUNTRY
VII. ON THE ROOF OF THE WORLD
VIII. RELIEVED
IX. RE-CAST
X. A LAST THROW
XI. A CARPET KNIGHT
XII. BAD NEWS
XIII. ON THIN ICE
XIV. THE CURSE OF A GOOD INTENTION
XV. THE TOUCH OF NATURE
XVI. THE SPIDER AND THE FLY
XVII. TWO MOTIVES
XVIII. LIKE SHIPS UPON THE SEA
XIX. AT HURLINGHAM
XX. IN A SIDE PATH
XXI. ALONE
XXII. ACROSS THE YEARS
XXIII. AND THE TIME PASSES SOMEHOW
XXIV. A STAB IN THE DARK
XXV. FROM THE JAWS OF DEATH
XXVI. BALANCING ACCOUNTS
XXVII. AT BAY
XXVIII. THE LAST LINK
XXIX. SETTLED
FROM ONE GENERATION TO ANOTHER
CHAPTER I
THE SEED
Il faut se garder des premiers mouvements, parce qu'ils sont presque
toujours honnetes.
"Dearest Anna,--I see from the newspaper before me of March 13, that I am
reported dead. Before attempting to investigate the origin of this
mistake, I hasten to write to you, knowing, dearest, what a shock this
must have been to you. It is true that I was in the Makar Akool affair,
and was slightly wounded--a mere scratch in the arm--but nothing more. I
have not written to you for some months past because I have been turning
something over in my mind. Anna, dearest, there is no chance of my being
in a position to marry for some years yet, and I feel it incumbent upon
me ..."
This letter, half written, lay on a camp table before a keen-faced young
officer. He ceased writing suddenly, and, leaping to his feet, walked to
the door of his bungalow, which was open to the four winds of heaven. In
doing this he passed from the range of the lazy punkah flapping
somnolently over table and bed. It may have been this sudden change to
hotter air that caused him to raise his hand to his forehead, which was
high and strangely rounded.
"By George!" he said, "suppose I do it that way!"
He walked rapidly backwards and forwards with the lithe actions of a man
of steel, a light weight, of medium height, keen and quick as a monkey.
His black eyes flitted from one object to another with such restlessness
that it was impossible to say whether he comprehended what he saw or
merely looked at things from force of habit.
He was dark of hair with a sallow complexion and a long drooping
nose--the nose of Semitic ancestors. A small mouth, and the chin
running almost to a point. A face full of interest, devoid of distinct
vice--heartless. Here was a man with a future before him--a man whose
vices were all negative, whose virtues depended entirely upon expediency.
Here was a man who could be almost anything he liked; as some men can. If
expediency prompted he could be a very depot of virtues; for his body,
with all the warmer failings of that part of humanity, was in perfect
control. On the other hand, there was no love of good for goodness'
sake--no conscience behind the subtle eyes. All this, and more, was
written in the face of Seymour Michael, whose handwriting had dried some
moments before on the half-filled sheet of letter-paper.
He returned and stood at the table with slightly bowed legs--not the
result of much riding, although he wore top-boots and breeches as if of
daily habit--but a racial defect handed down like the nasal brand from
remote progenitors. He looked at letter and newspaper as they lay side by
side--not with the doubtfulness of warfare between conscience and
temptation, but with a calculating thoughtfulness. He was not wondering
what was best to do, but what the most expedient.
Those were troublesome times in India, for the Mutiny was not quelled,
and each mail took home a list of killed, slowly compiled from news that
dribbled in from outlying stations, forts, and towns. Those were days
when men's lives were made or lost in the Eastern Empire, for it seems to
be in Fortune's balance that great danger weighs against great gain. No
large wealth has ever been acquired without proportionate risk of life or
happiness. To the tame and timorous city clerk comes small remuneration
and a nameless grave, while to more adventurous spirits larger stakes
bring vaster rewards. The clerk, pure and simple, has, within these later
years, found his way to India, sitting side by side with the Baboo, and
consequently it is as easy to make a fortune in London as in Calcutta and
Madras. The clerk has carried his sordid civilisation and his love of
personal safety with him, sapping at the glorious uncertainty from which
the earlier pioneers of a hardier commerce wrested quick-founded
fortunes.
Seymour Michael had come into all this with the red coat of a soldier and
the keen, ambitious heart of a Jew, at the very nick of time. He saw at
once the enormous possibilities hidden in the near future for a man who
took this country at its proper value, handling what he secured with
coolness and foresight. He know that he only possessed one thing to risk,
namely, his life; and true to his racial instinct, he valued this very
highly, looking for an extortionate usury on his stake.
At this moment he was like Aladdin in the cave of jewels: he did not know
which way to turn, which treasure to seize first.
Anna--dearest Anna--to whom this half-completed letter was addressed, was
a person for whom he had not the slightest affection. At the outset of
his career he had paused, decided in haste, and had resolved to make use
of the passing opportunity. Anna Hethbridge had therefore been annexed
_en passant_. In person she was youthful and rather handsome--her fortune
was extremely handsome. So Seymour Michael went out to India engaged to
be married to this girl who was unfortunate enough to love him.
In India two things happened. Firstly, Seymour Michael met a second young
lady with a fortune twice as large as that of Miss Anna Hethbridge.
Secondly, the Mutiny broke out, and India lay before the ambitious young
officer a very land of Ophir. He promptly decided to cut the first string
of his bow. Anna Hethbridge was now useless--nay, more, she was a
burthen. Hence the letter which lay half-written on the table of his
bungalow.
He paused before this wrong to a blameless woman, and contemplated the
perpetration of a greater. He weighed pro and con--carefully withholding
from the balance the casting weight of Right against Wrong. Then he took
up the letter and slowly tore it to small pieces. He had decided to leave
the report of his death uncontradicted. It was morally certain that five
weeks before that day Anna Hethbridge had read the news in the printed
column lying before him. He resolved to leave her in ignorance of its
falseness. Seymour Michael was not, however, a selfish man. All that he
did at this time, and later in life--all the lives that he ruined--the
hearts he broke--the men he sacrificed were not offered upon the altar of
Self (though the distinction may appear subtle), but sold to his career.
Career was this man's god. He wanted to be great, and rich, and powerful;
and yet he was conscious of having no definite use for greatness, or
riches, or power when acquired.
Here again was the taint of the blood that ran in his veins. The curse
had reached him--in addition to the long, sad nose and the bandy legs.
The sense of enjoyment was never to be his. The greed of gain--gain of
any sort--filled his heart, and _ennui_ secretly nestling in his soul
said: "Thou shalt possess, but not enjoy."
He was conscious of this voice, but did not understand it then. He only
burned to possess; looking to possession to provide enjoyment. In this he
was not quite alone--with him in his error are all men and women. And so
we talk of Love coming after marriage--and so women marry without Love,
believing that it will follow. God help them! That which comes afterwards
is not even the ghost of Love, it is only Custom. This was the spirit of
Seymour Michael. He had already acquired one or two objects of a vague
ambition; and, possessing them, had only learnt to be accustomed to
them--not to value them.
There was no elation in the thought that he was freed from the
encumbrance of Anna Hethbridge by a chance misprint. Neither was there
hesitation in turning accident ruthlessly to his own advantage. There was
only a steady pressing forward--an unceasing, unwearying attention to his
own gain.
In those days news travelled slowly, and the personal had not yet taken
precedence in journalism. In the anxiety for the State, the Individual
was apt to be overlooked. Seymour Michael counted on six months of
oblivion at the least--he hoped for more, but with characteristic caution
acted always in anticipation of the worst.
He had scarcely thrown the newspaper aside when a comrade entered the
bungalow carrying another copy of the same journal.
"I say, Michael," exclaimed this man, "do you see that you're put in
among the killed?"
"Yes," replied Seymour Michael, without haste, without hesitation. "I
have already written to contradict it. Not that there is any one to care
whether I am dead or alive. But it might do me harm in Leadenhall Street.
I can't afford to be dead even for a week when so much promotion is going
forward."
This was artistic. Most of us forget to preserve our own characteristics
in diverging from the truth. The tangled web is only woven when _first_
we practise to deceive. Later on the facility is greater, the handling
superior, and the web runs smooth and straight. Seymour Michael was
apparently no novice at this sort of thing. He was even at that moment
making mental note of the fact that up-country mails were in a state of
disorganisation, and a letter which was never written may easily be made
to have miscarried later on.
But even he could not foresee everything--no one can. Not even the
righteous man, much less the liar.
"Do you mean to say," pursued the newcomer, "that you are not writing to
your family about it--only to the Company?"
"That is all."
"Rum chap you are, Michael," said the other, lighting a cheroot.
"Heartless beggar I take it."
"Not at all. The simple fact is that I have no one to write to. I only
possess one or two distant relatives, and they would probably be rather
sorry than otherwise to have the report contradicted."
The younger officer--a mere boy--with a beardless, happy face, walked to
the door of the bungalow.
"Of course there is always this in it," he said carelessly. "By the time
the contradiction reaches home the news may be true."
Seymour Michael laughed lamely. A joke of this description made him feel
rather sick, for a Jew never makes a soldier or a sailor, and they are
rarely found in those positions unless great gain is holden up.
With this pleasantry the youth departed, leaving Michael to write the
letter which he had advised as written. As he drew the writing materials
towards him he cursed his brother officer quietly and politely for a
meddling young fool. He wrote a formal letter to the Company--the
old East India Company which administered an empire with ledger and
daybook--calling their attention to the mistake in the newspaper, and
begging them not to trouble to give the matter publicity, as he had
already advised his friends.
