Banked Fires Part 53

"I'll face anything but the loss of my husband's love. What a fool I have been! a blind, childish fool! Why, that affair with Captain Dalton which I exaggerated and worried over, might have been made all right in good time. I ought to have listened to you, and set myself to make Ray so happy that he would have had nothing to forgive! After all, it wasn't as if I was wilfully to blame?"

"I told you that before you went home."

"And it came to me only when I began to fear that I was losing his love!

That was a contingency I never believed possible. He was always so mad about me, spoiling me in every way and treating me as a little queen!

Oh, Honor what a mess I have made of things!"

"Don't do anything in the heat of pa.s.sion, dear," Honor advised thoughtfully. "Remember he has had sunstroke. A man is hardly himself for months after such an illness--sometimes for years. It affects people differently. Some are irritable, some have clouded memories; for the brain is the seat of the trouble."

"Are you trying to prepare me to find Ray insane?" Joyce asked with frightened eyes.

"Not at all. He is as sane as you or I, but his impulses are not so much under control, and his judgment is likely to err since that shock to his brain."

"Then he is not to be held accountable for anything he has done of late?" indignantly.

"You might take all I have said into consideration if you are required to forgive anything he has been weak or foolish enough to have done since his illness."

Joyce laughed bitterly. "I wonder what you would feel inclined to do in my place?"

"Do you really wish to know?"

"I do," said Joyce as a challenge, while drying her eyes.

"The chief thing to be considered, is the future. That must be saved at all costs. A mistake in the present, committed in haste, might affect your future life; and not only yours, but your baby's as well. You are about to deal with baby's daddy as well as your husband, and the whole of your world is looking on. You might take a prejudiced view of things that have occurred. You might, in your anger and humiliation, feel unforgiving towards him, and so, break up your home. I question whether anything ought to weigh against your love for your husband, if in your heart you love him and he loves you."

"Loving me, could he be disloyal?"

Honor hesitated. "It is possible he has been suffering from a clouded mind. Things have not been correctly focussed, as it were. And while in that condition, if he was tempted to drift into actual wrong-doing, I should imagine that self-loathing and remorse would afterwards be a worse punishment for him than you could possibly conceive of. This is presuming he has done anything to be ashamed of. In that case, I could not be harsh. Love always forgives--even to 'seventy times seven.'"

"Honey, you are an idealist! I wonder how many women could exercise so much forbearance! Think of the anger, the humiliation, the resentment!

It is an outrage to one's faith and trust!"

"If you had remained within reach of him so that when he was ill you could have gone to him at once, there would have been nothing to forgive. But for a frivolous reason you put the seas between you and threw his love back into his face. You are also very much to blame,"

said Honor boldly.

Joyce covered her face with her hands and wept silently.

Honor saw her into her train at Sealdah Station the following day, and after an afternoon spent in shopping for her mother, returned to Muktiarbad.

Joyce spent an uncomfortable night in the train on account of the muggy heat which was barely rendered tolerable by electric fans in the compartment, and was glad when the time came to transfer herself and her baggage into the toy railway of the Himalayas, which rattled briskly up the slopes by tortuous tracks into higher alt.i.tudes and cooler climes.

A party of ladies known to each other occupied the same compartment and chattered of all they did in Darjeeling last year, and all they meant to do. Joyce paid little heed while silently watching the changing views as the train wound its way along the mountain sides. The infinite grandeur of Nature on which humanity had set its stamp, thrilled her with wonderment and delight. All personal troubles were forgotten for a while as the glorious scenery unfolded to her vision.

Surely her eyes must have been holden when she saw it a year ago!

Heavy mists sweeping the mountain sides frequently obliterated a picture of purple distances and rugged heights. Anon, there was a blaze of sunlight revealing wooded spurs with zinc-roofed cottages and grey villages nestling on their slopes. Green valleys lay at the foot of frowning precipices, and round many a bend and curve were glimpses of tea gardens with the bushes laid out in serried rows; and c.u.mbrous, zinc-roofed tea factories looking strangely incongruous in their wild and glorious setting.

