Banked Fires Part 32

"But it is great to have found you! I am so thankful," and she sped to her bicycle and travelled at top speed to the Mission. Mr. Meek could provide the labour at a moment's notice for the work of digging out the imprisoned couple, and to him she went direct.

Immediately the Settlement hummed with activities; coolies swarmed to the spot with pickaxes and spades, crowbars and ropes, and as news flies from village to village with almost the rapidity of "wireless," hundreds of natives gathered at the scene to view operations, the women with infants astride one hip, and naked children swarming around. They camped on the ground chewing _pan_ and parched rice, and chattered incessantly of the mysterious workings of Providence, the folly of humanity, and the decrees of Fate.

The bare-footed, semi-nude rescuers, climbed over the face of the ruins with complete disregard of life and limb, and with wary tread and light touch, began the work of removing the _debris_.

In due course, the rescue was effected, and Joyce was a.s.sisted to climb out of the wrecked chamber to safety. Honor half-supported her to the car which Captain Dalton drove in silence to the Bara Koti. His eyes avoided Honor's and in manner he was quiet and constrained.

"So you never got the souvenir after all!" she said to Joyce when she had heard a disjointed account of the catastrophe.

"I should have hated to look at it again, if I had," was the hysterical reply. "I shan't want to pa.s.s this road again, or get a glimpse of that terrible place as long as I live. I hate India more than ever, and Ray must send me home at once. Otherwise, I shall live in dread of some other calamity befalling either Baby or me. Oh, Honor, persuade him to let me go!"

By the time she was put to bed she was suffering from nervous prostration. Meredith, who had returned from his fruitless search, looked like a man walking in his sleep. His wife had clung to his neck in pa.s.sionate relief, but she had avoided his lips as she had never done before, and a sword seemed to have entered his heart.

"Oh, I am so glad to be back!" she kept repeating, with her babe pressed to her bosom.

"Memsahib habbing one great fright!" commiserated the ayah.

Silent and stunned, Meredith hovered about the room. He had uttered no word of reproach to his wife for her imprudence,--she had suffered enough, mentally and physically; but resentment was fierce within him towards the doctor. The impulse to walk round and horse-whip him for having had the impudence to lead his foolish, but adored girl-wife into such a sc.r.a.pe, was well-nigh unconquerable, and he refrained only for fear that scandalous tongues would give the unhappy event a sinister character.

"Kiss me, Sweet," he once whispered, leaning over her in pa.s.sionate anxiety. He wanted to look deep into her eyes; not to see them fall away from his with a shrinking expression foreign to them.

Joyce offered her cheek.

"Your lips," he commanded.

But Joyce fell to weeping broken-heartedly. Meredith kissed her cheek with a pain at his heart, and turned away.

"Won't you tell me everything?" he asked another time, studying her intently. Normally, he imagined she would have babbled childishly of all her experiences, and have been insatiable in her demands for petting.

Why did she seem crushed and silent as to details? Honor had said the shock would account for her shaken and hysterical state; but it did not explain her strange aloofness.

"You know it all," Joyce returned listlessly, the tears springing to her eyes at his first question as to the experience she had undergone.

"I know the barest outline--and that from Honor Bright. You wanted a particular stone for a souvenir, and in digging it out, the arch collapsed, which brought down a large bit of the roof and a lot more besides. What happened after that? How did you manage to spend the night? It must have been horrible!"

"Some day I may be able to talk about it, but not now," she cried with quivering lips. "It is cruel to question me now."

Meredith leaned back in despair. "I hope Dalton was properly careful of you?" he asked, devoured with jealousy.

"He gave me his coat and his rug, and made cups out of pipal leaves to catch the raindrops as they fell. We were so thirsty," she said monotonously.

"Rather a brainy idea!"

"Please don't recall all that to me. I don't want to think of it!" she cried; and that was all Meredith could learn of the events of that night.

The following day it was discovered that the doctor was suffering from a feverish chill and was confined to bed. By nightfall, it was reported by Jack who had been to visit him, that he was in a high fever, and that the Railway doctor had been called in by the Civil Hospital a.s.sistant for a consultation.