This done, he proceeded with the ordinary routine of his daily life. Such
men as this are case-hardened. They carry with them a conscience like the
floor of an Augean stable, but they know how to walk thereon. Moreover,
he was one of those who assign to their dealings with men quite a
different code of morals to that reserved for women. His was the code of
"not being found out." Men are more suspicious--they find out sooner:
_ergo_ the morals to be observed _vis a vis_ to them are of a stricter
order. Railway companies and women are by many looked upon as fair game
for deception. Consciences tender in many other respects have a subtle
contempt for these two exceptions. Many a so-called honest man travels
gaily in a first-class carriage with a second-class ticket, and lies to a
woman at each end of his journey without so much as casting a shadow upon
his conscience.
Seymour Michael carried this code to the farthest limit of safety. All
through the months that followed he went about his business with a clear
conscience and a heart slightly relieved by the removal of Anna
Hethbridge from his path to prosperity. He served his country and the
Company with a keenness of foresight and a soldierly exposure of the
lives of others which did not fail, in the course of time, to bring him
in a harvest of honours and rewards. Neither did he put his candle under
a bushel, but set it in the very highest candlestick available.
But, as has been previously stated, he could not foresee everything. He
did not know, for instance, that his cheroot-smoking subaltern--a
youth as guileless as he was indiscreet, for the two usually go
together--possessed a memory like a dry-plate. He did not foresee that a
passing conversation in an Indian bungalow might perchance photograph
itself on the somewhat sparsely covered tablets of a man's mind, to be
reproduced at the wrong moment with a result lying twenty-six years ahead
in the womb of time.
CHAPTER II
SUBURBAN
_L'amour fait tout excuser, mais il faut etre bien sur qu'il y a de i
amour._
Miss Anna Hethbridge loved Seymour Michael with as great a love as her
nature could compass.
When the news of his death reached her, at the profusely laden
breakfast-table at Jaggery House, Clapham Common, her first feeling was
one of scornful anger towards a Providence which could be so careless.
Life had always been prosperous for her, in a bourgeois, solidly wealthy
way, entirely suited to her turn of mind. She had always had servants at
her beck and call, whom she could abuse illogically and treat with an
utter inconsequence inherent in her nature. She had been the spoilt child
of a ponderous, thick-skinned father and a very suburban mother, who, out
of her unexpected prosperity, could deny her daughter nothing.
Three months after the receipt of the news Anna Hethbridge went down into
Hertfordshire, where, in the course of a visit at Stagholme Rectory, she
met and became engaged to the Squire of Stagholme, James Edward Agar.
A month later she became the second wife of the simple-minded old country
gentleman. It would be hard to say what motives prompted her to this
apparently heartless action. Some women are heartless--we know that. But
Anna Hethbridge was too impulsive, too excitable, and too much given to
pleasure to be devoid of heart. Behind her action there must have been
some strange, illogical, feminine motive, for there was a deliberation in
every move--one of those motives which are quite beyond the masculine
comprehension. One notices that when a woman takes action in this
incomprehensible way her lady friends are never surprised; they seem to
have some subtle sympathy with her. It is only the men who look puzzled,
as if the ground beneath their feet were unstable. Therefore there must
be some influence at work, probably the same influence, under different
forms, which urges women to those strange, inconsequent actions by which
their lives are rendered miserable. Men have not found it out yet.
Anna Hethbridge was at this time twenty-four years of age, rather pretty,
with a vivacity of manner which only seemed frivolous to the more
thoughtful of her acquaintances. The idea of her marrying old Squire Agar
within six months of the untimely death of her clever lover, Seymour
Michael, seemed so preposterous that her hostess, good, sentimental Mrs.
Glynde, never dreamt of such a possibility until, in the form of a fact,
it was confided to her by Miss Hethbridge, one afternoon soon after her
arrival at the rectory.
"Confound it, Maria," exclaimed the Rector testily, when the information
was passed on to him later in the evening. "Why could you not have
foreseen such an absurd event?"
Poor Mrs. Glynde looked distressed. She was a thin little woman, with an
unsteady head, physically and morally speaking; full of kindness of
heart, sentimentality, high-flown principles, and other bygone ladylike
commodities. Her small, eager face, of a ruddy and weather-worn
complexion--as if she had, at some early period of her existence, been
left out all night in an east wind--was puckered up with a sense of her
own negligence.
She tried hard, poor little woman, to take a deep and Christian interest
in the welfare of her neighbours; but all the while she was conscious of
failure. She knew that even at that moment, when she was sitting in her
small arm-chair with clasped, guilty hands, her whole heart and soul were
absorbed beyond retrieval in a small bundle of white flannel and pink
humanity in a cradle upstairs.
The Rector had dropped his weekly review upon his knees and was staring
at her angrily.
"I really can't tell," he continued, "what you can have been thinking
about to let such a ridiculous thing come to pass. What are you thinking
about now?"
"Well, dear," confessed the little woman shamedly, "I was thinking of
Baby--of Dora."
"Thought so," he snapped, with a little laugh, returning to his paper
with a keen interest. But he did not seem to be following the printed
lines.
"I suppose she was all right when you were up just now!" he said
carelessly after a moment, and without lowering his paper.
"Yes, dear," the lady replied. "She was asleep."
And this young mother of forty smiled softly to herself as if at some
recollection.
This happiness had come late, as happiness must for us to value it fully,
and Mrs. Glynde's somewhat old-fashioned Christianity was of that school
which seeks to depreciate by hook or by crook the enjoyment of those
sparse goods that the gods send us. The stone in her path at this time
was an exaggerated sense of her own unworthiness--a matter which she
might safely have left to another and wiser judgment.
Presently the Rector laid aside the newspaper, and rose slowly from his
chair.
"Are you going upstairs, dear?" inquired his tactless spouse.
"Um--er. Yes! I am just going up to get--a pocket-handkerchief."
Mrs. Glynde said nothing; but as she knew the creak of every board
in the room overhead she became aware shortly afterwards that the
Rector had either diverged slightly from the path of which he was the
ordained finger-post, or that he had suddenly taken to keeping his
pocket-handkerchiefs in the far corner of the room where the cradle
stood.
It will be readily understood that in a household ruled, as this rectory
was, by a sleepy little morsel of humanity, Anna Hethbridge was in no way
hindered in the furtherance of her own personal purposes--one might
almost add periodical purposes, for she never held to one for long.
The Squire was very lonely. His boy Jem, aged four, would certainly be
the happier for a mother's care. Above all, Miss Hethbridge seemed to
want the marriage, and so it came about.
If Anna Hethbridge had been asked at that time why she wanted it, she
would probably have told an untruth. She was rather given, by the way, to
telling untruths. Had she, in fact, given a reason at all, she would
perforce have left the straight path, because she had no reason in her
mind.
The real motive was probably a love of excitement; and Miss Anna
Hethbridge is not the only woman, by many thousands, who has married for
that same reason.
The wedding was celebrated quietly at the Clapham parish church. A
humiliating day for the stiff-necked old Squire of Stagholme; for he was
introduced to many new relatives, who, if they could have bought up
Stagholme and its master, were but poorly equipped with the letter "h."
The bourgeois ostentation and would-be high-toned graciousness of the
ladies, jarred on his nerves as harshly as did the personal appearance of
their respective husbands.
Altogether it was just possible that Squire Agar began to realise the
extent of his own foolishness before the effervescence had left the
champagne that flowed freely to the health of bride and bride-groom.
The event was duly announced in the leading newspapers, and in the course
of a few days a copy of the _Times_ containing the insertion started
eastward to meet Seymour Michael on his way home from India.
Anna Agar came home to Stagholme to begin her new life; for which
peaceful groove of existence she was by the way totally unfitted; for she
had breathed the fatal air of Clapham since her birth. This atmosphere is
terribly impregnated with the microbe of bourgeoisie.
But the novelty of the great house had that all-absorbing fascination
exercised over shallow minds by anything that is new. At first she
maintained excitedly that there was no life like a country life--no
centre more suited for such an ideal existence than Stagholme. For a time
she forgot Seymour Michael; but love is eminently deceitful. It lies in a
comatose silence for many years and then suddenly springs to life.
Sometimes the long period of rest has strengthened it--sometimes the time
has been passed in a chrysalis stage from which Love awakens to find
itself changed into Hatred.
Little Jem, her stepson--sturdy, fair, silent--was her first failure.
"Come to your mother, dear," she said, with unguarded enthusiasm one
afternoon when there were callers in the room.
"I cannot go to my mother," replied the youthful James, with his mouth
full of cake, "because she is dead."
There was an uncompromising matter-of-factness about this simple
statement, made in all good faith and honesty, which warned the second
Mrs. Agar to press the matter no farther just then. But she was so intent
upon exhibiting to her neighbours the maternal affection which she
persuaded herself that she felt for the plain-spoken heir to Stagholme,
that she took him to task afterwards. With great care and an utter lack
of logic she devoted some hours to the instruction of Jem in the somewhat
crooked ways of her social creed.
"And when," she added, "I tell you to come to your mother, you must come
and kiss me."
This last item she further impressed upon him by the gift of an orange,
and then asked him if he understood.
After scratching his head meditatively for some moments, he looked into
her comely face with very steady blue eyes and said:
"I don't think so--not quite."
"Then," replied his stepmother angrily, "you are a very stupid little
boy--and you must go up to the nursery at once."
This puzzled Jem still more, and he walked upstairs reflecting deeply.
Years afterwards, when he was a man, the sunlight falling on the wall
through the skylight over the staircase had the power of bringing back
that moment to him--a moment when the world first began to open itself
before him and to puzzle him.
It happened that at that precise time when Mrs. Agar was endeavouring
To teach her little stepson the usages of polite society, a small,
keen-faced man was standing near the table in the smoking-room in the
Hotel Wagstaff at Suez. He was idly turning over the newspapers lying
there in the hopes of finding something comparatively recent in date.
Presently he came upon a copy of the _Times_, with which he repaired to
one of the long chairs on that verandah overlooking the desert which some
of us know only too well.
After idly conning the general news he glanced at the births, deaths, and
marriages, and there he read of the recent ceremony in the parish church
of Clapham.