With a rush of sound, a waterfall would be seen, as a curve was rounded, tumbling over rocks and rus.h.i.+ng under a bridge on its way to join some mighty river in the plains. The plains were often visible, stretching like a grey sea to the horizon, their surface marked by the silver tracery of streams. Now and then, Joyce could catch a glimpse of the Everlasting Snows, with Kinchin-junga, Nursing, and Pundeem, a mighty group glittering in the sunlight in stately magnificence, their peaks inaccessible to man. Beside the road, a stout parapet of boulders covered by ferns and lichen, stood, in places, between the pa.s.sengers and certain death, a thousand feet below; while up the steep banks rose forests of _sal_ and fir, climbing towards the sky.

Wherever there were homesteads perched among the rocks, children of the mountains would run forth like sure-footed goats to view the pa.s.sing train, their round and ruddy cheeks besmeared with dirt and chapped with cold; their flat faces, high cheek bones, and slanting eyes, revealing their Lepcha strain.

And all the while the temperature continued to fall; and the atmosphere grew moist and cold and exhilarating in its freshness.

A block in the line occasioned by a local landslip--a frequent occurrence on the hill-railway--detained the train till the afternoon, at Kurseong, where the pa.s.sengers left their carriages for luncheon at the hotel.

At Sonada, further on, two ladies entered the compartment and audibly discussed certain doings at Darjeeling where they appeared to be residing. When Joyce heard her husband's name, she set herself to listen, determined not to miss a word.

"I suppose she will be there," said one. "Wherever Mr. Meredith goes he manages to get an invitation for her,--and people don't much like it, but there's his position, you know!"

"I know. They are seldom seen apart. A handsome woman in her way, but utterly regardless! Her dress, for instance, at the Shrubbery Ball was indeed up to date--just a band under the armpits for a bodice. I never saw any one off the stage so disgustingly naked!"

"He looks to me rather 'fed up.' And the way she takes charge of him in public requires nerve! he simply falls into line just as if he can't help himself. Got into the habit, so to speak!"

"What are you going to wear tonight?" and the conversation drifted to the Planters' Ball at the Club. The Governor and his wife were expected to be present with their suite, and the house-party from the Shrubbery.

"It is a wonder to me," said the first speaker, "that Mrs. Dalton is received at Government House." Joyce again held her breath.

"Oh, but her position makes that all right. Her husband is an I.M.S.

man, a rising surgeon, somewhere in the plains. They don't get on, but that's n.o.body's business; and in Darjeeling one has to shut one's eyes.

If you begin to point the finger of scorn, you'll be kept fairly busy"

(with a mischievous laugh). "And after all, if her husband doesn't mind, it's n.o.body's business. All the same, she's been cut by a good few, and if he doesn't look out, he'll end in the divorce court--or she will!"

They laughed as at a great joke, and, others listening, smiled in sympathy, while Joyce turned her burning face away.

It seemed that there was no getting away from the story of her husband's shame. But for her having left him, this would never have been!

When the train drew up at the platform of the station in Darjeeling, she pulled herself together and stepped bravely out of her compartment, head erect, and manner perfectly composed. The need to have herself well in hand, gave her strength of mind for the occasion, so that none of her old friends--were she to come unexpectedly upon any--should think her crushed and miserable; a poor, humiliated wife! No! the world should see a laughing face.

As the roads of the Station were very familiar to her, she climbed the path leading to the Cosmopolitan Hotel, at which her husband was staying. It rose by easy stages to a higher level and pa.s.sed by red-brick villas built on the English plan, with pent roofs and homely chimney-pots. In parts the road was clear, in others, heavily shaded by tall firs, through the branches of which could be seen the Snowy Range bathed in the soft afterglow of a lurid sunset. Preceding her was a Lepcha boy from Sikkim, carrying her trunk mountaineer fas.h.i.+on on his back, strapped to his forehead; and it was a mystery how he lifted himself as well as his burden up the short cuts, without pausing to draw breath.

CHAPTER XXV

THE MEETING

While Joyce climbed the road preceded by her Lepcha coolie, a scene of dramatic possibilities was taking place in a room of the hotel to which she was bound.

It was Mr. Meredith's sitting-room, comfortably furnished; a fire was burning cheerfully in the grate, and the actors were himself and Mrs.

Dalton, who had called upon him in a crisis of her affairs.

She was eager and excited, bold, and yet somewhat baffled.