Читать книгу On the Face of the Waters: A Tale of the Mutiny - Flora Annie Webster Steel - Страница 18

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The Gissings' house stood in a large garden; but though it was wreathed with creepers, and set with flowers after the manner of flowerful Lucknow, there was no cult of pansies or such like English treasures here. It was gay with that acclimatized tangle of poppies and larkspur, marigold, mignonette, and corn cockles which Indian gardeners love to sow broadcast in their cartwheel mud-beds; "powder of flowers" they call the mixed seeds they save for it from year to year.

In the big dark dining room also--where Alice Gissing, looking half her years in starch, white muslin, and blue ribbons, sat at the head of the table--there was no cult of England. Everything was frankly, stanchly of the nabob and pagoda-tree style; for the Gissings preferred India, where they were received into society, to England, where they would have been out of it.

It had been one those heavy luncheons, beginning with many meats and much bottled beer, ending with much madeira and many cigars, which sent the insurance rate for India up to war risks in those days.

And there was never any scarcity of the best beer at the Gissings', seeing that he had the contract for supplying it to the British troops. His wife, however, preferred solid-looking porter with a creamy head to it, and a heavy odor which lingered about her pretty smiling lips. It was a most incongruous drink for one of her appearance; but it never seemed to affect either her gay little body or gay little brain; the one remained youthful, slender, the other brightly, uncompromisingly clear.

She had been married twice. Once in extreme youth to a clerk in the Opium Department, who owed the good looks which had attracted her to a trace of dark blood. Then she had chosen wealth in the person of Mr. Gissing. Had he died, she would probably have married for position; since she had a catholic taste for the amenities of life. But he had not died, and she had lived with him for ten years in good-natured toleration of all his claims upon her. As a matter of fact, they did not affect her in the least, and in her clear, high voice, she used to wonder openly why other women worried over matrimonial troubles or fussed over so slight an encumbrance as a husband. In a way she felt equal to more than one, provided they did not squabble over her. That was unpleasant, and she not only liked things to be pleasant, but had the knack of making them so; both to the man whose name she bore, and whose house she used as a convenient spot wherein to give luncheon parties, and to the succession of admirers who came to them and drank her husband's beer.

He was a vulgar creature, but an excellent business man, with a knack of piling up the rupees which made the minor native contractors, whose trade he was gradually absorbing, gnash their teeth in sheer envy. For the Western system of risking all to gain all was too much opposed to the Eastern one of risking nothing to gain little for the hereditary merchants to adopt it at once. They have learned the trick of fence and entered the lists successfully since then; but in 1856 the foe was new. So they fawned on the shrewd despoiler instead, and curried favor by bringing his wife fruits and sweets, with something costlier hidden in the oranges or sugar drops. Alice Gissing accepted everything with a smile; for her husband was not a Government servant. The contracts, however, being for Government supplies, the givers did not discriminate the position so nicely. They used to complain that the Sirkar robbed them both ways, much to Mr. Gissing's amusement, who, as a method of self-glorification, would allude to it at the luncheon parties where many men used to come. Men who, between the intervals of badinage with the gay little hostess, could talk with authority on most affairs. They did not bring their wives with them, but Alice Gissing did not seem to mind; she did not get on with women.

"So they complain I rob them, do they?" he said loudly, complacently, to the men on either side of him. "My dear Colonel! an Englishman is bound to rob a native if that means creaming the market, for they haven't been educated, sir, on those sound commercial principles which have made England the first nation in the world. Take this flour contract they are howling about. I'm beer by rights, of course, and, by George, I'm proud of it. Your men, Colonel, can't do without beer; England can't do without soldiers; so my business is sound. But why shouldn't I have my finger in any other pie which holds money? These hereditary fools think I shouldn't, and they were trying a ring, sir. Ha! ha! an absurd upside-down d----d Oriental ring based on utterly rotten principles. You can't keep up the price of a commodity because your grandfather got that price. They ignored the facility of transport given by roads, etc., ignored the right of government to benefit--er--slightly--by these outlays. Commerce isn't a selfish thing, sir, by gad. If you don't consider your market a bit, you won't find one at all. So I stepped in, and made thousands; for the Commissariat, seeing the saving here, of course asked me to contract for other places. It serves the idiots uncommon well right; but it will benefit them in the end. If they're to face Western nations they must learn--er--the--the morality of speculation." He paused, helped himself to another glass of madeira, and added in an unctuous tone, "but till they do, India's a good place."