"D----n it!" he muttered, with that racial love of an expletive which
makes a Jew a profane man.
In addition to a strong feeling of wounded vanity that Anna Hethbridge
should so soon have forgotten him, Seymour Michael was distinctly
disappointed that this heiress should no longer be within his reach. The
truth was, that the young lady in India had transferred her valuable
affections, with all solid appurtenances attaching thereto, to a young
officer in the Navy who had been invalided at Calcutta.
To men who intend, despite all and at any cost, to get on in the world
the first failures are usually very bitter. It is only those who press
stolidly forward without expecting much, who profit from a check. Seymour
Michael was just the man to fail by being too acute, too unscrupulous. He
was usually in such a hurry to help himself that he never allowed another
the very fruitful pleasure of giving.
In India his zeal had led him into one or two small mistakes to which he
himself attached no importance, but they were remembered against him. He
had cruelly thrown aside Anna Hethbridge when a richer marriage offered
itself. Now he had missed both bone and reflection, and he sat with a
smile on his dark face, looking out over the dreary desert.
CHAPTER III
MERCURY
_The evil is sown, but the destruction thereof is not yet come._
James Edward Makerstone Agar was not at the age of five the material
from which the heroes of children's stories are evolved. He was not a
good boy, nor a clean, nor particularly interesting. He was, however,
honest--and that is _deja quelque chose_. He was as far removed from the
"misunderstood" type as could be wished; and he was quite happy.
Before his stepmother had laid aside the title and glory of a bride, he
had, by his deadly honesty, made her understand that even a child of five
requires what she could not give him--namely, logic. Had she been clever
enough to reason logically she might have undermined the little fellow's
innate honesty of character, despite the fact that he lacked a child's
chief incentive to learn from its mother, namely, the sympathy of
heredity.
Gradually and steadily Mrs. Agar "gave him up," to make use of her own
expression. She was one of those women who either fear or despise that
which they do not understand. She could scarcely fear Jem, so she
persuaded herself that he was stupid and unattractive. At this time there
came another influence to militate against any excess of love between Jem
and his stepmother. It came to her, for he was ignorant of it. And this
was the knowledge that before long the little heir's undisputed reign in
the nursery would come to an end.
With a suburban horror of being a long distance from the chemist, Mrs.
Agar protested that she could not possibly remain at Stagholme during the
ensuing winter, and that her child must be born at Clapham. It was vain
to argue or reason, and at last the Squire was forced to swallow this
second humiliation, which was quite beyond his wife's comprehension. He
only dared to hint that all the Agars had seen the light at Stagholme
since time immemorial; but feelings of this description found no
answering note in her practical and essentially commonplace mind. So Mr.
And Mrs. Agar emigrated to Clapham, leaving Jem behind them.
It happened that a few days after their arrival at the stately house
overlooking the Common, a young officer called to see Mr. Hethbridge,
who was at that time one of the Directors of the East India Company.
Now it furthermore happened that this young soldier was he whom we last
saw smoking a cheroot in the doorway of Seymour Michael's bungalow in
India. As chance would have it, he called in the evening, and the
estimable Mr. Hethbridge, warmed into an unusual hospitality by the
fumes of his own port wine, pressed him to pass into the drawing-room and
take a dish of tea with the ladies. The subaltern accepted, chiefly
because it was the Director's self that pressed, and presently followed
that short-winded gentleman into the drawing-room--thereby shaping lives
yet uncreated--thereby unconsciously helping to work out a chain of
events leading ultimately to an end which no man could foresee.
"Yes," he said, in reply to Mrs. Agar's question, "I am just back from
India."
It happened that these two were left almost beyond earshot at the far end
of the room. The old people, among whom was Mrs. Agar's husband, were
settling down to a game of whist. Mrs. Agar was leaning forward with
considerable interest. This was not a mere passing curiosity to hear
further of a country and of an event which have not lost their glamour
yet.
The very word "India" had stirred something up within her heart of the
presence of which she had been unsuspicious. She was as one who, having a
closed room in her life, and thinking the door thereof securely barred,
suddenly finds herself within that room.
"Whereabouts in India were you?" she asked, with a sudden dryness of the
lips.
"Oh--I was north of Delhi."
"North of Delhi--oh, yes."
She moistened her lips, with a strange, sidelong glance round the room,
as if she were preparing to jump from a height.
"And--and I suppose you saw a great deal of the Mutiny?"
Even then--after many months, in a drawing-room in peaceful Clapham--the
young man's eyes hardened.
"Yes, I saw a good deal," he answered.
Mrs. Agar leant back in her chair, drawing her handkerchief through her
fingers with jerky, unnatural movements.
"And did you lose many friends?" she asked.
"Yes," answered the young fellow, "in one way and another."
"How? What do you mean?" She had a way of leaning forward and listening
when spoken to, which passed very well for sympathy.
"Well, a time like the Mutiny brings out all that is in a man, you
know. And some men had less in them than one might have thought, while
others--quiet-going fellows--seemed to wake up."
"Yes," she said; "I see."
"One or two," he continued, "betrayed themselves. They showed that there
was that in them which no one had suspected. I lost one friend that way."
"How?"
It was marvellous how the merest details of India interested this woman,
who, like most of us, did not know herself. Moreover, she never learnt to
do so thoroughly, thereby being spared the horrid pain of knowing oneself
too late.
"I made a mistake," he explained. "I thought he was a gentleman and a
brave man. I found that he was a coward and a cad."
Something urged her to go on with her pointless questions--the same
inevitable Fate which, according to the Italians, "stands at the end of
everything," and which had prompted Mr. Hethbridge to bring this stranger
into the drawing-room.
"But how did you find it out?"
"Oh, I did not do it all at once. I first began by a mere trifle. It
happened that this man was reported dead in the Gazette--I showed it to
him myself."
The young officer, who was not accustomed to ladies' society, and felt
rather nervous at his own loquaciousness, kept his eyes fixed on his
boots, and did not notice the deathly pallor of Mrs. Agar's face, nor the
convulsive clutch of her fingers on the velvet arm of the chair.
She turned right round, with a peculiar movement of the throat as if
swallowing something, and made sure that the whist-players were
interested in their game. In that position she heard the next words.
"He did not even take the trouble to write home to his friends. I thought
it rather strange at the time, and told him so. Later on I heard the
truth of it. I heard him tell some one else that he was engaged to a girl
in England, and he thought it a very good way of getting out of the
engagement."
"You heard him tell that, with your own ears?"
"Yes; and he seemed to think it a good joke."
Mrs. Agar was shuffling about in the chair as if in pain.
Then she asked again in a strangely metallic voice, "Did he say that
he--did not love her?"
"Yes, the cad!"
"He cannot have been a nice man," she said, with that evenness of
enunciation which betrays that the tongue is speaking without the direct
aid of the mind.
The young officer rose with a glance towards the clock.
"No," he said, "he was not. He did other things afterwards which made it
quite impossible for a man with any self-respect whatever to look upon
him as a friend."
"Did he," asked Mrs. Agar, "say anything about her personal appearance?
Was it that?"
The subaltern looked puzzled. It was as well for Mrs. Agar that he was
not a man of deep experience. Instead of being puzzled he might suddenly
have seen clear.
"No--no," he replied. "It was not that. It was merely a matter of
expediency, I believe."
But, womanlike, Mrs. Agar did not believe him. She sat while he made his
farewell speech over the whist-table, but as he went to the door she rose
and followed him slowly.
In the hall she watched the servant help him on with his coat--her
features twisted into a stereotype smile of polite leave-taking.
"By the way," she said, with a sickening little laugh, "what was the
man's name--your friend, whom you lost?"
"Michael--Seymour Michael."
"Ah! Good-night--good-night."
Then she turned and walked slowly upstairs.
We are apt to read indifferently of human ills, whether of the flesh or
the soul. We are apt to overlook the fact that what we read may apply to
us. Some of us even bear upon us the mark of hereditary disease and
refuse to believe in it. Then suddenly comes a day when a pain makes
itself felt--a dumb, little creeping pain, which may mean nothing. We sit
down and, so to speak, feel ourselves. Before long all doubt goes. We
have it. The world darkens, and behold we are in the ranks of those upon
whom we looked a little while back with a semi-indifferent pity.
It was thus with Mrs. Agar. As some play with nature, so had she played
with her own heart. She had heard of a consuming love which is near akin
to hatred. She had read of passion which is stronger than the strongest
worldliness. She had smilingly doubted the existence of the broken heart
pure and simple. And now she sat in her own room, numbly, blindly feeling
herself, like one to whom the first warning of an internal deadly disease
has been manifested. She was conscious of something within herself which
she could not get at, over which she had no control.
With quivering lips she sat and wondered what she could do to hurt this
man. She did not only want to inflict bodily pain, but that other
gnawing pain of the heart which she herself was now feeling for the first
time. And through it all there ran the one thought that he must die. It
was strange that hate should first teach her that love is a living,
undeniable reality in the lives of all of us. She had never realised
this before. Her bringing-up, her surroundings, all her teaching had
been that money and a great house, and servants, and carriages were the
good things of this life, the things to be sought after.
She had been conscious of a vague admiration for Seymour Michael, and
that was the full extent of her knowledge of herself. This admiration
took the worldly form of a conviction that he was destined one day to be
a great man, and she had a strongly developed, common-minded desire to be
a great lady.
There are some things in this life which to a moderate intelligence are
quite unmistakable. Most of us, having left childhood behind, recognise
at once an earthquake, and death. Love is as unmistakable when it really
comes. And Anna Agar, having suddenly learnt to hate Seymour Michael,
knew that she had loved him with that one all-absorbing love which comes
but once to a woman.
