Читать книгу Designing Fate - John Sandes - Страница 3

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"A bad business, my boy; a very bad business. I cannot tell you how sorry I am for you."

The old colonel stroked his white moustache and stared abstractedly at the matting. The clock on the mantelpiece of the colonel's working room in the bungalow ticked on, and the young man with the blue eyes, brown curly hair, and soldierly figure said never a word. His face was very grey, and there was a whole world of suffering in his eyes.

"When you were attached to the regiment for training, just a year ago, McLean," continued the old colonel, "I looked up your Australian record, and I was proud of you. Your dead father was one of my oldest friends, and I rejoiced for his sake in your successful career. Colonel Blakeway, your commanding officer, was at Sandhurst with me many years ago, and when he wrote to me suggesting your name as that of an Australian subaltern to be attached to the regiment for training, I immediately assented. I felt sure that it would have pleased your dead father if he could have known that his son was serving the Queen under myself."

Something like a dry sob escaped from the soldierly young officer, but he quickly mastered himself.

"I am deeply grateful to you, sir," he said; "and I can assure you that the stain which has fallen upon my father's name is what grieves me most in the whole of this miserable business."

Colonel Elmslie, of the Forty-first Pathans, in cantonments at Tilgit, rose from his chair and paced slowly up and down the room in manifest agitation.

"My boy," he said, "a wise man never criticises the conduct of another man's wife, and if you were a stranger to me I should doubtless take the safe and easy course of declining to intervene in this matter at all, but my long friendship with your dead father and my pride and interest in your own career make it impossible for me to look on with unconcern when that career is being ruined by a woman who is—forgive me if I wound you—unworthy to be your wife."

The young officer straightened himself into rigidity, as though to bear a physical blow.

"And I have only been married for two months," he whispered with dry lips.

"My boy," said the old colonel in a tone of deep sympathy, as he stopped his pacing up and down the room and placed his right hand on the young officer's shoulder, "there is nothing to be gained, believe me, by shirking trouble. Better far to face the situation like a soldier. The woman who fascinated you when you first met her on the mailboat between Colombo and Bombay, whom you married two months ago in a frenzy of boyish passion, and who was detected last night in a flagrant piece of cheating at cards in Major Mortimer's bungalow, is not unknown in India. My wife met her some years ago at Simla. Mrs. Harrington, as she then was, possessed a sinister reputation, and when poor Tom Harrington died she disappeared, and was not seen again until you brought her up here two months ago as your wife, having married her while you were on temporary leave. No one here except my wife had ever met her, or could identify her with Mrs. Harrington. We resolved to accept her for your sake, hoping that her early reputation was undeserved, and that she would make you happy. Nobody could be more grieved than I am that you married in haste without letting even me, your father's old friend, know of your intention. For I might have saved you from an irreparable mistake and the regiment from a most unpleasant scandal."

The young officer turned deadly white. "What course do you wish me to adopt, sir," he said, "in the interests of the regiment?"

"I do not wish to put it on that ground, McLean," said Colonel Elmslie, not unkindly. "But I think that in your own interests it would be better for you to leave Tilgit as soon as possible, and to take your wife away from India. Fortunately, the period of twelve months for which you were attached to us has almost expired. In the report which it will be my duty to furnish to the military authorities in Australia upon your work here I shall make no reference whatever to your domestic affairs, which do not concern me officially. And you may rest assured that I shall express the very highest possible opinion of your soldierly qualities, unremitting diligence in all the duties of your profession, and splendid gifts of leadership. I wish, my boy, that our parting could be a happier one, but you are young, and you will outlive, I trust, all the painful consequences of a mistake into which you were led by youthful passion and ignorance of the world."

"Thank you, Colonel, for your kindly advice," said the young officer in a broken voice. He wrung the proffered hand in silence, and, half-dazed by the shame and misery of it all, groped his way to the door.

When the colonel was having tiffin with his wife a few minutes later, Mrs. Elmslie, who had already heard the whole sordid story of the scandal from her most intimate friend, Mrs. Mortimer, could not help referring to it. Her worldly old heart had in it a streak of motherliness which was touched by the terrible distress of the young Australian officer.