"Is that Gissing preaching morality?" asked his wife, in her clear, high voice. The men at her end of the table had had their share of her; those others might be getting bored by her husband.

"Only the morality of business," put in a coarse-looking fellow who, having been betwixt and between the conversations, had been drinking rather heavily. "There's no need for you to join the ladies as yet, Mrs. Gissing."

Major Erlton, at her right hand, scowled, and the boy on her left flushed up to the eyes. He was her latest admirer, and was still in the stage when she seemed an angel incarnate. Only the day before he had wanted to call out a cynical senior who had answered his vehement wonder as to how a woman like she was could have married a little beast like Gissing, with the irreverent suggestion that it might be because the name rhymed with kissing.

In the present instance she heeded neither the scowl nor the flush, and her voice came calmly. "I don't intend to, doctor. I mean to send you into the drawing room instead. That will be quite as effectual to the proprieties."

Amid the laugh, Major Erlton found opportunity for an admiring whisper. She had got the brute well above the belt that time. But the boy's flush deepened; he looked at his goddess with pained, perplexed eyes.

"The morality of speculation or gambling," retorted the doctor, speaking slowly and staring at the delighted Major angrily, "is the art of winning as much money as you can--conveniently. That reminds me, Erlton; you must have raked in a lot over that match."

A sudden dull red showed on the face whose admiration Alice was answering by a smile.

"I won a lot, also," she interrupted hastily, "thanks to your tip, Erlton. You never forget your friends."

"No one could forget you--there is no merit----" began the boy hastily, then pausing before the publicity of his own words, and bewildered by the smile now given to him. Herbert Erlton noted the fact sullenly. He knew that for the time being all the little lady's personal interest was his; but he also knew that was not nearly so much as he gave her. And he wanted more, not understanding that if she had had more to give she would probably have been less generous than she was; being of that class of women who sin because the sin has no appreciable effect on them. It leaves them strangely, inconceivably unsoiled. This imperviousness, however, being, as a rule, considered the man's privilege only, Major Erlton failed to understand the position, and so, feeling aggrieved, turned on the lad.

"I'll remember you the next time if you like, Mainwaring," he said, "but someone has to lose in every game. I'd grasped that fact before I was your age, and made up my mind it shouldn't be me."

"Sound commercial morality!" laughed another guest. "Try it, Mainwaring, at the next Gymkhâna. By the way, I hear that professional, Greyman, is off, so amateurs will have a chance now; he was a devilish fine rider."

"Rode a devilish fine horse, too," put in the unappeased doctor. "You bought it, Erlton, in spite----"

"Yes! for fifteen hundred," interrupted the Major, in unmistakable defiance. "A long price, but there was hanky-panky in that match. Greyman tried fussing to cover it. You never can trust professionals. However, I and my friends won, and I shall win again with the horse. Take you evens in gold mohurs for the next----"

There was always a sledge-hammer method in the Major's fence, and the subject dropped.

The room was heavy with the odors of meats and drinks. Dark as it was, the flood of sunshine streaming into the veranda outside, where yellow hornets were buzzing and the servants washing up the dishes, sent a glare even into the shadows. Neither the furniture nor appointments of the room owed anything to the East--for Indian art was, so to speak, not as yet invented for English folk--yet there was a strange unkennedness about their would-be familiarity which suddenly struck the latest exile, young Mainwaring.

"India is a beastly hole," he said, in an undertone--"things are so different--I wish I were out of it." There was a note of appeal in his young voice; his eyes, meeting Alice Gissing's, filled with tears to his intense dismay. He hoped she might not see them; but she did, and leaned over to lay one kindly be-ringed little hand on the table quite close to his.

"You've got liver," she said confidentially. "India is quite a nice place. Come to the assembly to-night, and I will give you two extras--whole ones. And don't drink any more madeira, there is a good boy. Come and have coffee with me in the drawing room instead; that will set you right."

Less has set many a boy hopelessly wrong. To do Alice Gissing justice, however, she never recognized such facts; her own head being quite steady. But Major Erlton understood the possible results perfectly, and commented on them when, as a matter of course, his long length remained lounging in an easy-chair after the other guests had gone, and Mr. Gissing had retired to business. People, from the Palais Royale playwrights, downward--or upward--always poke fun at the husbands in such situations; but no one jibes at the man who succeeds to the cut-and-dried necessity for devotion. Yet there is surely something ridiculous in the spectacle of a man playing a conjugal part without even a sense of duty to give him dignity in it, and the curse of the commonplace comes as quickly to Abelard and Heloise as it does to Darby and Joan. So Major Erlton, lounging and commenting, might well have been Mrs. Gissing's legal owner. "Going to make a fool of that lad now, I suppose, Allie. Why the devil should you when you don't care for boys?"

