_ PHASE IV. DUST OF THE ACTUAL
CHAPTER XII
"She had a step that walked unheard,
It made the stones like grass;
Yet that light step had crushed a heart
As light as that step was."
--W.H. DAVIES.
At last, Roy was actually coming. The critical moment was upon them; and Rose sat alone in the drawing-room awaiting him.
Her mother was out; had arranged to be out for the evening also. The strain between them still continued; and it told most on Rose. The cat-like element in her loved comfort; and an undercurrent of clash was peculiarly irritating in her present sore, uncertain state of heart. Weeks of it, she knew, would scarcely leave a dent on her mother's leathern temperament. When it came to a tug the tougher nature scored, which was one reason why she had so skilfully avoided tugs hitherto.
True, she was of age; and her father's small legacy gave her a measure of independence. But how could one set about getting married in the face of open opposition? And--how keep the truth from Roy? Or tone it down, so that he would not go off at a tangent straightaway?
Assuredly the Fates had conspired to strip her headlong romance of its gilded trappings. But her moment for marriage had come. She was sick to death of the Anglo-Indian round--from the unattached standpoint, at least. Roy fascinated her as few men had done; and she had been deliberately trying to ignore the effect of her mother's brutal frankness. Their coming together again, in these changed conditions, would be the ultimate test. Such a chasm of distance seemed to yawn between that tender parting in her boudoir and this critical reunion--in another world....
Sounds of arrival brought her to her feet; but she checked the natural impulse to welcome him in the verandah. Her innate sense of drama shrank from possible awkwardness, a false step, at the start.
And now he appeared in the doorway--very straight and slim in his grey suit, with the sorrowful black band on his arm.
"Rose!" he cried--and stood gazing at her, pulses hammering, brain dizzy. The mere sight of her brought back too vividly the memory of those April days that he had been resolutely shutting out of his mind.
His pause--the shock of his changed aspect--held her motionless also. He looked older, more sallow; his sensitive mouth compressed; no lurking gleam in his eyes. He seemed actually less good-looking than she remembered; for anguish is no beautifier.
So standing, they mutely confronted the change in themselves--in each other; then Rose swept forward, both hands held out.
"Roy--my darling--
what you must have been through! Can you--will you--in spite of all----?"
Next moment, in his silent, vehement fashion, he was straining her to him; kissing her eyes, her hair, her lips; not in simple lover's ecstasy, but in a fervour of repressed passion, touched with tragedy, with pain....
Then he held her from him, to refresh his tired eyes with the sheer beauty of her; and was struck at once by the absence of colour; the wide black sash, the black velvet round her throat and hair.
He touched the velvet, looking his question. She nodded, drawing in her lip to steady it.
"I felt--I must. You don't mind?"
"
Mind----?--Sometimes I wonder if I shall ever really
mind things any more."
His face worked. That queer dizziness took him again. With an incoherent apology, he sat down rather abruptly, and leaned forward, his head between his hands, hiding the emotion he could not altogether control.
Rose stood beside him, feeling helpless and vaguely aggrieved. He had just got back to her, after a two weeks' parting, and he sat there lost in an access of grief that left her quite out of account. Inadvertently there flashed the thought, "Whatever Lance might have suffered, he would not succumb." It startled her. She had never so compared them before....
Then, looking down at his bowed head, compunction seized her, and tenderness, that rarely entered into her feeling for men. She could think of nothing to say that would not sound idiotically commonplace. So she laid her hand on his hair, and moved it caressingly now and then.
She felt a tremor go through him. He half withdrew his head, checked himself, and capturing her hand, pressed it to his lips, that were hot and feverish.
"Roy--what is it? What went wrong?" she asked softly.
He looked up now with a fair imitation of a smile. "Just--an old memory. It was dear of you. Ungracious of me."--Pain and perplexity went from her. She slipped to her knees beside him, and his arm enclosed her. "Sorry to behave like this. But I'm not very fit. And--seeing you, brought it all back so sharply! It's been--a bit of a strain, this last week. A letter from Thea--brave, of course; but broken utterly. The wedding too: and that beast of a journey fairly finished me."
She leaned closer, comforting him by the feel of her nearness. Then her practical brain suggested needs more pedestrian, none the less essential.
"Dearest--you're simply exhausted. How about tea--or a peg?"
He pleaded for a peg, if permissible. She fetched it herself; made tea; plied him with sandwiches and sugared cakes, for which he still retained his boyish weakness.
