The Hermit Doctor of Gaya: A Love Story of Modern India
even then Tristram recognized as poignant. "My God, man, why don't you
go in and win?" he burst out.
They stared at each other through a long minute of silence. The pipe
slipped from Tristram's hand and fell with a crack on the hard floor.
He bent down and picked it up. The stem was broken. He tried to piece
it together with a sightless persistency.
"Are you--you trying to be damned funny?" he stammered.
"Do you think I should make a jest of a thing like that?" was the fierce
retort. "What I've done would be the action of a cad if you weren't the
man I know you to be. It hasn't been easy--you can guess that. But I
wasn't going to see Anne's happiness break up or want of a little
sincerity. I believed you cared. I've been watching you. I was almost
certain tonight. I understood your principles--you wouldn't ask a woman
to share your life--but I know what Anne feels--she'd stick by you,
Tristram----" He faltered, the thread of his argument lost in a sudden
ugly sense of uncertainty. He saw Tristram's face in the shadow, and
its sheer expressionlessness frightened him. "I suppose I've behaved
like a fool," he said. "A man who cares as I do is liable to become
obsessed with an idea. Forget it----"
Tristram started a little, as though awakening from a deep mental
abstraction. He came and stood at Meredith's side, laying the fragments
of the old pipe on the table with a mechanical care.
"That's the only foolish thing you've said," he remarked, gently. "I
don't believe any one ever forgets anything. It's just a sort of
comfortable phrase-- You did quite right--you clergymen have a kind of
insight into things--you--you see where the shoe pinches--don't
worry--I'm awfully grateful. Even now, I see what a fine thing you've
done--I shall realize it much better later on. You've lived up to your
faith--you've made me respect it. It's a case of the old Pagan and the
early Christian. No, I'm not jeering. I'm in deadly earnest. There,
turn in and go to sleep. I shan't want my bunk tonight. I've got to
think things out--get clear with myself. So many things have been
sprung on me--I've got to be alone. But don't worry. You've done the
right thing. Good night."
He held out his hand, and now it was quite steady. Meredith took it and
wondered at the strength of it. In the dull, bitter reaction from
sacrifice, he visualized the fervour of Tristram's happiness.
"Good night. Don't let Anne guess----"
"Never--on my word."
He went out. The night was dark and oppressive. A hush of exhaustion
hung over the village. Afar off a jackal howled dismally, and was
answered nearer by a prowling pariah dog. Tristram crossed the deep
gutter which lined the uneven roadway. Though he could see nothing, he
knew every stone, every turn; he could have named the invisible huts and
their owners as he passed them. The pariah dog came snuffing round his
heels, and he threw it a crust which it was his habit to carry in his
pocket for the starving strays of the village. He heard the snap of its
famished teeth, and a hurried scamper through the darkness.
At the cross-roads a breeze came down from the west. It rustled through
the mysterious, never-silent leaves of the council-tree. It seemed to
him that their whisperings were the ghosts of familiar voices now still.
He stopped to listen. He could hear Ayeshi's voice, low-pitched and
meditative, the harsher notes of the headman:
"Ah, those were the great days--the great days----"
The headman had been swept away in the last epidemic. Ayeshi was gone.
He would never sit again by the red firelight and listen to the story of
the Rani Kurnavati. He would never lie and stare up through the
fret-work of peepul leaves and dream his boyish dreams of her. Gone--all
gone.
He walked on rapidly. He had no consciousness of distance or any
purpose--only a desire to be always moving. But at last a sound broke
through to him--the dull, menacing roar of unseen water sliding past him
into the darkness. He knew then that he had reached the limit of his
respite. The menace was for him. This was the end of drifting--of all
dreams. Here was the reality--the whole future to be faced.
He stood there listening--bracing himself....
It was close on daybreak when he returned. The lamp still burned dimly.
Meredith lay on the camp-bed, fully dressed, apparently asleep.
Tristram glanced at the composed face and then stumbled over to the
table against the wall and sat down. The struggle was over, but it had
left him exhausted, broken, his mind blank save for odd distortions of
memory. He thought he heard Wickie patter over the floor to meet
him--Ayeshi's soft and friendly foot-fall--a voice in his ear---"I could
make you a rich man--you could marry whom you pleased----" He heard a
woman speaking gently with a subdued triumph--"Is this your confession,
Major Tristram?"