She came to a stand in front of him like a child, her hands behind her back, but her china-blue eyes had a world of shrewdness in them. "Don't I? Do you think I care for men either? I don't. You just amuse me, and I've got to be amused. By the way, did you remember to order the cart at five sharp? I want to go round the Fair before the Club."

If they had been married ten times over, their spending the afternoon together could not have been more of a foregone conclusion; there seemed, indeed, no choice in the matter. And they were prosaically punctual, too; at "five sharp" they climbed into the high dog-cart boldly, in face of a whole posse of servants dressed in the nabob and pagoda-tree style, also with silver crests in their pith turbans and huge monograms on their breastplates; old-fashioned servants with the most antiquated notions as to the needs of the sahib logue, and a fund of passive resentment for the least change in the inherited routine of service. Changes which they referred to the fact that the new-fangled sahibs were not real sahibs. But the heavy, little and big breakfasts, the unlimited beer, the solid dinners, the milk punch and brandy pâni, all had their appointed values in the Gissings' house; so the servants watched their mistress with approving smiles. And on Mondays there was always a larger posse than usual to see the old Mai, who had been Alice Gissing's ayah for years and years, hand up the bouquet which the gardener always had ready, and say, "My salaams to the missy-baba." Mrs. Gissing used to take the flowers just as she took her parasol or her gloves. Then she would say, "All right," partly to the ayah, partly to her cavalier, and the dog-cart, or buggy, or mail-phaeton, whichever it happened to be, would go spinning away. For the old Mai had handed the flowers into many different turn-outs and remained on the steps ready with the authority of age and long service, to crush any frivolous remarks newcomers might make. But the destination of the bouquet was always the same; and that was to stand in a peg tumbler at the foot of a tiny white marble cross in the cemetery. Mrs. Gissing put a fresh offering in it every Monday, going through the ceremony with a placid interest; for the date on the cross was far back in the years. Still, she used to speak of the little life which had come and gone from hers when she was yet a child herself, with a certain self-possessed plaintiveness born of long habit.

"I was barely seventeen," she would say, "and it was a dear little thing. Then Saumarez was transferred, and I never returned to Lucknow till I married Gissing. It was odd, wasn't it, marrying twice to the same station. But, of course, I can't ask him to come here, so it is doubly kind of you; for I couldn't come alone, it is so sad."

Her blue eyes would be limpid with actual tears; yet as she waited for the return of the tumbler, which the watchman always had to wash out, she looked more like some dainty figure on a cracker than a weeping Niobe. Nevertheless, the admirers whom she took in succession into her confidence thought it sweet and womanly of her never to have forgotten the dead baby, though they rather admired her dislike to live ones. Some of them, when their part in the weekly drama came upon them, as it always did in the first flush of their fancy for the principal actress in it, began by being quite sentimental over it. Herbert Erlton did. He went so far once as to bring an additional bouquet of pansies from his wife's pet bed; but the little lady had looked at it with plaintive distrust. "Pansies withered so soon," she said, "and as the bouquet had to last a whole week, something less fragile was better." Indeed, the gardener's bouquets, compact, hard, with the blossoms all jammed into little spots of color among the protruding sprigs of privet, were more suited to her calm permanency of regret, than the passionate purple posy which had looked so pathetically out of place in the big man's coarse hands. She had taken it from him, however, and strewn the already drooping flowers about the marble. They looked pretty, she had said, though the others were best, as she liked everything to be tidy; because she had been very, very fond of the poor little dear. Saumarez had never been kind, and it had been so pretty; dark, like its father, who had been a very handsome man. She had cried for days, then, though she didn't like children now. But she would always remember this one, always! The old Mai and she often talked of it; especially when she was dressing for a ball, because the gardener brought bouquets for them also.