"Fred," she said to the colonel, "can nothing be done to save that young fellow from this appalling disgrace? His only crime has been that he loved that wretched woman with callow infatuation, and married her without knowing anything whatever about her. Surely something might be done to save him from having his whole life ruined by the idiocy that made him blunder into marriage with a woman ten years older than himself who is nothing more than a common swindler."

"I put it to him as gently as I could, my dear," said the practical old colonel with his mouth full of curry. "But the whole thing was so flagrant. Mortimer actually saw her drop her handkerchief and pick up the ace of diamonds with it—like any common card-sharper. She was caught with the ace in her hand, and the discard—a small club—on the floor at her feet. How can a thing like that be hushed up? The only thing for them both to do is to disappear as soon as possible."

"But surely the story won't be allowed to leak out, Fred. It would be too awful for the poor fellow if it did."

"I can only say that I have done everything possible to stop it, my dear. There were only seven people in the room altogether when the thing happened. Mortimer and Stanhope were standing out, and the five who were playing were Mrs. Mortimer, Mrs. Burlington, Carvill, Sykes-Huntington, and Mrs. McLean. There were four men and two women besides the culprit. I have seen them all, and each individual gave me a sacred promise that the matter would be kept an inviolable secret."

"That was a capital idea of yours, Fred," said Mrs. Elmslie.

"But I find that one of them has already told you," retorted the colonel grimly.

"Well, surely that is no harm," said Mrs. Elmslie pleasantly. "I hope I can be trusted to keep a secret. It's a pity that Mrs. Burlington was there, though, because she is sure to tell Mrs. Abbott, and Harry Abbott is certain to mention it to his particular pal Harford-Clinton at the club, and it will be all round Tilgit before the gymkhana on Thursday."

Colonel Elmslie groaned. "Well, at any rate I have done my best to save poor young McLean from the wolves," he said; and then, as he poured another peg into the tall glass, he added: "There's a mistake in the system somewhere. It's all very well to train up a boy in all the military virtues from childhood, and expect him to grow into a combination of Napoleon and St. Anthony; but when the woman comes along, what happens to the regulations? As long as there are petticoats in the world, my dear, there will be trouble."

"Don't be coarse, Fred," said Mrs. Elmslie with an indulgent smile.

"That's not coarseness," returned the colonel; "it's common sense. Look at the case of this unfortunate young McLean. They put him through the mill—junior cadets, senior cadets, drill, manoeuvres, and all the rest of it, so rigorously that he had no time to think of anything but his drill-book. Consequently, the first woman who snapped her eyes at him bagged him. And it was bad luck for him that she happened to be a woman who had fallen so low as to be mixed up with card-sharpers working the mailboats between Aden and Bombay."

"It's rather sad though, all the same, isn't it, Fred?" said Mrs. Elmslie, whose little golden vein of genuine feeling was hidden in the conglomerate of worldliness, conventionality, and self-interest that made up the greater part of her nature. "However, the young man will no doubt go back to his home in Australia at once, and I hear that the divorce laws over there are extremely liberal. It's to be hoped that it will not take him long to get rid of his incubus."

"Hum!" said the colonel. "Not a cheerful description of a bride of two months, is it, my dear? Hullo! why, bless my soul, I have to be at the polo-ground at two."

And away he clanked.

But for Hector McLean the daily routine of pleasure and duty at Tilgit was at an end.

As he rode slowly away to his own bungalow on the outskirts of the station, he revolved in his mind the maddening realities of his position. And no matter from what point he started, he reached always the same wretched termination. His brief married life, it was clear, had ended in a cul de sac. The most painful scene of all had yet to be lived through. It was necessary for him to tell his wife, who had deceived him and disgraced him, that they must leave India.

And what of his career—the career for which he had worked so steadfastly since he first joined the junior cadets in his schooldays in distant Australia? Was his life as a soldier to be wrecked as well as his life as a private citizen? Were the confident predictions of the instructional officers who had prophesied a brilliant future for him to be falsified? Was he to pass into the ignominious list of those who had failed to come up to the standard of character demanded by the military authorities from all those who sought to serve their country as officers? To a man of merely average character and application the blow would have been a severe one. To such a man as Hector McLean, whose whole faculties had been concentrated upon the attainment of success in his military career until he met Mildred Harrington, the shock was well-nigh paralysing.