She was not a deep-thinking or a subtle woman. Her actions were usually
based upon impulse, and her one all-absorbing desire now was to see him,
to speak to him face to face. In this indefinite longing there was
probably a vulgar love of vituperation--the taint of her low-born
ancestors.
She wanted to shout and shriek her hatred into the evil face of the man
who had tricked her. She wanted to frighten him, to threaten, to lash him
with her tongue. For she was conscious all the while of her own inability
to harm him. Without defining the thought, her common-sense taught her
one lamentable, unjust fact; namely, that unless a woman is loved by the
object of her wrath she can hardly make him suffer.
She rose at last, and, lighting the candles on the writing-table, she
proceeded to write to Seymour Michael. Even in this epistle the natural
cunning of her nature appeared.
"DEAR SEYMOUR "--she wrote on a sheet of paper bearing the address of the
house in which she was staying, the roof under which Seymour Michael had
first paid his careless tribute to her wealth--"I learnt by accident this
evening that your regiment has returned to England. If you are in London,
I hope you will make time to come and see me. Come to-morrow evening at
four, if that time is convenient to you. ANNA."
She purposely signed her Christian name only, purposely refrained from
vouchsafing any personal news. She did not know how much or how little he
might know.
Ringing for her maid, she sent the letter to the post, addressed to
Seymour Michael, at the Service Club, of which she knew him to be a
member. Then she went to bed to toss and turn all night. The doctors,
good, portly Clapham practitioners, had warned her in the usual way to
spare herself all bodily fatigue and mental worry for the sake of the
little one. It is so easy to urge each other to spare all mental worry,
and so eminently useful.
CHAPTER IV
FREIGHTED
I shall remember while the light lives yet,
And in the darkness I shall not forget.
Seymour Michael was no coward where hard words and no hard knocks were to
be exchanged. His faith in his own keenness of intellect and
unscrupulousness of tongue was unbounded.
He smiled when he read Anna Agar's letter over a dainty breakfast at his
club the next morning. The cunning of it was obvious to his cunning
comprehension, and the fact of her suppressing her newly-acquired surname
only convinced him that she knew but little about himself.
That same evening at four o'clock he presented himself at the lordly
hall-door of Mr. Hethbridge. Since first he had raised his hand to this
knocker, fingering his letter of introduction to the East India director,
Seymour Michael had learnt many things, but the knowledge was not yet his
that indiscriminate untruths are apt to fly home to roost.
Anna Agar had easily managed to send her mother out of the house; her
husband spent his days as far from Clapham as circumstances would allow.
She was seated on a sofa at the far end of the room when Seymour Michael
was shown in, and the first thing that struck her was his diminutiveness.
After the hearty country gentlemen who habitually carried mud into the
Stagholme drawing-room, this small-limbed dapper soldier of fortune
looked almost puny. But there is a depth in every woman's heart which is
only to be reached by one man. Whatever betide them both, that one is
different from the rest all through life.
Neither of these two persons spoke until the servant had closed the door.
Then, as is usual in such cases, the more indifferent spoke first.
"Why did you never write to me?" said Seymour Michael, fixing his
mournful glance on her face.
"Because I thought you were dead."
"You never got my letter contradicting the report?"
"No," she answered, with so cheap a cunning that it deceived him.
"And," he went on, with the heartlessness of a small man, for large men
respect woman with a deeper chivalry than every puny knight yet
compassed, "and you did not trouble to inquire. You did not even give me
six months' grace to cool in my grave."
"How did you send your letter?" she asked, with a suppressed excitement
which he misread entirely.
"By the usual route. I wrote off at once."
"Liar! liar! liar!" she shrieked.
She had risen, and stood pointing an accusatory finger at him. Then
suddenly the dramatic force of the situation seemed to fail, and she
burst out laughing. For some seconds it seemed as if her laughter was
getting beyond her control, but at last she checked it with a gurgle.
The complete success of the trap which she had laid for him almost
disappointed her. Few things are more disappointing than complete
success. She hated him, and yet for the sake of the one gleam of good
love that had flickered once in her essentially sordid heart, she had
nourished a vague hope that he would clear himself--that at all events he
would have the cleverness to see through her stratagem.
"Liar!" she repeated. "In this room last night--not twenty-four hours
ago--Mr. Wynderton told me all about it. He said that you told several
men in his presence that you did not love me, and that your death
reported in the papers was the best way of breaking off the engagement."
Seymour Michael's eyes never wavered. For once they were still, with
that solemn depth of gaze which tells of the curse laid on a smitten,
miserable race. It was strange that before honest men and women his
glance wavered ever--he could never meet honest eyes; but looking at Anna
Agar they were as steady as those of a true man.
"Wynderton," ho said, "the man whose promotion I stopped, by a report
against him for looting."
When Nature makes a fool in the guise of a woman she turns out a finished
work. Mrs. Agar's eyes actually lighted up. Seymour Michael saw; but he
knew that he had no case. Nevertheless, in view of the Squire's advanced
age (a fact of which he had made sure), he attempted to carry through a
forlorn hope.
"And you believe this man before you believe me?" said Michael. It is
strange how often one hears the word "believe" on the lips of those whose
veracity is doubtful.
Now it happened that Mr. Hethbridge had spoken of Wynderton at breakfast
that morning in terms which left no doubt as to the untruth of the
statement just made in regard to him. But even this would have been
passed over by the woman who had a natural tendency towards falsehood
herself, had not Seymour Michael made a hideous mistake. A wiser man than
any of us has said that there is a time for all things. Most distinctly
defined is the time for making love. More men come to grief by making too
much love than too little. Seymour Michael, being heartless, deemed
erroneously that this was a propitious moment to essay the power which
had once been his over this woman.
He accompanied his reproachful speech with a tender glance, which in
olden times had never failed to call forth an answering look of love in
her eyes. Now, it suddenly aroused her to realise the extent of her
hatred. In some subtle way it humiliated her; for she looked back into
the past, and saw herself therein a dupe to this man.
"No!" she cried, and her raised voice had a sudden twang in
it--suggestive of the streets; of the People. "No--you needn't trouble to
make soft eyes at me. I know you now--I know that what that man said was
true. He called you a coward and a cad. You are worse! You are a Jew--a
mean, lying Jew."
There are few greater trials to a man's dignity than vituperation from
the lips of a woman. She walked towards him, clumsily, menacingly and
raised her hand as if to strike him.
Seymour Michael's brown face turned yellow beneath her blazing anger.
"Sit down!" he commanded, "and don't make a fool of yourself."
He was mean enough to pay her back in her own coin--the paltry,
loud-ringing coin which is all that a woman has.
"I do not mean to wrangle," he said coolly; "but I may as well tell you
now that I never cared a jot for you. I was laughing at you in my sleeve
all the time. I did not want you but your money. I concluded that the
money would be too dear at the price, so I determined to throw you over.
The way I chose to do it was as good as any other, because it saved me
the trouble of writing to you."
Anna Agar had obeyed him. She was sitting down in a stiff-backed
arm-chair, looking stupidly at the pattern of the carpet as if it were
something new to her. Between physical pain and mental excitement she
was beginning to wander. She was the sort of woman to lose control over
her mind with a temperature of one hundred and one.
Michael looked keenly at her. He had a racial terror of physical ailment.
He saw that something was wrong, but his knowledge went no further. He
had never seen a woman faint, so limited had been his experience of the
sex.
"Come," he said consolingly, "it is all for the best. We made a mistake.
In a few years we shall look back to this, and thank Heaven for saving us
many years of unhappiness. We are not suited to each other, Anna. We
never should have been happy."
It was characteristic of the man to be more afraid of a fainting fit than
of a broken heart.
He went to her side and stood, not daring to touch her, for fear of
arousing another of those fits of passion in her which neither of them
seemed to understand. At length she spoke in a singular monotonous tone
which an experienced doctor would have recognised at once as the speech
of a tongue unguided for the time being. She did not look up, but kept
her eyes fixed on the carpet as if reading there.
"Some day," she said, "I will pay you back. Some day--some day. I do not
know how, but I feel that you will be sorry you ever did this."
Twenty-five years afterwards these words came back to him in a flash.
They passed through his brain--conglomerate--in a flash, in a hundredth
part of the time required to speak them.
Even at the time of hearing them, spoken in that voice which did not seem
to belong to Anna Hethbridge at all, he turned pale. For all the hatred
that burnt within her like a fire smouldered in the deliberate tones of
her voice. Hatred and love can teach us more in a moment than the
experience of a lifetime; for through either of them we see ourselves
face to face. This hatred made Anna Agar in twenty-four hours, and the
woman thus created went through a lifetime unchanged.
Michael went towards the bell.
"I am going to ring," he said, "for your maid."
"Twice," she muttered in the same vague way.
He obeyed her, ringing twice.
Presently the woman came.
"Your mistress," said Michael in a low voice to her at the door, "has
been suddenly seized with faintness. I leave her to you."
Without looking round he passed through the doorway and out into his own
self-seeking life. But Anna Agar's revenge began from that moment. To a
man of his nature, in whose veins ran the taint of a semi-superstitious
Oriental blood, there was a nameless terror in the hatred of a human
being, however helpless. Surely the hell of the coward will be a twilight
land of vague shadowy dangers ever approaching and receding.
In such a land Seymour Michael moved for some months, until he returned
to India; and there, in the daily round of a new life, he gradually
learnt to shake off the past. The world is very large despite chance
meetings. It is easy enough to find room for two even in the same county,
with the exercise of a little care.
Twenty-five years elapsed before these two met again, and then they only
had time to exchange a glance. By that time the result of their own
actions had passed beyond their control.
Seymour Michael walked across the Common, which was in those days still
wild and almost beautiful; and on the whole he was pleased with the
result of this interview. He knew that it was destined to come sooner or
later--he had known that all along; and it might have been worse. It is
characteristic of an untruthful nature to be impervious to the shame of
mere detection. In Eastern countries the liar detected smiles in one's
face. Detection is to an Oriental no punishment; something more tangible
is required to pierce his mental epidermis.