Major Erlton, therefore, gave no more pansies, and his sentiment died down into a sort of irritable wonder what the little woman would be at. The unreality of it all struck him afresh on this particular Monday: as he watched her daintily removing the few fallen petals; so he left her to finish her task while he walked about. The cemetery was a perfect garden of a place, with rectangular paths bordered by shrubs which rose from a tangle of annual flowers like that around the Gissings' house. This blossoming screen hid the graves for the most part; but in the older portions great domed erections--generally safeguarding an infant's body--rose above it more like summer-houses than tombs. Herbert Erlton preferred this part of the cemetery. It was less suggestive than the newer portion, and he was one of those wholesome, hearty animals to whom the very idea of death is horrible. So hither, after a time, she came, stepping daintily over the graves, and pausing an instant on the way to add a sprig of mignonette to the rosebud she had brought from a bush beside the cross; it was a fine, healthy bush which yielded a constant supply of buds suitable for buttonholes. She looked charming, but he met her with a perplexed frown.

"I've been wondering, Allie," he said, "what you would have been like if that baby had lived. Would you have cared for it?"

Her eyes grew startled. "But I do care for it! Why should I come if I didn't? It isn't amusing, I'm sure; so I think it very unkind of you to suggest----"

"I never suggested anything," he protested. "I know you did--that you do care. But if it had lived----" he paused as if something escaped his mental grasp. "Why, I expect you would have been different somehow; and I was wondering----"

"Oh! don't wonder, please, it's a bad habit," she replied, suddenly appeased. "You will be wondering next if I care for you. As if you didn't know that I do."

She was pinning the buttonhole into his coat methodically, and he could not refuse an answering smile; but the puzzled look remained. "I suppose you do, or you wouldn't----" he began slowly. Then a sudden emotion showed in face and voice. "You slip from me somehow, Allie--slip like an eel. I never get a real hold---- Well! I wonder if women understand themselves? They ought to, for nobody else can, that's one comfort." Whether he meant he was no denser than previous recipients of rosebuds, or that mankind benefited by failing to grasp feminine standards, was not clear. And Mrs. Gissing was more interested in the fact that the mare was growing restive. So they climbed into the high dog-cart again, and took her a quieting spin down the road. The fresh wind of their own speed blew in their faces, the mare's feet scarcely seemed to touch the ground, the trees slipped past quickly, the palm-squirrels fled chirruping. He flicked his whip gayly at them in boyish fashion as he sat well back, his big hand giving to the mare's mouth. Hers lay equably in her lap, though the pace would have made most women clutch at the rail.

"Jolly little beasts; aint they, Allie?"

"Jolly altogether; jolly as it can be," she replied with the frank delight of a girl. They had forgotten themselves innocently enough; but one of the men in a dog-cart, past which they had flashed, put on an outraged expression.

"Erlton and Mrs. Gissing again!" he fussed. "I shall tell my wife to cut her. Being in business ourselves we have tried to keep square. But this is an open scandal. I wonder Mrs. Erlton puts up with it. I wouldn't."

His companion shook his head. "Dangerous work, saying that. Wait till you are a woman. I know more about them than most, being a doctor, so I never venture on an opinion. But, honestly, I believe most women--that little one ahead into the bargain--don't care a button one way or the other. And, for all our talk, I don't believe we do either, when all is said and done."

"What is said and done?" asked the other peevishly.

There was a pause. The lessening dog-cart with its flutter of ribbons, its driver sitting square to his work, showed on the hard white road which stretched like a narrowing ribbon over the empty plain. Far ahead a little devil of wind swept the dust against the blue sky like a cloud. Nearer at hand lay a cluster of mud hovels, and--going toward it before the dog-cart--a woman was walking along the dusty side of the road. She had a bundle of grass on her head, a baby across her hip, a toddling child clinging to her skirts. The afternoon sun sent the shadows conglomerately across the white metal.

"Passion, Love, Lust, the attractions of sex for sex--what you will," said the doctor, breaking the silence. "Nothing is easier knocked out of a man, if he is worth calling one--a bugle call, a tight corner---- God Almighty!--they're over that child! Drive on like the devil, man, and let me see what I can do."

There is never much to do when all has been done in an instant. There had been a sudden causeless leaving of the mother's side, a toddling child among the shadows, a quick oath, a mad rear as the mare, checked by hands like a vise for strength, snapped the shafts as if they had been straws. No delay, no recklessness; but one of these iron-shod hoofs as it flung out had caught the child full on the temple, and there was no need to ask what that curved blue mark meant, which had gone crashing into the skull.

Alice Gissing had leaped from the dog-cart and stood looking at the pitiful sight with wide eyes.