The next day it was known that Captain Dalton was seriously ill with pneumonia; a _loc.u.m_ arrived from headquarters, nurses were telegraphed for, and for some days his life hung in the balance.

Joyce, who still kept her bed with shaken nerves, incapable of interesting herself in her usual pursuits, was startled out of her lethargy at the news. "If he dies, it will be my fault," she cried. "Oh, Honor! I was so cold that he gave me his coat as well as the rug, and did without them himself till morning. He must have taken a chill, for he looked so bad in the dawn."

"He did what any other decent man would have done in his place."

"It was rather surprising of him, considering how fiercely we quarrelled!" and feeling the need of confession, she poured out the whole story of her shame into her friend's ears. "Even now I grow hot with humiliation when I think of it! I cannot understand why he did it, for it was not as if he had fallen in love! Only because he thought I was a--a--flirt, like others he had known."

Honor's face was very white as she listened, silent and stricken.

"I just had to tell you, dear, or the load of it on my mind would have killed me. I feel as if I were guilty of a crime against Ray; and, poor darling, he does not understand what is wrong!"

"Why don't you tell him and get it over? He loves you enough to make the telling easy. And if you love him enough, why, it can only end happily,"

said Honor with an effort.

"There would be a tragedy!--I dare not. Ray would kill him for having dared to insult me like that! You have no idea of what I have been through! Captain Dalton said I was asleep and needed awakening! I have awakened in right earnest and know that I have been a wicked fool. How I long to be loved and forgiven! Oh, Honor! when Ray looks at me so anxiously and lovingly, I just want to be allowed to cry my heart out in his arms and confess everything; but I simply cannot, with this dread of consequences. Nor can I make up to him with this wretched thing on my conscience! Why didn't I listen to you!"

"There is not much use in crying over spilt milk, is there? The best thing you can do is to bury it and be everything to your husband that he wishes. You must try to atone. If you love him----"

"I do! There is no other man in the world so much to me. I did not realise how much I cared till Captain Dalton made me, by his outrageous behaviour! I am not fit for Ray's love after knowing how I have lowered myself!"

"You will not mend matters by creating a misunderstanding between yourself and your husband. What is he to think if you continue to shrink from his caresses?"

"He will think I don't care at all, and that is so untrue!"

"Can't you see that, with your own hand, you are building up a barrier between you which will be difficult to pull down at will?"

"When I am able to tell him all about it, he will understand. At present I feel shamed and degraded. I feel myself a cheat! I, whom he believes a good and virtuous wife, have actually been kissed by a man who thought I was the sort to permit an intrigue! Don't you see, that if I behaved as though nothing wrong had happened, I would be putting myself on a par with Judas?"

Having wrought herself up to the point of hysteria, she was not to be reasoned with.

"How I wish I had never set foot in that dreadful place! It seems, after all, that the devil is really in possession of it, and that disaster overtakes people who enter there."

"Disaster invariably overtakes people who give the devil his chance,"

said Honor unable to resist a smile.

"I dare say you are right. I have been very foolish, for I had no idea of the sort of man I was growing so intimate with. But he was truly sorry, and tried afterwards in a hundred ways to show how he regretted his behaviour. Indeed, I think, on the whole, he received quite a good moral lesson for thinking most women are without any conscience," and Joyce proceeded to relate the sequel of her story, which involved that of the doctor's past.

"It is a most painful history," said Honor gravely.

"And he has never known home-life; his mother was a wicked woman, and was divorced!"

"How pitiful!"

"It quite accounts,--doesn't it?--for his badness?"

"I don't think he is at all bad," Honor said unexpectedly. "He's been badly hit and wants to hit back; that's about what it is. To him women are all alike"--

"Not you!--he said you were, to his mind, the 'exception that proves the rule.'" Joyce interrupted.

Honor coloured as she continued,--"And he has very little respect for the s.e.x. He requires to meet with some good, wholesome examples to set him right, poor fellow!"