Voices in the Night Part 21

'How rude! Isn't it at least as bad for a woman to be burnt,'

challenged a very pretty one, 'as a man?'

'For the woman, no doubt,' replied the brogue drily; 'but in this case the men don't care. Ye see, the Mohammedan paradise is already peopled with _houris_ like yourself, me dear Mrs. Carruthers; so the presence of the s.e.x isn't important enough to fuss about.'

'Of course not!' retorted the little lady gaily, 'because you men know we can always make a Paradise for ourselves.'

'Make; an' mar, me dear madam!'

'Oh! I give you Eve! The woman who is fool enough to think she can keep her husband in one if she gives him a cold lunch of apples, deserves to lose everything.'

'Except her looks! The world can't spare the pretty women!'

So far the lightness of both voices had been charming; but a new one coming from the other side of the table had the heavy acidity in it of wine that should sparkle and does not; for the owner being Mrs.

Carruthers's recognised rival, sinned against the first principles of _badinage_ by importing spite into it.

'Surely that's been said before. Every one knows cooks are the devil; mine is, anyhow!'

'The devil!' echoed little Mrs. Carruthers, eyeing her adversary--whose bad dinners were a byword--with a charming surprise; 'I wonder at _your_ saying so. Why, the devil tempts you, and you do eat; and--and _some_ cooks disgust you, and you don't!'

Her antagonist s protest that the quotation applied to Eve, was lost in the laugh, during which Jack Raymond--who had found it impossible to evade Sir George Arbuthnot's conscientious grat.i.tude for Jerry's rescue as embodied in an invitation to dinner-said to his neighbour--

'You think, Miss Drummond, that we Anglo-Indians talk a lot of rubbish.'

He, himself, had given her small opportunity of judging, for he had been very silent all through the meal; in fact, a trifle sulky. Why, he could not decide, and it had annoyed him that he should be conscious at once of resentment and relief at the etiquette of precedence which sent the secretary to the club so far from the beautiful face at the head of the table. And Lesley, for her part, after the manner of modern girls, had accepted his silence calmly, not troubling herself to amuse one who did not trouble to amuse her; so she had eaten her dinner peacefully, without any reference to her neighbour.

He, however, had been unable to attain this philosophic standard. This indifference of the independent girl of the world, who, conscious of an a.s.sured position even as an unmarried woman, treats man as an unnecessary, if, on the whole a not unpleasant adjunct to a life that is complete without him, was quite new to Jack Raymond, who had not been home for fourteen years. He admired it frankly; felt that it suited her, suited the refined curve of the long throat, the faint droop at the corners of the mouth, the smooth coils of hair. The chill dignity of it all, he realised--for he was a quick judge in such matters--did not mean anything personal. It was not _he_ with whom, as he phrased it, she desired to have no truck, but with the whole creation of such as he; or such, rather, as she chose to consider him.

For it was evident that, despite her almost magisterial calm, she still used the woman's privilege of making her own heroes and villains. In reality, she could know nothing about him! Should he tell her something? The question had occurred to him, and had found answer in his remark.

She answered the challenge with a half-bored smile.

'I suppose you like it; but it does seem odd to an outsider in what is virtually a picked society. And then there is so much to talk about seriously in India.'

'We prefer to think about serious things,' he replied coolly. 'I'll bet you--shall we say your namesake's odds--twenty to one?--that the men round this table do better work for not wasting time in--in _talkee-talkee_.'

'I don't bet,' she said, too disdainful for wider notice of his words.

'So I am aware,' he answered quietly, 'and that reminds me! The five thousand rupees I won off Bonnie Lesley still awaits your instructions.'

'Mine!' she echoed in surprise. 'Why?'

'As to what charity is to profit by my sin. There is one for the regeneration of European reprobates--more commonly called the loafers'

fund, Miss Drummond, which, under the circ.u.mstances, might suit.'

She looked icebergs. 'Thanks, Mr. Raymond; but your eloquence succeeded so absolutely in convincing me I was in no way responsible, that I must decline to interfere. Please do as you choose with your ill-gotten gains.'

He smiled. 'Then the money, being in thousand-rupee notes, shall stay where it is--in my pocket-book. It gives a gambler confidence to know he has some spare cash about him! Besides,' he added hastily, a sudden shrinking in her eyes warning him that he had really pained her, 'it might come in for a good deed.'

'Possibly, not probably,' she began, then explained herself hastily: 'I mean, of course, it is not likely such an occasion will arise----'

'Don't, Miss Drummond,' he interrupted gravely. 'Keep your bad opinion of me undiluted; you can't go wrong there. But don't condemn the lot of us for talking rubbish; there is generally a reason for it.'

'There is generally a reason for most things, I believe,' she said coldly.

Her tone nettled him, and as usual when his temper rose, he went straight to the point.