"We couldn't do anything," she said in an odd hard voice, as the others joined her. "There was nothing we could do. Tell the woman, Herbert, that we couldn't help it."

But the Major, making the still plunging mare a momentary excuse for not facing the ghastly truth, had, after one short, sharp exclamation--almost of fear, turned to help the groom. So there was no sound for a minute save the plunging of hoofs on the hard ground, the groom's cheerful voice lavishing endearments on his restless charge, and a low animal-like whimper from the mother, who, after one wild shriek, had sunk down in the dust beside the dead child, looking at the purple bruise dully, and clasping her living baby tighter to her breast. For it, thank the gods! was the boy. That one with the mark on its forehead only the girl.

Then the doctor, who had been busy with deft but helpless hands, rose from his knees, saying a word or two in Hindustani which provoked a whining reply from the woman.

"She admits it was no one's fault," he said. "So Erlton, if you will take our dog-cart----"

But the Major had faced the position by this time. "I can't go. She is a camp follower, I expect, and I shall have to find out--for compensation and all that. If you would take Mrs. Gissing----" His voice, steady till then, broke perceptibly over the name; its owner looked up sharply, and going over to him laid her hand on his arm.

"It wasn't your fault," she said, still in that odd hard voice. "You had the mare in hand; she didn't stir an inch. It is a dreadful thing to happen, but"--she threw her head back a little, her wide eyes narrowed as a frown puckered her smooth forehead--"it isn't as if we could have prevented it. The thing had to be."

She might have been the incarnation of Fate itself as she glanced down at the dead child in the dust, at the living one reaching from its mother's arms to touch its sister curiously, at the slow tears of the mother herself as she acquiesced in the eternal fitness of things; for a girl more or less was not much in the mud hovel, where she and her man lived hardly, and the Huzoors would doubtless give rupees in exchange, for they were just. She wept louder, however, when with conventional wailing the women from the clustering huts joined her, while the men, frankly curious, listened to the groom's spirited description of the incident.

"You had better go, Allie; you do no good here," said the Major almost roughly. He was anxious to get through with it all; he was absorbed in it.

So the man who had said he was going to tell his wife to cut Mrs. Gissing had to help her into the dog-cart.

"It was horrible, wasn't it?" she said suddenly when, in silence, they had left the little tragedy far behind them. "We were going an awful pace, but you saw he had the mare in hand. He is awfully strong, you know." She paused, and a reflectively complacent smile stole to her face. "I suppose you will think it horrid," she went on; "but it doesn't feel to me like killing a human being, you know. I'm sorry, of course, but I should have been much sorrier if it had been a white baby. Wouldn't you?"

She set aside his evasion remorselessly. "I know all that! People say, of course, that it is wicked not to feel the same toward people whether they're black or white. But we don't. And they don't either. They feel just the same about us because we are white. Don't you think they do?"

"The antagonism of race----" he began sententiously, but she cut him short again. This time with an irrelevant remark.

"I wonder what your wife would say if she saw me driving in your dog-cart?"

He stared at her helplessly. The one problem was as unanswerable as the other.

"You had better drive round the back way to the Fair," she said considerately. "Somebody there will take me off your hands. Otherwise you will have to drive me to the Club; for I'm not going home. It would be dreadful after that horrid business. Besides, the Fair will cheer me up. One doesn't understand it, you know, and the people crowd along like figures on a magic lantern slide. I mean that you never know what's coming next, and that is always so jolly, isn't it?"

It might be, but the man with the wife felt relieved when, five minutes afterward, she transferred herself to young Mainwaring's buggy. The boy, however, felt as if an angel had fluttered down from the skies to the worn, broken-springed cushion beside him; an angel to be guarded from humanity--even her own.

"How the beggars stare," he said after they had walked the horse for a space through the surging crowds. "Let us get away from the grinning apes." He would have liked to take her to paradise and put flaming swords at the gate.

"They don't grin," she replied curtly, "they stare like Bank-holiday people stare at the wild beasts in the Zoo. But let us get away from the watered road, the policemen, and all that. That's no fun. See, go down that turning into the middle of it; you can get out that way to the river road afterward if you like."

The bribe was sufficient; it was not far across to peace and quiet, so the turn was made. Nor was the staring worse in the irregular lane of booths and stalls down which they drove. The unchecked crowd was strangely silent despite the numberless children carried shoulder high to see the show, and though the air was full of throbbings of tomtoms, twanging of sutaras, intermittent poppings and fizzings of squibs. But it was also strangely insistent; going on its way regardless of the shouting groom.

