The Hermit Doctor of Gaya: A Love Story of Modern India
boast to myself--and yet we have been so happy together--we love the
same things and have the same faith; we look at life with the same eyes.
All that is surely something. As to myself--God knows how little I have
to give you--but I won't apologize for the rest--not for my work. That
is the grandest, best thing I have to offer. I know you think so too."
"Yes, Owen." She put her small, unsteady hand on his arm. And for a
second hope blazed up in him, dying down again to grey premonition.
"And you weren't boastful to think I cared--I do--but not like that,
Owen."
Something impersonal within himself marvelled at the banality of
tragedy. People made fun of scenes like this--caricatured them. And he
was sick with pain and weakness.
"Little Anne--you're so young--how should you know?"
"I do know," she answered.
Then he looked at her, driven out of himself by the simplicity and
strength of her confession. She held herself upright and even though
her face was full of shadow he could see the line of her mouth and it
frightened him. He knew now what he had always refused to know.
Ruthlessly, from the secret depths where we bury our hated truths, he
drew out a memory and a fear and recognized them for what they were.
The recognition was the end of the one hope of personal happiness he had
granted himself, and it staggered him. Then the man and the Christian
in him rose triumphant.
"I won't pretend I don't guess," he said quietly and naturally. "I do.
And, Anne, though I was selfish enough to want you myself--still, there
was one thing I did want more. It isn't a phrase--it's honestly true.
I wanted you to be happy. I think you will be--I think you are--so I
haven't the right to grumble, have I?"
He tried to smile at her. Commonplace as his form of renunciation had
been, he was not conscious now of any banality either in himself or her.
He stood on that rarely ascended pinnacle whence men look down on their
daily life and see in its tortuous monotony the weaving of a divine
pattern. He felt for the instant glorified as some men are who stand
before a miracle of nature, or a great picture, or listen to grand
music. It was his vision of the Beautiful--willing sacrifice, happy
renunciation.
But Anne Boucicault got up and stood beside him, very straight, her
hands clenched at her sides.
"I am not happy," she said. "I do not think I ever shall be."
And she left him standing there in the twilight, a very human and tragic
figure, with the grey ash of his vision between his hands.
* * * * *
Such was Anne Boucicault's birthday. Mrs. Compton, driving home from
the scene of celebration, met her husband at the barrack gates and
forced the reins upon him in order that she might give herself over
entirely to invective and lurid description, two pastimes for which she
had an unlimited talent. Archie Compton chuckled at her picture of
Sigrid's dramatic and triumphant intervention, but his chuckle was not
all that she had expected, and she caught herself up.
"What a brute I am!" she exclaimed repentantly. "I had forgotten. You
poor old boy! You must be feeling sick----"
"I am," he returned grimly. "It was damnable." His voice was lowered
for the benefit of the syce balanced on the back seat, but it was no
less vibrant with bitterness. "But that's how it is out here. We--you
and I--men like Tristram--everybody--sweat out our lives, sacrifice
every personal wish we've got, play the game from the Viceroy down to
the new-fledged Tommy as, heaven knows, the game isn't often played on
this earth--for what? Well, we don't talk about that. We just go ahead
with our best. And then some blundering ass--some blackguard, is let
loose among us and the whole thing is in the fire--we might as well
never have been--or played the deuce to our hearts' content----"
She caught a glimpse of his drawn, miserable face.
"You think--things are pretty bad?" she asked, gropingly. "Something
will happen?"
"Sure." His grip tightened on the reins. "Something--God knows
what--but something----"
*CHAPTER VIII*
*THE TWO LISTENERS*
It was typical of Owen Meredith that, as he left the Boucicaults'
compound behind him, he put aside his own grief and turned sternly to
the duty that lay nearest him. That duty concerned Ayeshi. Possibly,
had Ayeshi been moulded in the common clay of his race, Meredith might
have taken his duty with less seriousness, though his blood would still
have burnt at Boucicault's wanton brutality--as it was, a
long-considered purpose now took a definite form.
It chanced that, as Meredith trudged on his way to the Mission, the
Rajah's English dog-cart swerved round a bend of the dusty road, and
came down upon him with the best speed of a rather showy high-stepper.
Rasaldu drove himself, the knowledge of animals being the one talent
that he appeared to have inherited from his cowherd ancestry, and,
recognizing Meredith, he drew up so smartly as almost to jerk his
attendant from off his precarious perch in the rear.
"I have just come down from the dak-bungalow," he explained. "I was to
have taken Mademoiselle Fersen out with my new cob--beauty, eh?--but she
was out. Happened to have seen her?"
Meredith accepted the fat brown hand extended towards him.
"I left her at the Boucicaults'," he said. "But that was some time
back. It was Miss Boucicault's birthday, you know."
"No, I didn't." Rasaldu's face fell like that of an offended child, and
Meredith hastened to add lightly:
"It was a very small affair--only a handful of Miss Boucicault's women
friends and an odd male or two like myself. Miss Fersen was there as a
matter of course. I don't think any affair in Gaya could get along
without her."
The Rajah chuckled, flattered and reassured.
"No, I suppose not. A wonderful woman. Well, I daresay she had to go.
Anything I can do for you, Meredith? Want a new schoolhouse or anything
like that?"