'Generally,' he admitted; 'but I don't think you allow for these. That lady opposite, for instance, is talking nonsense, all she knows, in order to forget that she sang the hymn for those at sea to-day. The _padre_ had it because his wife and daughter are on their way out, and a bad cyclone was telegraphed yesterday off Socotra. Her only son is in the same boat. Then the man next her,' he went on, for Lesley was listening with faintly startled, faintly distasteful curiosity, 'is trying to forget that the doctors tell him it is a toss up whether he can pull through the next hot weather without leave. He can't afford to take any, with four boys at school and one at the university. Luckily, if he doesn't pull through, his wife--she has been bossing the show at home these five years because the rupees wouldn't run two establishments--will be better off than if he did. Pensions of a hundred, and a hundred and fifty, mount up, you see, when there's ten of a family. Then the pretty woman flirting with the general is trying to forget there is such a thing as a child in the world. She left four at home because they telegraphed that her husband wasn't safe alone. He was in an out-station, and took a double-barrelled gun to shoot locusts. So he said, but his bearer wetted the cartridges, and sent a camel _sowar_ to headquarters for the doctor! He has still to use a hair restorer you'll observe--that's the man over there. Look how he's watching his wife! He has to take her back to the wilderness to-morrow, and I shouldn't wonder if he wasn't thinking himself a fool not to have made sure, for her sake, that his powder was dry! Brain fever plays tricks with a man's reasoning powers, Miss Drummond.'

Lesley's lip curled slightly with the indifferent distaste so many girls have nowadays, for the least sentimentality, the faintest claim on emotion.

'Is it _all_ tragedy?' she began critically.

'All!' he interrupted her cheerfully. 'Even Mrs. Carruthers has one.

They fumigated her last Paris frock at the quarantine station, and took the colour out of it! But that's enough. I don't want to have to find a reason for the nonsense that is in _me_. Are you going to the Artillery sports to-morrow?'

She gave no answer, but she sat looking at him with an appreciative smile. 'You do it very well, though----' she said, then paused. 'I wonder why you gave up the civil service? Lady Arbuthnot told me you did, but she didn't say why. I expect you lost your temper, didn't you?'

It was exactly what he had done, but the only person who had ever told him so before had been Grace Arbuthnot. And she had made it a personal matter; her eyes had given and claimed so much when she told him; while the ones opposite him, now, were absolutely self-absorbed.

'Possibly,' he admitted curtly, nettled by her cool curiosity. 'You can judge for yourself. There was a row in the native city of which I had charge. I fired on the mob. Government thought it was unnecessary, and stopped my promotion. I resigned.

'And the row?' she asked quickly.

'That stopped also, of course. Excuse me, but Lady Arbuthnot has made the move.'

Lesley stood up, tall, slender, almost conventual in her clinging white dress, in the reserved yet absolutely self-reliant look on her face.

But she paused, ere leaving him, to say judicially--

'Then that proves that you were right to fire; and if you were in the right, as you were, when----?'

'Are you not coming, Lesley? You can finish your discussion afterwards,' came Lady Arbuthnot's voice in a half-playful, half-impatient appeal, as she stopped beside them to include the girl in the contingent she was marshalling towards the door. The servants had gone. From one end to the other of the big room there was no hint or sign of the east. It might have been a London dinner-party. Grace herself, in her pale green draperies and flas.h.i.+ng diamonds, might have been the London hostess whose only care was to get rid of her guests gracefully and so find freedom to be one herself, elsewhere.

'It is my fault,' put in Jack Raymond quickly. 'It is so seldom any one tells me I do right, that I must be excused for delaying a young lady who is kind enough to perjure herself to say so.'

'I didn't perjure myself,' said Lesley, with a frown. 'I don't as a rule. I really think you were right.'

He knew, absolutely, that her praise was--as her blame had been--quite impersonal, that he was forgotten in her sense of abstract justice and injustice, but he appropriated the commendation with a bow, because he felt that to do so was a challenge to both the women before him; to Grace, of the older type, with her cult of sentiment deliberately overlaying her intellect, and Lesley, of the newer type, with her dislike to sentimentality as deliberately overlaying her heart. He felt, with a certain irritation, that there ought to be some middle standpoint, as he said--

'Thank you, Miss Drummond!'

Lady Arbuthnot recognised the personal challenge instantly.

'What was the virtue, Lesley?' she asked proudly.

'Only firing on a mob,' he answered for the girl. 'It is lucky, Lady Arbuthnot, that I have no chance of doing so again, or the consequences of Miss Drummond's approval might be more disastrous than that of other people's blame.'

The sense of something uncomprehended, coming to Lesley uncomfortably, as it always comes, made her forbear to squash the maker of the bow, and say hastily in half-unconscious effort after the purely commonplace--

'Then I hope there won't be a chance; but one can never tell, can one?'