Being quite incapable of a strong love this man was innocent of consuming
hatred. He therefore vaguely wondered whether the day might come wherein
he would once more lay siege to the affections of Anna Agar, a rich
widow.
Had he seen the face of the woman whom he had just left as it lay
at that moment, hardly less pale than the pillow between the fluted
mahogany pillars of a huge four-post bed, he would not have understood
its meaning. He would never have divined that the dull gleam shining
between her half-closed eyelids was simple hatred of himself, that the
restless, twitching lips were whispering curses upon his head, that the
half-stunned brain was struggling back to circulation and thought for
the sole purpose of devising hurt to him.
Seymour Michael, ignorant of all this, went peaceably back to his club,
where he dressed, dined, and proceeded to pass the evening at a theatre.
That night, while he was displaying his diamond studs in the stalls of
Drury Lane Theatre, was born into the world--long before his time--a
child, Arthur Agar, destined to walk the smoothest paths of life,
literally in silk attire; for he grew up to love such things.
But the ways of Nature are strange. She is very quiet; patient as death
itself. She holds her hand for years--sometimes for a generation--but she
strikes at last.
She is more cruel than man, or even than woman which is saying much, She
is the best friend we have, and the worst foe, for she never forgives an
outrage.
Nature raised her hand over this puny, whimpering child, Arthur Agar. She
never forgot a mother's selfish passion. She forgets nothing. When first
he opened his little pink lids upon the world he looked round with a
scared wonder in a pair of colourless blue-grey eyes; and that vague look
of expectation never left his eyes in later life. It almost seemed as if
the infant orbs could see ahead into the future--could discern the
lowering hand of outraged Nature.
This hand was suspended over the ill-fated, poorly-endowed head for
years, then Nature struck--hard.
CHAPTER V
AFTER NINETEEN YEARS
A sharp judgment shall be to them that be in high places.
"Yes, dear. I have great news for you to take back to your mother. Jem
has got his commission--in a Goorkha regiment!"
The lady who spoke leant back in her chair, half turning her head, but
not looking entirely round in the direction of the only other occupant of
the room--a girl of nineteen.
"In a Goorkha regiment, Aunt Anna?" repeated the girl; "what is that? It
sounds as if he would have to black his face and wear a turban. It
suggests curry and gymkhanas (whatever they may be) and pyjamas and
bananas and other pickles. A Goorkha regiment."
There was a faint drop in her tone--on the last three words, which to
very keen ears might have signified reproach, but the hearer was not
keen--merely cunning, which is quite a different matter.
"Yes, dear. They tell me that these Indian regiments are much the best
for a young man who is likely to get on. There are so many more chances
of promotions and--er--er--distinction."
The girl was standing by the open window, and she turned her head without
otherwise moving, looking at the speaker with a pair of exceedingly
discriminating eyes.
"Bosh, my dear aunt!" she whispered confidingly to the blind-cord.
"Yes," pursued the lady, with the eager credulity of her first mother,
ever ready to believe the last speaker when belief is convenient--"Yes.
Sister Cecilia tells me that all the great men began in the Indian
Service."
"Oh! I wonder where they finished. Royal Academy--finishing Academy.
Regimentals and a gold frame--leaning heroically on a mild-looking cannon
with battles in the background."
"Yes, dear," replied Mrs. Agar, who only half understood Dora Glynde at
all times; "it is such a good thing for Jem. Such a splendid opportunity,
you know!"
"Yes," echoed the girl, with a twist of her humorous lips. "Splendid!"
She had turned again, and was looking out of the window across a soft old
lawn where two Wellingtonians towered side by side like sentries. Without
glancing in the direction of her companion she knew the expression of
Mrs. Agar's face, the direction of her gaze; the very thought in her
shallow mind. She knew that Mrs. Agar was sitting with her arms on the
little davenport, gazing rapturously at the photograph of an insipid
young man with a silk-faced smoking jacket; with clean linen, clean
countenance, clean hands, immaculate hair, and a general air of being too
weak to be mean.
"Sister Cecilia," went on the elder lady, "seems to know all about it."
It is useless to attempt concealment of the fact that at this juncture
Dora Glynde made a face--an honest schoolgirl behind-your-back
Face--indicative of supreme scorn for some person or persons unspecified.
Hers was a countenance which lent itself admirably to the purpose, with
lips full of humour, and capable, as such lips are, of expressing a great
and wonderful tenderness. The face, _du reste_, was that of a healthy,
fair-skinned English girl, liable to honest change from pale to pink,
according to the dictates of an arbitrary climate. Her eyes were of a
dark grey-blue, straightforward and steady, with a shadow of thought in
them which made wise people respect her presence. She was not painfully
beautiful, like the heroine of a novel--nor abnormally plain, like the
antitype who has found her way into fiction, and there (alone) brings all
hearts to her feet.
"Is Jem glad?" she asked cheerfully. "Is he thirsting for gore and
glory?"
"Oh, delighted! Arthur will be so pleased too. Dear boy, _he_ is so
interested in soldiers, but of course he could not go into the army! He
is too delicate--besides, the life is rough, and the risks are very
great."
Mrs. Agar was speaking with her head slightly inclined to one side, and
she never raised her adoring eyes from the photograph of the insipid
young man. Had she done so she would have seen a look of patient, if
comic, resignation come over the face of her youthful companion at the
mention of her son's name.
"I will tell mother," said Dora Glynde, purposely ignoring Arthur Agar,
whose name was always dragged sooner or later into every conversation.
"Fancy Jem in a helmet, or a turban, with his face blacked! All the same,
if I were a man I should be a soldier. When does he go--to join his
regiment?"
"Oh, almost at once."
The girl winced, quietly, between herself and the blind-cord.
"And in the meantime," she said lightly, "I suppose he is fully engaged
in buying swords and guns and bomb-shells, or whatever the Goorkhas use
in warfare."
"He is coming home to-morrow for Sunday," replied Jem Agar's stepmother
absently. She was thinking of her own son, and therefore did not hear the
quick sigh which was almost a gasp; did not note the sudden light in the
girl's eyes.
Dora Glynde was rather a solitary-minded young person. The only child of
elderly parents, she had never learnt in the nursery to indulge in the
indiscretions of confiding girlhood. She had the good fortune to be
without a bosom-friend who related her most sacred secrets to other bosom
friends and so on, as is the way of maidens. From her father she had
inherited a discriminating mind and a most admirable habit of reserve.
She was quite happy when alone, which, according to La Bruyere, is a
great safeguard against all evil.
She wanted to be alone now, and therefore passed out of the open window
with a non-committing "Good-bye, Aunt Anna!"
"Good-bye, dear," replied the lady, awaking suddenly from a reverie. But
by the time she had turned round in her chair, the girl was gone.
Dora crossed the lawn, passing between the sentinel pines and crossing
the moat by the narrow footbridge. She climbed the railing with all the
ease of nineteen years and struck a bee-line across the park. She never
raised her eyes from the ground, never paused in her swinging gait, until
she reached the brown hush of the beechwood which divided the Rectory
garden from the southern extremity of the park.
Having climbed the railing again she sat on a mossy mound at the foot of
a huge beech tree. Her manner of doing so subtly indicated that she did
not only know the spot, but was in the habit of sitting there, possibly
to think. A youthful privilege of doubtful value, for, as we get busier
in life we have to do the thinking as we go along.
"Oh!" she muttered, "oh, how awful!"
A new expression had come over her face. She looked older, and all the
vivacity had suddenly left her lips.
While she was still sitting there the crisp sound of footsteps on the
fallen leaves approached through the wood. Looking up she saw her father,
following the winding path through the spinney towards his home.
A grave man was the Rector of Stagholme in his declining years;
hopelessly, wisely pessimistic, with sudden youthful returns of interest
in matters literary and theological. As he came he read a book.
Instantly the expression of Dora's face changed. She rose and went
towards him, smiling contemptuously towards his lowering gravity. He
looked up, gave a little grunt of recognition, and closed his book.
"Father," she said, "I've just heard a piece of news."
"Bad, I suppose."
She laughed.
"Well," she answered, "I suppose we shall survive it. Jem has got his
commission, in a Goorkha regiment."
"Goorkha regiment? Nonsense!"
"Aunt Anna has just told me so. She is very pleased, and seems prepared
for the--best."
"That is the custom of fools, to be prepared for the best--only."
The Rector gave a despairing shrug of the shoulders. He was a man who
allowed himself, after the manner of the ancients with whom he lived
mentally, a few gestures. He smoked a very expressive cigarette. He was
smoking one at this moment, and threw it away half consumed. This divine
was possessed of a rooted conviction that the Almighty made a great
mistake whenever He invested temporal power in a woman, whom he was
ungallantly inclined to classify under a celebrated dictum of Mr.
Carlyle's respecting the population of these happy Isles, who, truth to
tell, care not one jot what Mr. Carlyle may think of them.
The Reverend Thomas Glynde and his daughter walked all the way home
without exchanging another word. In the Rectory drawing-room they found
Mrs. Glynde, small, nervous, worried. She had evidently devoted
considerable thought and attention to the preservation of the hot
buttered toast. Poor humble little soul, she was quite content to
minister to the bodily requirements of her spouse, having long been
convinced of the inferiority of her own sex in every respect except a
certain limited knowledge of housekeeping matters.
She was vaguely conscious of inferiority to Dora from a literary point of
view, and talked with abject humility to her own daughter of all things
appertaining to books. But on all other points connected with the child
of her old age this quiet little woman was absolute mistress. Years
before the Rector had made a great mistake; he had, as the plain-spoken
East Burgen doctor put it, made an ass of himself on the matter of a
childish illness, thereby imperilling Dora's half-fledged little life.