But talking proved difficult. There were uncomfortable gaps. In their first uplifted moment all had seemed well. Love-making was simple, elemental, satisfying. Beyond the initial glamour and passion of courtship they had scarcely adventured, when the fabric of their world was shattered by the startling events of those four days. Both were realising--as they stepped cautiously among the fragments--that, for all their surface intimacy, they were still strangers underneath.
Roy took refuge in talk about Lahore; the high tribute paid to the conduct of all troops--British and Indian--and police, under peculiarly exasperating circumstances, the C.O.'s conviction that unless sterner measures were taken--and adhered to--there would be more outbreaks, at shorter intervals, better organised....
He hoped her charming air of interest was genuine, but felt by no means sure. And all the while, he was craving to know what she had to say for herself; yet doubting whether he could stand the lightest touch on his open wound. Lance had begged him not to hurt her. Had it ever occurred to that devout lover how sharply she might hurt him?
Tea and a restful hour in an arm-chair eased the strain a little. Then Rose suggested the garden, knowing him susceptible to the large healing influences of earth and sky; also with diplomatic intent to draw him away from the house before her mother's meteoric visitation.
And she was only just in time. The rattle of rickshaw wheels came up the main path two minutes after they had turned out of it towards a favourite nook, which she had strangely grown to love in the last two weeks.
"Poor darling! You've just missed Mother!" She condoled with him, smiling sidelong under her lashes; and she almost blessed her maternal enemy for bringing back the familiar gleam into his eyes.
"Bad luck! Ought we to go in again?"
"Gracious, no. She's only tearing home to change for an early dinner at Penshurst and the theatre. Anyway, please note, you're immune from the formalities. We're going to have a peaceful time, quite independent of Simla rushings. Just ourselves to ourselves."
"Good."
It was an asset with men--second only to her beauty--this gift for creating a restful atmosphere.
Her nook, in an angle above the narrow path, was a grassy bank, looking across crumpled ranges--velvet-soft in the level light--to the still purity of the snows.
"Rather nice, isn't it?" she said. "I'm not given to mooning out of doors; but I've spent several evenings here ... lately."
"It's sanctuary," Roy murmured; but his sigh was tinged with apprehension. Flinging off his hat, he reclined full length on the gentle slope, hands under his head, and let the healing rays flow into the deeps of his troubled being.
Rose sat upright beside him, her fingers locked loosely round one raised knee. She was troubled too, and quite at a loss how to begin.
"So you've not been going out much?" he asked, after a prolonged pause.
"No--how could I--with you, so unhappy, down there--and...."--She deliberately met his eyes; and the look in them impelled her to ask: "
What is it, Roy--lurking in your mind?"
"Am I--to be frank?"
She shivered. "It sounds--rather chilly. But I suppose we'd better take our cold plunge--and get it over!"
"Well"--he hesitated palpably. "It was only a natural wonder--if you care ... all that ... now he's gone, how could you deliberately hurt him so--while he lived?"
She drew in her lip. It was going to be more unsteadying than she had foreseen.
"How
can a woman explain to a man the simple fact that she is incurably--perhaps unforgivably--a woman?"
"I don't know. I hoped you could--up to a point," said Roy, looking away to the snows and remembering, suddenly,
that was where he ought to be now--with Lance--always Lance: no other thought or presence seemed vital to him, these days. Yet Rose remained beautiful and desirable--and clearly she loved him.
"It doesn't make things easier, you know," she was saying, in her cool, low voice, "to feel you are patently regretting events that, unhappily, did hurt--him; but also--gave me to you...."
Her beauty, her evident pain, penetrated the settled misery that enveloped him like an atmosphere.
"Darling--forgive me!" He reached out, pulling her hands apart, and his fingers closed hard on hers. "I'm only trying--clumsily--to understand...."
"And goodness knows I'm willing to help you," she sighed, returning his pressure. "But--I'm afraid the little I can say for myself won't do much to regild my halo--if there's any of it left! I gather you aren't very well up in women, or girls, Roy?"
"No--I'm not. Perhaps it makes me seem to you a bit of a fool?"
"Quite the reverse. It's all along been a part of your charm."
"My--charm?"
There was more of tenderness than amusement in her low laugh. "Precisely! If you didn't possess--
some magnetic quality, could I have been drawn away from a man--like Lance, when I'd nearly made up my mind--to face the music."
For answer, he kissed her captured hand.
Then: "Roy, if it doesn't hurt too much," she urged, "will you tell me first--just--what Lance said?"
