Stories by English Authors: The Orient Part 13

She had lost command over her voice, and the shrill note of horror in it was unmistakable. The man heard it, and shrank in his turn.

"I'm so sorry, John," she murmured, raising her great bright eyes to his face. They had not lost their goaded expression, though they were full of tears. "I'm awfully sorry; but I'm just nervous and stupid, and I can't bear _any one_ to touch me when I'm nervous."

"Here's Broomhurst, my dear! I made a mistake in his name after all, I find. I told you _Brookfield_, I believe, didn't I? Well, it isn't Brookfield, he says; it's Broomhurst."

Mrs. Drayton had walked some little distance across the plain to meet and welcome the expected guest. She stood quietly waiting while her husband stammered over his incoherent sentences, and then put out her hand.

"We are very glad to see you," she said, with a quick glance at the new-comer's face as she spoke.

As they walked together toward the tent, after the first greetings, she felt his keen eyes upon her before he turned to her husband.

"I'm afraid Mrs. Drayton finds the climate trying?" he asked. "Perhaps she ought not to have come so far in this heat?"

"Kathie is often pale. You _do_ look white to-day, my dear," he observed, turning anxiously toward his wife.

"Do I?" she replied. The unsteadiness of her tone was hardly appreciable, but it was not lost on Broomhurst's quick ears. "Oh, I don't think so. I _feel_ very well."

"I'll come and see if they've fixed you up all right," said Drayton, following his companion toward the new tent that had been pitched at some little distance from the large one.

"We shall see you at dinner then?" Mrs. Drayton observed in reply to Broomhurst's smile as they parted.

She entered the tent slowly, and, moving up to the table already laid for dinner, began to rearrange the things upon it in a purposeless, mechanical fas.h.i.+on.

After a moment she sank down upon a seat opposite the open entrance, and put her hand to her head.

"What is the matter with me?" she thought, wearily. "All the week I've been looking forward to seeing this man--_any_ man, _any one_ to take off the edge of this." She shuddered. Even in thought she hesitated to a.n.a.lyse the feeling that possessed her. "Well, he's here, and I think I feel _worse_." Her eyes travelled toward the hills she had been used to watch at this hour, and rested on them with a vague, unseeing gaze.

"Tired Kathie? A penny for your thoughts, my dear," said her husband, coming in presently to find her still sitting there.

"I'm thinking what a curious world this is, and what an ironical vein of humour the G.o.ds who look after it must possess," she replied, with a mirthless laugh, rising as she spoke.

John looked puzzled.

"Funny my having known Broomhurst before, you mean?" he said doubtfully.

"I was fis.h.i.+ng down at Lynmouth this time last year," Broomhurst said at dinner. "You know Lynmouth, Mrs. Drayton? Do you never imagine you hear the gurgling of the stream? I am tantalised already by the sound of it rus.h.i.+ng through the beautiful green gloom of those woods--_aren't_ they lovely? And _I_ haven't been in this burnt-up spot as many hours as you've had months of it."

She smiled a little.

"You must learn to possess your soul in patience," she said, and glanced inconsequently from Broomhurst to her husband, and then dropped her eyes and was silent a moment.

John was obviously, and a little audibly, enjoying his dinner. He sat with his chair pushed close to the table, and his elbows awkwardly raised, swallowing his soup in gulps. He grasped his spoon tightly in his bony hand, so that its swollen joints stood out larger and uglier than ever, his wife thought.

Her eyes wandered to Broomhurst's hands. They were well shaped, and, though not small, there was a look of refinement about them; he had a way of touching things delicately, a little lingeringly, she noticed.

There was an air of distinction about his clear-cut, clean-shaven face, possibly intensified by contrast with Drayton's blurred features; and it was, perhaps, also by contrast with the gray cuffs that showed beneath John's ill-cut drab suit that the linen Broomhurst wore seemed to her particularly spotless.

Broomhurst's thoughts, for his part, were a good deal occupied with his hostess.

She was pretty, he thought, or perhaps it was that, with the wide, dry lonely plain as a setting, her fragile delicacy of appearance was invested with a certain flower-like charm.

"The silence here seems rather strange, rather appalling at first, when one is fresh from a town," he pursued, after a moment's pause; "but I suppose you're used to it, eh, Drayton? How do _you_ find life here, Mrs. Drayton?" he asked, a little curiously, turning to her as he spoke.

She hesitated a second. "Oh, much the same as I should find it anywhere else, I expect," she replied; "after all, one carries the possibilities of a happy life about with one; don't you think so? The Garden of Eden wouldn't necessarily make my life any happier, or less happy, than a howling wilderness like this. It depends on one's self entirely."

"Given the right Adam and Eve, the desert blossoms like the rose, in fact," Broomhurst answered, lightly, with a smiling glance inclusive of husband and wife; "you two don't feel as though you'd been driven out of Paradise, evidently."

Drayton raised his eyes from his plate with a smile of total incomprehension.

"Great heavens! what an Adam to select!" thought Broomhurst, involuntarily, as Mrs. Drayton rose rather suddenly from the table.

"I'll come and help with that packing-case," John said, rising, in his turn, lumberingly from his place; "then we can have a smoke--eh! Kathie don't mind, if we sit near the entrance."

The two men went out together, Broomhurst holding the lantern, for the moon had not yet risen. Mrs. Drayton followed them to the doorway, and, pus.h.i.+ng the looped-up hanging farther aside, stepped out into the cool darkness.

Her heart was beating quickly, and there was a great lump in her throat that frightened her as though she were choking.

"And I am his _wife_--I _belong_ to him!" she cried, almost aloud.

She pressed both her hands tightly against her breast, and set her teeth, fighting to keep down the rising flood that threatened to sweep away her composure. "Oh, what a fool I am! What an hysterical fool of a woman I am!" she whispered below her breath. She began to walk slowly up and down outside the tent, in the s.p.a.ce illumined by the lamplight, as though striving to make her outwardly quiet movements react upon the inward tumult. In a little while she had conquered; she quietly entered the tent, drew a low chair to the entrance, and took up a book, just as footsteps became audible. A moment afterward Broomhurst emerged from the darkness into the circle of light outside, and Mrs. Drayton raised her eyes from the pages she was turning to greet him with a smile.

"Are your things all right?"

"Oh, yes, more or less, thank you. I was a little concerned about a case of books, but it isn't much damaged fortunately. Perhaps I've some you would care to look at?"

"The books will be a G.o.dsend," she returned, with a sudden brightening of the eyes; "I was getting _desperate_--for books."

"What are you reading now?" he asked, glancing at the volume that lay in her lap.

"It's a Browning. I carry it about a good deal. I think I like to have it with me, but I don't seem to read it much."

"Are you waiting for a suitable optimistic moment?" Broomhurst inquired, smiling.

"Yes, now that you mention it, I think that must be why I am waiting,"

she replied, slowly.

"And it doesn't come--even in the Garden of Eden? Surely the serpent, pessimism, hasn't been insolent enough to draw you into conversation with him?" he said, lightly.

"There has been no one to converse with at all--when John is away, I mean. I think I should have liked a little chat with the serpent immensely by way of a change," she replied, in the same tone.

"Ah, yes," Broomhurst said, with sudden seriousness; "it must be unbearably dull for you alone here, with Drayton away all day."

Mrs. Drayton's hand shook a little as she fluttered a page of her open book.

"I should think it quite natural you would be irritated beyond endurance to hear that all's right with the world, for instance, when you were sighing for the long day to pa.s.s," he continued.