Mrs. Glynde had then, like a diminutive tigress, stood up boldly before
her awesome lord and master, saying such things to him that the
remembrance of them made her catch her breath even now. From that time
forth the Rector was allowed to hold forth on symptoms to his heart's
content, to take down from his library shelf a stout misguided book of
medical short-cuts to the grave, but nothing more.
He never referred to the asinine business, and in the course of
years he forgave the doctor (having in view the fact that that
practitioner had been carried away by a right and proper sense of the
importance of the case), but he tacitly acknowledged that in the practice
of home-administered medical assistance, his knowledge was second to a
mother's instinct.
"It appears," he said sharply, while he was stirring his tea, "that Jem
Agar has got his commission in a Goorkha regiment."
Now Mrs. Glynde knew more about the organisation of the heavenly bands
than of the administration of the Indian army. She did not know whether
to rejoice or lament, and having been sharply pulled up--any time during
the last twenty years--for doing one or the other in the wrong place, she
meekly took soundings.
"What is that, dear?" she inquired.
"The Goorkhas are native Indian soldiers," explained the Rector. "Very
good fellows, no doubt. They get all the hard knocks in small frontier
wars and none of the half-pence. What the woman can have been thinking
of, I don't know."
Mrs. Glynde was anxiously glancing towards Dora, who was nicking the nose
of a sportive kitten with the tassel of the tea-cosy.
"And will he go to India?" she asked, with laudable mental grovellings in
the mire of her own ignorance.
"Course he will."
"And," added Dora cheerfully, "he will come home covered with glory and
medals, with a weakness for strong pickles and hot language--I mean hot
pickles and strong language."
"But," said Mrs. Glynde rather breathlessly, "are they never stationed in
England?"
"No--never," replied her husband snappishly.
Mrs. Glynde had a pink patch on each cheek--precisely on the spot whore
two such patches had appeared years ago when the doctor spoke so
strongly. Those patches were maternal, and only appeared when Dora's
affairs, spiritual or temporal, were concerned.
"I don't know," put in Dora again, "but I have a sort of lurking
conviction that Jem will have to wear a turban and red morocco boots."
"But," pursued Mrs. Glynde, with that courage which cometh with a red
patch on either cheek, "I always thought these Indian regiments were
meant for people who are badly off."
The Rector gave a short laugh.
"You are not so very far wrong, my dear," he admitted. "And no one can
say that Jem is badly off. He will be very rich some day."
The Rector assumed an air of superior discretion, to which he usually
treated his women-folk when he thought fit to consider that they were
touching on matters beyond their jurisdiction.
"Some more tea, please, mother," put in Dora appropriately. "Excuse my
appetite. I suppose it is the autumn air."
There was a short silence, during which Mrs, Glynde sought to propitiate
her angered spouse with sodden toast and a second brew of tea.
"I always said," observed the Rector at last, "that your cousin was a
fool."
And in some indefinite way Mrs. Glynde felt that she was once more
responsible.
CHAPTER VI
FOR HIS COUNTRY
Shall I forget on this side of the grave?
I promise nothing; you must wait and see.
From the train arriving at East Burgen station at eight o'clock that same
evening there alighted a youth who seemed suddenly to have taken manhood
upon his shoulders. He stood on the platform and pointed out to a porter,
who called him Master James, a large Gladstone bag and a new sword-case.
Although he could have carried the luggage under one arm and the porter
under the other, he carefully refrained from offering to convey anything
except his own walking-stick. Such is the force of education. This boy
had been brought up to expect service. He was to be served all his life,
and so the sword-case had to be left to the porter whom he envied.
During the journey down--between the farthest-removed stations--the sword
had flashed more than once in the dim light of the carriage lamp. Ah!
those first swords! Not Toledo nor Damascus can produce their equal in
after years.
The porter, honest father of two private soldiers of the line himself,
saw it all--at once. He carried the sword-case with an exaggerated
reverence and forbore from remark just then. Afterwards, beneath the
station-lamp, he looked at the shilling--the first of its kind from that
quarter--with a pathetic, meaning smile.
It was Saturday night. The streets of East Burgen were rather crowded,
and Jem Agar--with elbows well in and the whip at the regulation angle
across old Lasher's face, who could not help squinting at the pendant
thong--shouted to the country-folk in a new voice of mighty deep
register.
He carried his boyish head stiffly, and had for ever discarded a
turn-down collar. At first he kept old Lasher at a respectful distance,
asking in a somewhat curt and business-like manner after the stables.
Then gradually, as they bowled along the country road in the familiar
hush of an April evening, he thawed, and proceeded to vouchsafe to that
steady coachman a series of very interesting details of military matters
in general and the Indian army in particular.
"Well, I'm sure, Mas--sir," opined Mr. Lasher at length; "if there's any
one as has got into his right rut, so to speak, in this world, it's you.
I always said you was a born soldier."
"Ah--then you've heard that I've got my commission?" inquired Jem airily,
as if he had had many such in bygone years.
"Oh yes, sir! Miss Dora it was that told me."
Somehow this caused a little silence.
Truth to tell, Dora had lost her rank as the most beautiful and
accomplished maiden in Christendom. This situation was at that moment
occupied by a young person hight Evelina Louisa Barmond, sister to Billy
Barmond of the Hundred and second, a veteran fellow-soldier and comrade
who had jumped five feet six at the Sandhurst sports a year before. Miss
Evelina Louisa was twenty-four, five years Dora's senior, and only three
years and two months older than Jem Agar himself. He had spoken to her
twice, and thought about her in the intervals allowed by such weighty
matters as uniform and the new sword, which, however, required almost
constant consideration at that time.
"Well," said Jem, with exaggerated nonchalance, "I am afraid I should
never be fit for anything else."
Whereat Lasher laughed and touched his hat. He made it a rule to salute a
joke in that manner, either from a general respect for humour, or looking
at it in the light of a mental gratuity offered by his betters.
"There's one thing you can do, Master Jem, sir--leastwise, which you can
do as well as any man in the British army," he said, with pardonable
pride, "and that is sit a 'orse."
"Thanks to you, Lasher," Jem was kind enough to say with a flourish of
his whip.
The dignity was now ebbing fast, and by the time that the clever little
cob swung round the gate-post into the avenue of Stagholme, Jem and
Lasher were fully re-established on the old familiar footing.
There was a bright moon overhead, and at the end of the avenue beyond the
dip where the lake gleamed mysteriously, the gables and solid towers of
Stagholme stood peacefully confessed.
Jem Agar was firmly convinced that England only contained one Stagholme,
and perhaps he was right. Six miles from the nearest station, the great
house stands self-sufficient, self-contained. The moat, now dry and
cultivated, is still traceable, and requires bridging in two places.
Surrounded by vast park-like meadowland, where huge trees guard against
cutting wind or prying modern journalistic instinct, the house is only
approached by a private road.
Inside the gates of this road there is something ancient and feudal in
the very scent of the air. The tones of the big bell striking the hour
over the wide portico die away over the lands that still belong to
Stagholme, despite the vicissitudes through which all ancient families
run.
Jem, however, whose childhood and youth had been passed amidst companions
with names as good as his, had learnt long ago to keep his pride to
himself. He was Jem Agar, and the family name seemed somehow to belong
exclusively to his father still, although that thorough old sportsman had
lain for three years and more beneath the quiet turf of the little
churchyard within his own park gates.
As he pulled up at the door this was thrown open, and within its frame of
light he saw the gracious form of his stepmother waiting to welcome him.
Behind her, in the shadow, and amidst the decoration of staghorns,
ancient pike and hanger, loomed a tall dark figure startlingly in keeping
with the semi-monastic architecture of the house. This was Sister
Cecilia. She was always thus--behind Mrs. Agar, with clasped hands and a
vaguely approving smile, as if Mrs. Agar conferred a benefit upon
suffering humanity by the mere act of existing.
A slightly bored expression came into Jem's patient eyes. It was not that
he had very much in common with his stepmother, although he had an honest
affection for her; but he instinctively disliked Sister Cecilia and all
her works. These latter were of the class termed "good." That is to say,
this lady, the spinster daughter of a former rector in the neighbourhood,
considered that the earthly livery of a marvellous black bonnet which was
almost a cap, and quite hideous, justified a shameless interference in
the most intimate affairs of her neighbours, rich and poor.
Under the cover of charity she committed a thousand social sins. She
constituted herself mother-confessor to all who were weak enough to
confide in her or seek her advice, and in soul she was the most arrant
time-server who ever flattered a rich woman.
Jem distrusted her soft and "holy" ways, more especially her speech,
which had the lofty condescension of the saved towards the damned in
prospective. In his calmly commanding way he had, months before,
forbidden Dora Glynde to kiss Sister Cecilia, because that ostentatiously
virtuous person was in the habit of kissing the maids when she met them;
and he maintained that this Christian practice, if very estimable
theoretically, was socially an insult either to the mistress or the maid.
In view of the important changes in his own life which were about to
supervene, that is to say, firstly, his departure for India, and
secondly, his coming of age before he could hope to return from that land
of promise, he had counted on a quiet evening with his mother. Moreover,
he was vaguely conscious of the fact that a right-minded person would
have carefully abstained from accepting the most pressing invitation to
form a third that evening.
In view of this Jem Agar had recourse to the last refuge of the simple.
He retired within himself, and, so to speak, shut the door. He had dined
with these women before, and knew that the conversation would follow its
usual mazy course through a forest of cross-questions upon all subjects,
and notably upon those intimate matters which were essentially his own
business.
Sister Cecilia, good mistaken soul that she was, tried her best. She was
lively in a Sunday-school-tea style. She was by turns tender and warlike
as occasion seemed to demand; but no scrap or tittle of personal
information did she extract from Jem, stiffly on guard behind his high
collar. Mrs. Agar was excited and failed utterly to follow the wiser
footsteps of her bosom friends. She talked such arrant nonsense about
India, the Goorkhas, and matters military, that more than once Jem
glanced at the imperturbable servants with misgiving.