"I want money, Rajah," Meredith returned promptly.
"Thought so. You shall have it. Let me have the list and I'll head it
with as much as you like----"
"Hadn't you better hear what it's for?" Meredith suggested.
Rasaldu shook his head.
"Oh, I don't know; that's hardly my business."
"In this case, I think. It concerns one of your own people, Rajah."
Rasaldu's smile faded. He looked oddly crestfallen.
"A protege of yours, eh?"
"Yes, a very brilliant young man--much above his class. Though I've not
been able to trace his parentage, I imagine he has good blood in his
veins. Anyhow, I want to give him his chance, perhaps eventually send
him to Calcutta University."
"Convert, eh?"
"That may come," was the grave answer.
Rasaldu was silent a moment, busy with the restless animal in the
shafts. A rather supercilious smile flickered at the corners of his
thick lips.
"Well, you shall have all you want," he said finally. "But send him to
London--Paris. Paris is the place. It opens a man's mind--gives him
ideas. We want that sort of stuff out here. Don't fuddle him with
universities. Show him life. And there's nothing like Paris for that.
It was there I met Mademoiselle Fersen, you know. A fine woman, eh?
Fairly taken Gaya by storm, I fancy."
"She certainly does pretty well what she likes," Meredith admitted with
a wry smile.
"I thought so. She was bound to win. At home she fairly walked over
everyone--don't know why exactly. It wasn't only her dancing--I couldn't
quite understand it myself--not enough of it or too much--and it wasn't
her beauty. She isn't in the least beautiful.... There were women in
Paris I knew----" He caught sight of Meredith's face and burst out into
a good-natured laugh. "Well, all that won't interest you. But you shall
have your money. Keep clear of the wheels, my dear fellow--the brute's
got the devil in her--good-bye."
He raised his whip in salutation, and a minute later was a speck in a
rolling cloud of dust.
Owen Meredith trudged on patiently and interwove his thoughts of
Ayeshi's future, and of the slow piling of stone upon stone which was to
make a new temple in India, with the red thread of his own pain.
Meantime the subject of his anxious consideration sat on the top step of
the dak-bungalow and was ministered to by Mrs. Smithers. Mrs. Smithers
had accepted him much as she would have accepted a herd of wild
elephants if they had presented themselves in Sigrid's name. She
brought hot water and bathed the blood from his face, and set food in
lavish quantities at his side, all this--except for a single
exclamation, "lawks a-mercy!"--without surprise or question or the
slightest change in the expression of her grim features. Ayeshi seemed
scarcely aware of her. Nor did he touch the food. He sat with his back
against the wooden pillar of the verandah, his knees drawn up to his
chin and shivered as though in the grip of a violent ague. Mrs.
Smithers tried to cover him with a rug, but he thrust her offering
aside.
"I am not cold," he said.
"You're very ill, young man," Mrs. Smithers retorted.
He turned his half-closed, suffering eyes for a moment to her face.
"It is not my body----" he muttered.
Mrs. Smithers gave it up. Nevertheless, she drew up a chair on the
other side of the steps and sat down with her hands folded in her lap
and kept watch over him as though he had been a criminal given over into
her keeping.
It was thus Sigrid found them half an hour later. The brief Indian
twilight still lingered on the open roadway, but in the happy wilderness
which was the garden of the dak-bungalow it was night, and the figures
of the two watchers were only shadows.
Sigrid stepped out of the white military cloak which covered her light
dress and revealed the presence, under one arm, of a black-snouted,
alert-eared something which in other days, when Aberdeens and their
mongrel offspring were unknown, would have been taken for a baby dragon.
Mrs. Smithers's unexpectant lap received Wickie, helplessly entangled in
the cloak, and Sigrid knelt at Ayeshi's side. He had tried to rise and
salaam, but she forced him back with a resolute hand.
"We've had enough of that sort of thing," she said almost angrily. "How
you must hate us all!"
He gave a long shuddering sigh like that of a child which has exhausted
itself with crying, and then was still.
"Mem-Sahib is very good," he said softly. "But he had the right----"
"He had not," she flashed back fiercely. "What gives him the right?"
"If Mem-Sahib were not a stranger she would know," he answered in his
broken voice.
She struck her knee with her clenched hand in a storm of anger.
"There is no law----" she began.
"There is a custom, Mem-Sahib," he interrupted. "I think many of them
were sorry, but had I turned on him and struck him they would have flung
themselves on me. That is the difference."
"You are as good as he," she protested recklessly. "If you had a chance
you would be more than he is. Major Tristram has told me----"
"There are barriers that Mem-Sahib would be the first to remember," he
persisted.
But the fire of her outraged chivalry burnt fiercer in the wind of his
opposition.
"You're wrong, Ayeshi. I shouldn't. There are no barriers--at least,
none like that. Goodness knows, we're not born equal, but the
inequality that matters isn't of birth or race, but of mind and soul.
And you have a mind and soul above most. There are no barriers for
you."
He bent his head.
"That is what Meredith Sahib has said to me. We are all brothers--that
is the message of his God to us. Somehow, I do not think that Meredith
Sahib is wise to bring the message--nor you, Mem-Sahib--and yet we who