"Take care," said Mrs. Gissing lightly, "don't run over another child. By the way, I forgot to tell you--the Fair was so funny--but Erlton ran over a black baby. It wasn't his fault a bit, and the mother, luckily, didn't seem to mind; because it was a girl, I expect. Aren't they an odd people? One really never knows what will make them cry or laugh."

Something was apparently amusing them at that moment, however, for a burst of boisterous merriment pealed from a dense crowd near a booth pitched in an open space.

"What's that?" she cried sharply. "Let's go and see."

She was out of the dog-cart as she spoke despite his protest that it was impossible--that she must not venture.

"Do you imagine they'll murder me?" she asked with an insouciant, incredulous laugh. "What nonsense! Here, good people, let me pass, please!"

She was by this time in the thick of the crowd, which gave way instinctively, and he could do nothing but follow; his boyish face stern with the mere thought her idle words had conjured up. Do her any injury? Her dainty dress should not even be touched if he could help it.

But the sightseers, most of them peasants beguiled from their fields for this Festival of Spring, had never seen an English lady at such close quarters before, if, indeed, they had ever seen one at all. So, though they gave way they closed in again, silent but insistent in their curiosity; while, as the center of attraction came nearer, the crowd in front became denser, more absorbed in the bursts of merriment. There was a ring of license in them which made young Mainwaring plead hurriedly:

"Mrs. Gissing!--don't--please don't."

"But I want to see what they're laughing at," she replied. And then in perfect mimicry of the groom's familiar cry, her high clear voice echoed over the heads in front of her: "Hut! Hut! Ari bhaiyan! Hut!"

They turned to see her gay face full of smiles, joyous, confident, sympathetic, and the next minute the cry was echoed with approving grins from a dozen responsive throats.

"Stand back, brothers! Stand back!"

There were quick hustlings to right and left, quick nods and smiles, even broad laughs full of good fellowship; so that she found herself at the innermost circle with clear view of the central space, of the cause of the laughter. It made her give a faint gasp and stand transfixed. Two white-masked figures, clasped waist to waist, were waltzing about tipsily. One had a curled flaxen wig, a muslin dress distended by an all too visible crinoline, giving full play to a pair of prancing brown legs. The other wore an old staff uniform, cocked hat and feather complete. The flaxen curls rested on the tarnished epaulet, the unembracing arms flourished brandy bottles.

It was a vile travesty; and the Englishwoman turned instinctively to the Englishman as if doubtful what to do, how to take it. But the passion of his boyish face seemed to make things clear--to give her the clew, and she gripped his hand hard.

"Don't be a fool!" she whispered fiercely. "Laugh. It's the only thing to do." Her own voice rang out shrill above the uncertain stir in the crowd, taken aback in its merriment.

But something else rose above it also. A single word:

"Bravo!"

She turned like lightning to the sound, her cheeks for the first time aflame, but she could see no one in the circle of dark faces whom she could credit with the exclamation. Yet she felt sure she had heard it.

"Bravo!" Had it been said in jest or earnest, in mockery or---- Young Mainwaring interrupted the problem by suggesting that as the maskers had run away into a booth, where he could not follow and give them the licking they deserved because of her presence, it might be as well for her to escape further insult by returning to the buggy. His tone was as full of reproach as that of a lad in love could be, but Mrs. Gissing was callous. She declared she was glad to have seen it. Englishmen did drink and Englishwomen waltzed. Why, then, shouldn't the natives poke fun at both habits if they chose? They themselves could laugh at other things. And laugh she did, recklessly, at everything and everybody for the remainder of the drive. But underneath her gayety she was harping on that "Bravo!" And suddenly as they drove by the river she broke in on the boy's prattle to say excitedly: "I have it! It must have been the one in the Afghan cap who said 'Bravo!' He was fairer than the rest. Perhaps he was an Englishman disguised. Well! I should know him again if I saw him."

"Him? who--what? Who said bravo?" asked the lad. He had been too angry to notice the exclamation at the time.

She looked at him quizzically. "Not you--you abused me. But someone did--or didn't"--here her little slack hands resting in her lap clasped each other tightly. "I rather wish I knew. I'd rather like to make him say it again. Bravo! Bravo!"

And then, as if at her own mimicry, she returned to her childish unreasoning laugh.