The next day was Sunday, and after morning service Jem eagerly accepted
an invitation to have supper at the Rectory after evening church. Sister
Cecilia was staying from Saturday till Monday, which alone was sufficient
reason for this young soldier to pass his last evening in Stagholme under
another than his own historic roof. With her in the house he knew that
the chances of serious conversation were small; for she encouraged such
topics as the possibility of sending fresh eggs packed in lime to the
Goorkhas of his prospective half-company. So Jem retired within himself,
and finally left England without having said many things which should
have been said between stepmother and son.
At the Rectory he found a very different atmosphere--that air of cheerful
intellectuality which comes from the presence of cultivated men and
women.
The Rector held strong views on the rare virtue of minding one's own
business, and in loyalty to such, deemed it right to refrain from
mentioning his opinion as to the wisdom of selecting a native branch of
the military service for the heir to Stagholme.
The supper passed pleasantly enough in the discussion of general topics
all bordering on the great question they had at heart. They were like
people seeking for each other in the dark around the edge of a pit--the
pit being India. Dora, and Dora alone, laughed and treated matters
lightly. Mrs. Glynde blundered several times, and stepping backwards over
an abyss of years, called the new soldier "darling" more than once. Twice
she required helping out by Dora, and on the second occasion something
was said which Jem remembered afterwards with a stolid British memory.
"Jem," said the girl, buttering a biscuit with a light hand, "you should
write a diary. All great men write diaries which their friends publish
afterwards."
"I do not think," replied Jem, with that contempt for the pen which the
possession of a new sword ever justifies, "that writing a diary is much
in my line."
"Ah, you can never tell till you try. Of course it would not be published
straight off. Some literary person would be hired to cross the t's and
dot the i's."
There was a little pause. Dora glanced at Jem Agar, and something made
him say:
"All right. I'll try."
"Who knows?" said the Rector, with a smile of indulgent affection. "There
may be great literary capacity lying dormant in Jem. The worst of a diary
is that one may come to look at it in after years, when one finds a very
different story has been written from what one intended to write."
"Oh," said Dora, lightly skipping over the chasm of gravity, "that is
Providence. We must blame Providence for these little _contretemps_. Some
one must be blamed, and Providence obviously does not mind."
Jem laughed--somewhat lamely; but still it was a laugh. Supper was
despatched somehow--as last meals are. Some of us never forget the
flavour of those cups of tea gulped down in the gorgeous steamer-saloon
while the stewards get the hand luggage on board. It was a late meal on
Sunday evening at the Rectory, and the servants soon followed their
betters into the drawing-room for prayers.
Then the Rector lighted his last cigarette, and Mrs. Glynde began to show
symptoms of a patch of pink in either cheek.
At last Jem rose--awkwardly--in the midst of a sally from Dora, who
seemed afraid to stop speaking.
"Must be going," he said; and he shook hands with the Rector.
Mrs. Glynde, with nervous deliberation, kissed him and squeezed his hand
jerkily.
"Dora--will open the door for you," she said, with an apprehensive glance
towards her husband, who, however, showed no inclination to move from his
chair.
Dora not only opened the door, but left it open, and walked with him
across the lawn towards the stile. When they reached it there was a
little pause. He vaulted over and she quietly followed--without his
proffered assistance.
Then at last Jem spoke.
"You don't seem to care!" he said gruffly--with his new voice.
"Oh, _don't!"_ she whispered imploringly.
And they walked on beneath the murmuring trees where the yellow moonlight
stole in and out between the trunks. It was not cheerful. For when Nature
joins her sadness to the sad libretto of life she usually breaks a heart
or two. Fortunately for us we mostly act our tragedies in the wrong
scenery--the scenery that was painted for a comedy.
"I don't understand it," said the girl at length.
"I suppose it is in order to save money for Arthur."
"If I don't, go," replied Jem, "it will be a question of letting
Stagholme."
Dora knew of the ancient horror of such a necessity, handed down from one
Agar to another, like a family tradition. Moreover, women seem to respect
men who have some simple creed and hold to it simply. Are they not one of
our creeds themselves, though by seeking for rights instead of contenting
themselves with privileges, some of them try to make atheists of us?
"So," she said nevertheless, "you are being sacrificed to Arthur!"
He answered nothing, but he had forgotten for ever Miss Evelina Louisa
Barmond.
"When do you go?" asked Dora suddenly, with something in her voice which
no one had ever heard before. She was startled at it herself.
He waited until the soft old church bell finished striking ten, then he
answered:
"To-morrow!"
They had reached the farthest limit of the wood and stood at the park
railing.
"Then--," she paused, and seemed to collect herself as if for a leap;
"then good-bye, Jem!"
He took the outstretched hand; his large grasp seemed to swallow it up.
"Good-bye!" he said.
He climbed the rail without agility, paused for a moment, and the
moonlight happened to gleam on his face through the gently waving
branches as he looked down at her in dumb distress.
Then he turned and walked away across the shimmering grass.
A few minutes later Dora re-entered the drawing room. Her father and
mother were seated close together, closer than she had seen them for
years. Mrs. Glynde was pale, with two scarlet patches.
Dora collected her belongings, preparatory to going to bed.
"Jem," she said quietly, "is absurdly proud of his new honours. It
affects his chin, which has gone up exactly one inch."
Then she went to bed.
CHAPTER VII
ON THE ROOF OF THE WORLD
The more a man has in himself, the less he will want from other people.
"Here--hi!"
As no one replied to this summons either, by voice or approach, the young
man subsided into occupied silence.
He was a very large young man, with a fair moustache which looked almost
flaxen against the deep tan of his face. This last, like the rest of him,
was ludicrously typical of that race which has wandered farther than the
Jews, and has hitherto managed, like them, to retain a few of its
characteristics. The Anglo-Saxonism of this youth was almost aggressive.
It lurked in the neat droop of moustache, which was devoid of that untidy
suggestion of a beer-mug characterising the labial adornment of a
northern flaxen nation of which we wot. It shone calmly in the glance of
a pair of reflectively deep blue eyes--it threw itself at one from the
pockets of an old tweed jacket worn in conjunction with regulation
top-boots and khaki breeches.
Moreover, it gave birth to a quiet sense of being as good as any one
else, and possibly better, which sat without conceit on his brow.
It would seem that he really did not want to be answered just then, for
he did not raise a voice accustomed to dominate the clatter of horses'
feet, nor did he pass any comment on the carelessness or criminal absence
of some person or persons unknown.
He merely took up his pen again, and proceeded to handle that mighty
weapon with an awkwardness suggestive of a greater skill with another
instrument only less powerful. He was seated on two reversed buckets,
pyramidally balanced, at a small table which had the air of wide
capabilities in some other sphere of usefulness. There was a weird
cunning in the legs of this table indicative of subtle change into a
camp-bed or possibly a canoe.
The writing materials consisted of a vaseline bottle (fourpenny size)
full of ink, and two weary pieces of blotting-paper. The paper upon which
he was writing had a travelled and somewhat jaundiced air, the penholder
was of gold. In the furniture of the tent, as in the canvas thereof,
there was that mournful suggestion of better days which is held to be a
virtue in furnished apartments. But over all there hovered that sense of
well-scrubbed cleanliness which comes from the touch of a native military
servant. An indulgence in this habit of rubbing and scrubbing was indeed
accountable for much dilapidation; for that silent little Ghoorka man,
Ben Abdi, had rubbed and scrubbed many things not intended by an
ingenious camp-furnisher for such treatment. James Edward Makerstone Agar
was engaged in the compilation of a diary, which volume there is reason
to believe is still preserved in a woman's jewel drawer.
It has not run through any editions--indeed, no compositor's finger has
up to this time defiled its pages. This, in fact, was one of those
literary works, ground slowly out from the millstones of the brain, of
which the style fails to please the taste of the present day. To catch
the fancy of a slang-loving and thoughtless generation the writer must
throw off his works. This is an age of "throwing off," and it is to be
presumed that future ages will throw the result away. One must be
brilliant, shallow, slightly unpleasant and very unwholesome, to acquire
nowadays that best of all literary reputations which leaveth a balance at
one's bank.
J.E.M. Agar--or "Jem" as his friends call him to his face and his
servants behind his back--Jem Sahib to wit--was no Pepys. His literary
style was disjointed, heavy, and occasionally illiterate. This last
peculiarity, by the way, is of no consequence nowadays, but it is
mentioned here for ulterior motives. In the pages of this little
black-bound volume there were no scintillating thoughts scribbled there
with suspicious neatness of diction, such as one finds in the diaries of
great men who, it would seem, are not above post-mortem vanity. The diary
was a chronicle of solid facts--Jem being essentially solid and a man of
the very plainest facts.
Speaking as an impartial critic, one would incline to the opinion that
Agar devoted too much thought to his work--in strong contrast, perhaps,
to the literary tendency of his day. He nibbled the leisure end of his
penholder too much, and allowed the business extremity thereof to dry in
inky conglomeration. The result was a distinct sense of labour in the
style of the work. After having called in vain, perhaps for assistance,
the scribe returned to the contemplation of his latest effort. The book
was one of Letts's diaries, three days in a page, which are in themselves
fatal to a finished style of literature. There is always too much to say
or too little. One's thoughts never fit the rhomboid apportioned by Mr.
Letts for their accommodation. Great men who have thoughts when the diary
is handy do not, of course, patronise Letts, because he could not be
expected to know when there would be a sunset likely to stir up poetic
reflections, or a moonrise comparable with the cold light cast by some
unsympathetic young woman's eyes upon the poet's life.
For such men, however, as Agar, Mr. Letts is a guardian angel. The space
is there, and facts must be forthcoming to fill it. Agar was, and is
still--thank Heaven--a conscientious man. He had promised to keep this
diary and keep it he did. And surely he hath his reward--remembering the
jewel drawer.
