第60章

It was the bleak side of Jakko; even tonight there was a fresh springing coldness in it blowing over from the hidden snows behind the rims of the nearer hills.Madeline held up her face to it, and gave herself a moment of its grateful discipline.

'I have been as foolish as possible,' she said, 'as foolish as possible.I have distressed you.Well, I couldn't help it--that is all there is to be said.Now if you will tell me--what is in your mind--what you spoke of writing--I will mount again and go home.It doesn't matter--I know you didn't mean to be unkind.' Her lip was trembling again, and he knew it, and dared not look at it.

'How can you ask me to tell you--miserable things!' he exclaimed.

'How can I find the words? And I have only just been told--I can hardly myself conceive it--'

'I am not a child in her teens that my ears should be guarded from miserable things.I have come of age, I have entered into my inheritance of the world's bitterness with the rest.I can listen,'

Madeline said.'Why not?'

He looked to her with grave tenderness.'You think yourself very old, and very wise about the world,' he said; 'but you are a woman, and you will be hurt.And when I think that a little ordinary forethought on my part would have protected you, I feel like the criminal I am.'

'Don't make too much of it,' she said, simply.'I have a presentiment--'

'I'll tell you,' Innes said, slowly; 'I won't niggle about it.The people of this place--idiots!--are unable to believe that a man and a woman can be to each other what we are.'

'Yes?' said Madeline.She paused beside the parapet and looked down at the indistinct little fields below, and the blurred masses of white wild roses waving midway against the precipice.

'They can not understand that there can be any higher plane of intercourse between us than the one they know.They won't see--they can't see--that the satisfaction we find in being together is of a different nature.'

'I see,' said Madeline.She had raised her eyes, and they sought the solemn lines of the horizon.She looked as if she saw something infinitely lifted above the pettiness he retailed to her.

'So they say--good God, why should I tell you what they say!' It suddenly flashed upon him that the embodiment of it in words would be at once, from him, sacrilegious and ludicrous.It flashed upon him that her natural anger would bring him pain, and that if she laughed--it was so hard to tell when she would laugh--it would be as if she struck him.He cast about him dumb and helpless while she kept her invincibly quiet gaze upon the farther hills.She was thinking that this breath of gossip, now that it had blown, was a very slight affair compared with Horace Innes's misery--which he did not seem to understand.Then her soul rose up in her, brushing everything aside, and forgetting, alas! the vow it had once made to her.

'I think I know,' she said.'They are indeed foolish.They say that we--love each other.Is not that what they say?'

He looked in amazement into her tender eyes and caught at the little mocking smile about her lips.Suddenly the world grew light about him, the shadows fled away.Somewhere down in the valley, he remembered afterward, a hill-flute made music.When he spoke it was almost in a whisper, lest he should disturb some newly perceived lovely thing that had wings, and might leave him.'Oh, Madeline,'

he said, 'is it true?' She only smiled on in gladness that took no heed of any apprehension, any fear or scruple, and he himself keeping his eyes upon her face, said, 'It is true.'

So they stood for a little time in silence while she resisted her great opportunity.She resisted it to the end, and presently beckoned to the syce, who came up leading the pony.Innes mounted her mechanically and said, 'Is that all right?' as she put her foot in the stirrup, without knowing that he had spoken.

'Goodbye,' she said; 'I am going away--immediately.It will be better.And listen--I have known this for weeks--and I have gone on seeing you.And I hope I am not any more wicked than I feel.

Goodbye.'

'Goodbye,' he said, taking his hand from the pony's neck, and she rode buoyantly away.He, turning to breast the road again, saw darkness gathering over the end of it, and drawing nearer.

At eleven o'clock next morning Brookes rose from her packing to take a note addressed to her mistress from the hand of a messenger in the Imperial red and gold.It ran:

'Dear Miss Anderson--I write to tell you that I have obtained three weeks' leave, and I am going into the interior to shoot, starting this afternoon.You spoke yesterday of leaving Simla almost immediately.I trust you will not do this, as it would be extremely risky to venture down to the Plains just now.In ten days the rains will have broken, when it will be safe.Pray wait till then.

'Yours sincerely,'Horace Innes.'

Involuntarily the letter found its way to Madeline's lips, and remained there until she saw the maid observing her with intelligence.

'Brookes,' she said, 'I am strongly advised not to start until the rains break.I think, on the whole, that we won't.'

'Indeed, miss,' returned Brookes, 'Mrs.Sergeant Simmons told me that it was courting cholera to go--and nothing short of it.I must say I'm thankful.'