He rode slowly along the dusty track, entirely oblivious of outer surroundings, and when his charger stopped in front of the gate of his compound, McLean dismounted mechanically, handed the bridle to the waiting sais, and strode up to the verandah, where a tall dark-haired woman, seated in a low chair, was feverishly turning over the leaves of a three-months-old illustrated paper. The deathly pallor of her skin and the dark rings round her eyes told of a troubled night.

"Well," said the woman, looking up defiantly; "what did the old fool want to see you about?"

"There should be no need for you to ask why the colonel sent for me," replied her husband quietly. "He knows everything that occurred last night. He has promised to keep the—the—disgraceful incident a secret in order to save the regiment from scandal."

"What rubbish you are talking!" broke in the woman angrily. "It was a mere accident. Dozens of people do the same thing every night of the week, and because it is not noticed nobody cares a rap." She was talking very fast, and Hector McLean eyed her gravely.

"Surely, Mildred, you are not thinking of what you are saying," said McLean sternly. His wife seemed to be bereft temporarily of a moral sense. "Are you incapable of seeing that cheating at cards is a particularly despicable form of theft?"

Then the woman flared up. Half hysterical after the long torturing sleepless night, she rose from the chair and faced her husband furiously. "Oh, you make me sick, sick, sick, with your miserable goody-goody twaddle!" she cried. "Two months ago you told me that you loved me and could not live without me. To-day you tell me that I am a thief. You came into my life and dragged me away from the friends who admired me and made much of me, to bring me up to this hole, where all the old cats avoid me as if I had the plague. And because I happened to make a little mistake over a miserable game of cards you turn from me like the rest of them. What do they want to do with me now—to send me to prison or only to Coventry? I insist upon knowing. I demand to be told at once. Life isn't so amusing up in this God-forsaken place that it won't be a blessed relief to get back to civilisation, and the sooner the better, as far as I am concerned."

Hector McLean stood appalled at the unreasoning and hysterical outburst. "As soon as you can control yourself," he said firmly, "I will tell you what has to be done."

"For goodness' sake, go on," said the woman, stamping her foot. "Even a prisoner has a right to know the sentence of the court without being kept in suspense longer than necessary. And after all you are my husband, don't forget that. The law will compel you to support me, even if you have forgotten your vows of eternal love after two months—only two months!"

She gave a slight shudder and turned her gaze outwards across the dusty road, and the banyans and the club compound to the towering mountain peaks that almost enclosed the lonely station, producing the effect of a gigantic prison for the little handful of white men and white women encamped there.

"Sit down in that chair, Mildred, and listen to me," said McLean in his resolute, low-pitched voice, "for there is something which must be said by me to you, here and now."

The woman sat down on the edge of the chair, leaning forward, with her face resting on her hands and her elbows on her knees. In her eyes was a look of tense and painful expectancy. She felt the strength of the man's will at last. It held her in silence, as though she were spent and exhausted after the rush of babbling words a moment earlier.

"Listen to me, Mildred," said the young man in his steady even voice. "It is necessary for us both to leave Tilgit at once. We must go away from here; we must get out of India."

"Rubbish!" said the woman angrily. "You can't go. You have your career to think about."

"My career is over so far as India is concerned," said McLean, with a trace of bitterness in his tone. "Possibly it is over altogether. Well, it can't be helped now. But you are my wife, and I intend to stand by you. If we cannot live here we can live in another country."

"I don't want to go to any other country," said the woman wearily. "I am sick to death of travelling. I want to stay in one place and have what I have never had yet—a home."

"I can give you a home, Mildred, in my own country—in Australia, where I was born, where all my friends are, and where I had hoped to do some useful work before I die. Soldiering is a man's game, after all. I suppose that is why I chose it. You will come back with me to Australia, and together we will live down this terrible thing. There now, you mustn't cry, Milly. It will all come right in the end."

"Oh don't, Hector! Don't speak kindly to me! It's more than I can bear." The woman's body was shaken with sobs; she threw herself into the chair and buried her face in her hands.

Hector McLean was down on his knees beside her at once, comforting her. "A man must stick to his wife, Milly, even if she does make a mistake," he said. "We will forget all this when you come with me to Caringal. You know that my mother died when I was a child, and my father soon followed her. I shall be all alone with you at Caringal, and I shall always be able to get a military job of some sort, I suppose."