It would hurt, horridly. But it was as well she should know; and not a word need he withhold. Could there be a finer tribute to his friend? It was his own share in their last unforgettable talk that could not be reproduced.
"Yes--I'll tell you," he said. And, his half-closed eyes resting on the sunlit hills, he told her, in a voice from which all feeling was carefully expunged. Only so could he achieve the telling; and she listened without interruption, for which he felt grateful, exceedingly....
When it was over he merely moved his head and looked up at her; and she returned his look, her eyes heavy with tears. Mutually their fingers tightened.
"Thank you," she said. "It makes me ... ashamed, but it makes me proud."
"It made
me angry and bewildered," said Roy. "If you really were ... coming his way, what the devil did
I do to upset it all? Of course I admired you; and I was interested--on his account. But--I had no thought--I was absorbed in other things----"
She nodded slowly, not looking at him. "Quite so. And I suppose--being me--I didn't choose that a man should dance with me, ride with me, obviously admire me, and yet remain absorbed in other things. And--being you--of course it never struck you that, for my kind of girl, your provocatively casual attitude almost amounted to a challenge. Besides--as I said--you were charming; you were different. Perhaps--if I'd felt a shade less sure--of Lance, if he'd had the wit even to
seem keen on some one else ... he might have saved himself. As it was--you were irresistible."
She heard him grit his teeth; and turned with swift compunction.
"My poor Roy! Am I jarring you badly? I suppose, if I talked till midnight, I'd never succeed in making a man like you understand how purely instinctive it all is. Analysed, like this, it sounds cold-blooded. But, it's just--second nature. He--Lance--understood up to a point. That's why he was aggressive that day: oh--furiously angry; all because of you. The pair you are! He said if I fooled you, and didn't play fair, he'd back out, or insist on a
pucca engagement. And--yes--it did have the wrong effect. It made me wonder--if I
could marry a man, however splendid, who owned such exacting standards and such a hot temper. And there were you--an unknown quantity, with the Banter-Wrangle discreetly in pursuit. A supreme inducement in itself!--Yes, distinctly, that afternoon was a turning-point. Just Lance losing his temper, and you coolly forgetting an arrangement with me----"
She paused, looking back over it all; felt Roy's hold slacken and unobtrusively withdrew her hand.
"Soon after Kapurthala, he was angry again. And that time, I'm afraid I reminded him that our engagement was only 'on' conditionally; that if he started worrying at me, it would soon be unconditionally off----"
"So it
should have been!" Roy jerked up on to his elbow, and confronted her with challenging directness. "Once you could speak like that, feel like that, you'd no
right to keep him hanging on--hoping when there was practically no hope. It wasn't playing the game----"
This time she kept her eyes averted, and a slow colour invaded her face. There was a point beyond which feminine frankness could not go. She could not--would not--tell this unflatteringly critical lover of hers that it was not in her nature to let the one man go till she felt morally sure of the other.
Roy had only a profile view of her warm cheek, her sensitive nostril a-quiver, her lip drawn in. And when she spoke, it was in the tense, passionate tone of that evening at Anarkalli.
"Oh yes--it's easy work sitting in judgment on other people. I told you I hadn't much of a case--I asked you to make allowances. You clearly can't.
He asked you--not to hurt me. You clearly feel you must. Yet--in justice to you both--I'm doing what I can. I've never before condescended to explain myself--almost excuse myself--to
any man; and I certainly never shall again. It strikes me you'd better apply your own indictment ... to your own case. If
you can think and feel ... as you seem to do, better face the fact and be done with it----"
But Roy, startled and penitent, was sitting upright by now; and, when she would have risen, he seized her, crushing her to him, would she or no. In her pain and anger she more than ever drew him. In his utter heart-loneliness, he more than ever needed her. And the reminder of Lance crowned all.
"My darling--don't go off at a tangent, that way," he implored her, his lips against her hair. "For me--it's a sacred bond. It can't be snapped in a fit of temper--like a bit of knotted thread. I'll accept ... what I can't see clear. We'll stand by each other, as you said. Learn one another--Rose...! My dearest girl--
don't----!"
He strained her closer, in mingled bewilderment and distress. For Rose--who trod lightly on the hearts of men, Rose--the serene and self-assured--was sobbing brokenly in his arms....
Before the end of the evening, they were more or less themselves again; the threatened storm averted; the trouble patched up and summarily dismissed, as only lovers can dismiss a cloud that intrudes upon their heaven of blue. _