At the moment under consideration he was filling in yesterday's rhomboid,
and paused at the conclusion of the following remarks:
"_Seven_ A.M. Turned out, and shot a Ghilzai. Saw him sneaking up the
valley. Long shot--should put it down at a hundred and seventy-five
yards. Hit him in the stom--abd--chest. Looked like rain until two
o'clock. Then cleared up. Walter caught a mongoose and brought him in
with much triumph. He got conceited afterwards and slept on my bed till
kicked off by Ben Abdi. I see it's Sunday. Church four hundred odd miles
away."
This, my masters, is not the stuff to quote _in extenso_, and yet in its
day this diary was cried over--before it was put away in the jewel
drawer. Truly women are strange--one can never tell how a thing will
present itself to them. Honest Jem Agar, nibbling his penholder and
jerking these lucid observations out of his military brain by mere force
of discipline, never suspected the heart that was in it all--that minute
particle of himself that lay in the blot in the corner carefully absorbed
by the exhausted blotting-paper.
"Sunday, egad!" he muttered, leaning his arms on the cunning table, and
gazing out across the pine-clad valley that lay below him in a deep blue
haze.
He stared into the haze, and there he saw those whom he called "his
people" walking across a neat English park toward a peaceful little
English church. To them came presently a young person; a young person
clad in pink cotton, who walked with a certain demure sureness of tread,
as if she knew her own mind and other things besides. Her path came into
the park from the left, and among the trees into which it disappeared
behind her there stood the red chimneys of a long low house.
Suddenly these visions vanished before something more tangible in the
haze of the valley. This was the flutter of a dirty white rag which
seemed to come and go among the fir trees.
Jem Agar rose from his temporary seat and walked to the door of the
tent--exactly two strides. A rifle lay against the canvas, and this he
took up, slowly cocking it without taking his eyes from the belt of fir
trees across the valley.
Presently he threw the rifle up and fired instantaneously. He had been
musketry instructor in his time and held views upon quick firing. The
smoke rose lazily in the ambient air, and he saw a figure all fluttering
rags and flying turban running down the slope away from him. At the same
moment there was a crashing volley, followed by two straggling reports.
The figure stopped, seemed to hesitate, and then slowly subsided into the
grass.
Agar put his head out of the tent and saw half a company of Goorkhas,
keen little sportsmen all standing in line at the edge of the plateau,
reloading.
This was the force at the disposal of Major J. E. M. Agar, at that time
occupying and holding for Her Majesty the Queen of England and Empress of
India a very advanced position on the northern frontier of India. And in
this manner he spent most of his days and some of his nights. In addition
to the plain Major he had several other titles attached to his name at
that time, indicative of duties real and imaginary. He was "deputy
assistant" several things and "acting" one or two; for in military
titles one begins in inverse ratio in a large way, and ends in something
short.
Jem Agar was thought very highly of by almost all concerned, except
himself, and it had not occurred to him to devote much thought to this
matter. He was one of the very few men to whom a senior officer or a
pretty girl could say, "You are a nice man and a clever fellow," without
doing the least harm. Men who thought such things of themselves laughed
at him behind his back, and wondered vaguely why he got promotion. It
never occurred to them to reflect that "old Jem" invariably acquitted
himself well in each new position thrust upon him by a persistently kind
fortune; they contented themselves with an indefinite conviction that
each severally could have done better, as is the way of clever young men.
One of the many mysteries, by the way, which will have to be cleared up
in a busy hereafter is that appertaining to brilliant boys, clever
undergraduates, and gifted young men. What becomes of them? There are
hundreds at school at this moment--we have it from their own parents;
hundreds more at Oxford and Cambridge--we have it from themselves. In a
few years they will be absorbed in a world of men very much inferior to
themselves (by their own showing), and will be no more seen.
Jem Agar had never been a clever boy. He was not a clever man. But--and
mark ye this--he knew it. The result of this knowledge was that he did
what he could in the present with the present, and did not indefinitely
postpone astonishing the universe, as most of us do, until some future
date.
At this time he was banished, as some would take it. Banished to the top
of a pass which was nought else than a footway between two empires. Forty
miles from men of his own race, this man was one of those who either have
no thoughts or no wish to impart them; for this racial solitude, which is
an emotion fully explored by many in India, in no way affected his
nerves. Some say that they get jumpy, others aver that they begin to lose
their national characteristics and develop barbarous proclivities, while
one Woods-and-Forests man known to some of us resigned because he had a
buzzing in the head during the long solitary, silent evenings.
Major Agar made no statements on this point, though he listened with
sympathy to the assertions of others. If the sympathy were subtly mingled
with non-comprehensive wonder, the seeker after a purer form of
commiseration attributed the alloy to natural density, and turned
elsewhere.
Accompanied by a handful of Goorkhas, Major J. E. M. Agar had occupied
the key to this narrow pass for more than a week, vaguely admiring the
scenery, illustrating upon living "running deer" in turbans his views
upon quick firing to his diminutive soldiers, who worshipped him as
second only to the gods, and possessing his soul with that trustful
patience which is rapidly becoming old-fashioned and effete.
During that same week the newspapers at home had been very busy with his
name. Some had gone so far as to lay before a greedy public a short and
succinct account of his life, compiled from the Army List and a
journalistic imagination, finishing the record on the Monday, six days
previously, with the usual three-line regret that England should in
future be compelled to limp along the path to glory without the
assistance of so brilliant a young officer.
Such a word as brilliant had never been coupled with the name of Jem even
by his best friend in earnest or his worst enemy in irony. Such sarcasm
were too shallow to be worth sounding even in disparagement. But we never
know what an obituary notice may bring. Not only had he been endowed with
many virtues, manly qualities, and the record of noble deeds, but more
substantial honours had been heaped upon his fallen crest or pinned upon
his breathless bosom. To some of his distant countrymen he was the proud
possessor of the Victoria Cross, awarded him post-mortem in the heat of
obituary enthusiasm by more than one local paper. To others he was held
up by what is called a Representative Press as a second Crichton. And all
this because he was dead. Such is glory.
All unconscious of these honours, honest Jem Agar sat in his little
tent, nibbling the end of his penholder--the gift, by the way, of his
father--and wishing that he had bought a Letts's diary with six days in a
page instead of three.
CHAPTER VIII
RELIEVED
Well waited is well done.
"Here--hi!"
This time some one heard him, and that small, silent man, Ben Abdi, stood
in the doorway of the tent at attention.
"Are you keeping a good look-out down the valley?" asked Major Agar.
"Ee yess, sar."
"No signs of any one?"
"No, sar."
Agar shut up the diary, which book Ben Abdi had been taught to regard as
strictly official, laid it aside, and passed out of the tent, the little
Goorkha following close upon his heels with a quick intelligent interest
in his every movement which somehow suggested a dusky and faithful little
dog.
For some moments they stood thus on the edge of the small plateau, the
big man in front, the little one behind--alert, with twinkling, beady
eyes. Behind them towered a bleak grey slope of bare rock, like a cliff
set back at a slight angle, so treeless, so smooth was the face of it. In
front the great blue-shadowed valley lay beneath them, stretching away to
the south, until in a distant haze the sharp hills seemed to close in and
cut it short.
Perched thus, as it were, upon the roof of the world, these two men
looked down upon it all with a calm sense of possession, and to him of
the dominant race standing there some thousands of miles from his native
land--alone--master of this great stretch of an alien shore, there must
have come some passing thought of the strangeness of it all.
There was something wrong--he knew that. His orders had been to press
forward and occupy this little ridge, which was vaguely marked on the
service maps as Mistley's Plateau, named after an adventurous soul, its
discoverer. He had been instructed to hold this against all comers, and
if possible to prevent communication between the two valleys, connected
only by this narrow pass. All this Agar had carried out to the letter;
but some one else had failed somewhere.
"It will be three days at the most," his chief had said, "and the main
body of the advance guard will join you!"
Jem Agar had been in occupation a week, and it seemed that he and his
little band of men were forgotten of the world. Still this soldier held
on, saying nothing to his men, writing his intensely practical diary, and
trusting as a soldier should to the _Deus ex machina_ who finally allows
discipline to triumph. He looked down into the valley, piercing the
shimmer of its hazes with his gentle blue eyes, looking to his chief, who
had said, "In three days I will join you."
It was not the first time that Agar and the little non-commissioned
native officer, Ben Abdi, had stood thus together. They had taken their
stand in this same spot in the keen air of the early morning, with the
white frost crystallising the stones around them; in the glow of midday;
and when the moon, hanging over the sharp-pointed hills, cast the valley
into an opaque shade dark and fathomless as the valley of death.
Scanning the distant hills, Agar presently raised his eyes, noting the
position of the sun in the heavens.
"Have you tried the heliograph a second time this morning?" he asked
without looking round, which informality of manner warmed the little
soldier's heart.
"Yes, sar. Three times since breakfast."
It was the first time that Ben Abdi had found himself in a position of
some responsibility, in immediate touch with one of the white-skinned
warriors from over seas whose methods of making war had for him all the
mystery and the infinite possibilities of a religion. This silent looking
out for relief partook in some small degree of the nature of a council of
war. Jem Sahib and himself were undoubtedly the chiefs of this
expeditionary force, and to whom else than himself, Ben Abdi, should the
Major turn for counsel and assistance? The little Goorkha preferred,
however, that it should be thus; that Agar Sahib should say nothing,
merely allowing him to stand silent three paces behind. He was a modest
little man, this Goorkha, and knew the limit of his own capabilities,
which knowledge, by the way, is not always to be found in the hearts of
some of us boasting a fairer skin. He knew that for hard fighting, snugly
concealed behind a rock at two hundred yards, or in the open, with
cunning bayonet or swinging kookery, he was as good as his fellows; but
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