The unhappy woman was weeping unrestrainedly now. "Oh, I know I'm a bad lot, Hector, a rotten bad lot; but when you came into my life I meant to turn over a new leaf. Indeed I did. But now it is all over. I cannot imagine what made me cheat last night. The idea came into my head quite suddenly that it would be so easy to bring off that stale old trick. Almost before I realised what I was doing, it was done. And then came the exposure."

Mildred McLean had never looked less attractive. Her eyes were red, her cheeks were haggard, and her lips were quivering. Though really only thirty-two, she looked fully forty. But her boyish husband experienced a sharp revulsion of feeling as his eyes dwelt on her face. Here was a woman surely who was a strange contradiction—a woman capable of thoughtless, careless evil-doing, but also of true greatness, of heroic self-sacrifice. The sense of shame and outraged justice ebbed from his heart and a wave of love and pity rushed in. True, she had done a base act. But was she wholly base? His heart said no.

"Come inside now, dear, for I have many things to do," he said, stroking her hand, but when he tried to raise her up he saw that she had fainted.

Muhammad Bahksh, the "khansama," was wise in the ways of mem-sahibs. He brought burnt feathers and brandy in a wine-glass. And then he helped Hector McLean to carry his bride of two months into the bungalow, where Shaibalini, Mrs. McLean's ayah, was waiting. McLean laid his wife on her bed, and she opened her eyes and smiled wanly at him. "I often feel like that now, dear," she said, "but I shall be all right in a minute."

But Muhammad Bahksh, as he listened to a few hastily muttered sentences that Shaibalini the ayah poured into his ear, looked preternaturally wise.

"The eyes of the sahib are blind," he replied, "because of his want of knowledge. But we know what we know."

Next morning Colonel Elmslie received information that the Zakka Khels were hiding their wives and families in caves in the hills—the usual preliminary to an extended raid. The tribesmen had been exhibiting more than usual unrest, and at least a dozen rifles belonging to the Forty-first Pathans had disappeared.

"It's just the job for McLean before he goes," muttered the colonel thoughtfully; "and besides, it will take his thoughts off his own troubles."

So McLean cantered away at the head of fifty native troopers, each of whom had the light of battle in his eyes and rations for three days in his saddle-bags.

It was in the days before the gun-runners of the Persian Gulf had distributed arms to all the potential enemies of Great Britain in the tribesmen's country. Stolen rifles at that time fetched high prices among the hillmen.

When the young Australian returned to Tilgit with his troop on the fourth day, with ten of the missing rifles and a bullet-hole through his helmet, he found his wife gone.

Muhammad Bahksh explained that the mem-sahib had gone out for a ride immediately after his departure. She had not yet returned. However, she had left a chit on the dressing-table.

This was the chit:—

"MY DEAREST HUSBAND,—Do not be angry with me for going away. You made me happier than I ever thought I could be in my whole life, but it is all over now. By one mad act I threw away all the happiness that you gave me, and now I must leave you. If I were to remain with you your career would be ruined. I have seen too much of the world to believe that the possession of an impossible wife is no bar to advancement. You would be dragged down by your unfortunate marriage. But if I am not with you the way will be open to you. I shall watch your career from far away. I shall follow each promotion through the newspapers, and be proud of your success. But you must never see me again. I thank you, dear, from my heart for all that you have given me—your love, your name, and your protection. It is for your sake that I give up everything. I cannot accept the sacrifice that you have offered me. After all, a man's work is a man's life. If nobody in Australia knows that you married me your career will be a brilliant one. If you are hampered with me you will never rise at all. And so I cannot hesitate. Do not worry about me. Do not follow me. Try to forget me. I have the fifty pounds you gave me on my birthday, and out of India I can get work as a governess or a companion. Remember that I shall always watch your career with loving pride, and that I shall always think of you with tears of gratitude for the honest boyish love that you, gave me. And now goodbye. I'm sure you have not forgotten the song I sang on the first night that I met you—'I love you so, dear, that I only can leave you' I little thought that it would so soon come true.

"Your unhappy

"MILDRED."

Hector McLean read the letter through and passed his hand in bewilderment across his forehead.

Then he summoned Muhammad Bahksh.

"The mem-sahib has gone down to Bombay to wait for me," he said slowly to the khansama. "Lay my kit out ready for packing. We are going back to Australia together."