But Meredith was not asleep. He had spent the night in a bitter
conflict of uncertainties, in prayer, in alternating thankfulness and
dread. Up to now, his growing purpose had been a light in his path,
brightening as his eyes strengthened to the prospect it revealed. He
had hugged sacrifice to himself and grown peaceful in his surrender.
Now that his sacrifice and surrender had been made full and complete, he
had lost his vision.
On Tristram's return, he had feigned sleep instinctively. Now the big,
powerful figure huddled by the table fascinated him. He watched through
half-opened eyes, painfully aware that he was eavesdropping, spying, but
unable to turn away. Something was to be shown, made clear to him. He
saw Tristram pick up a photograph which had stood hidden in the shadow
and hold it before him. He remained thus motionless for many minutes.
Meredith tried to speak to him, to hinder at all costs the self-betrayal
which was to come. But it was too late. Without a sound, Tristram had
dropped forward, hiding the portrait with his body, his face in his
arms.
Thereafter Meredith lay still, with closed eyes, sick with an unformed
sense of disaster.
By daybreak Tristram had disappeared. He left a brief note. He had
been called to the next village--a case of fever. He hoped that the
eggs would be all right for Meredith's breakfast. All very
matter-of-fact and natural.
But the portrait on the table had vanished with him.
*CHAPTER XVII*
*MRS. SMITHERS DOES ACCOUNTS*
As she would have been the first to admit, arithmetic was not one of
Mrs. Smithers's intellectual strongholds. Figures baulked her. They
were an inexhaustible enemy which, when aroused, flung themselves upon
her in serried legions and battalions, eluded pursuit, barricaded
themselves behind mysterious lines, multiplied themselves into
preposterous quantities, and utterly refused to "come out" and surrender
to Mrs. Smithers's somewhat individual laws of subtraction and addition.
On this particular afternoon, she had determined on a grand assault, and
had armed herself with a large sheet of paper, a pencil sharpened to a
nicety, removed her mittens, straightened her wig, and figuratively
rolled up her sleeves. Having made these preparations, which were
probably intended more as a demonstration of impending "frightfulness"
than as an actual assistance in her task, she took up her position in
the dak-bungalow dining-room and opened fire.
She had fought unflinchingly for an hour, when the curtains at the far
end of the room were pushed aside with an impatience which Mrs. Smithers
seemed to recognize. Before she even looked up, she turned the sheet of
paper, with its pattern of astonishing hieroglyphics on its face, and
set her mittens upon it with an air of fixing a tombstone over the body
of her enemy.
"Why, lawks a-mercy, Sigrid, I thought you were sleeping!" she
exclaimed.
"The punkah-coolie had a nap instead. It was so hot--oh, Smithy, what
an annoying person you can be! I've been hunting for you for the last
hour."
"In which case," Mrs. Smithers commented, with a judicial flavour of
speech culled from the law reports, "you must have looked under all the
chairs and tables. I can't see how anybody could hunt for anything in
this nasty barn of a place without running into them in ten minutes.
Not a decent door, not a corner where you can get a moment to
yourself--let alone escape from those crawling black things----"
Sigrid Fersen sighed. She had been standing in the doorway, one slender
arm, from which the sleeve of her pale green tea-gown had dropped back,
raised to hold aside the curtain. Now she came forward, moving
restlessly and noiselessly about the room, picking up one ornament after
another and putting it down without apparently having looked at it.
"You never will let me wipe my boots on you, Smithy," she complained.
"I've trained you to be a doormat ever since I was an infant in arms,
and you still show not the slightest aptitude. One of these days, I
shall lose patience and send you flying." She caught the line of
contempt at the corner of Mrs. Smithers's prim mouth and came over and
pinched her ear with real severity. "I saw that sneer, you horrid,
disreputable old tyrant! You think I can't get on without you. I wish
I could, just to spite you----"
She stopped short, as though losing interest in her train of thought,
and stood at Mrs. Smithers's side stroking the latter's withered cheek
with a light, absent-minded hand. Mrs. Smithers accepted the attention
much as a cat would have done, without gush or undignified gratitude,
but with sedate I-fully-deserve-it satisfaction. "Smithy, do you
realize that we shall have to pack up soon?"
"And a very good thing, too. A nice sight you're getting to look in
this oven of a place."
"Am I? I thought so myself this afternoon. It quite frightened me.
Smithy, make an effort and tell the truth. Am I showing signs of--of
wear and tear?"
Mrs. Smithers unbent. She took the hand on her shoulder and kissed it
abruptly and shamefacedly.
"Steel doesn't rust, Sigrid."
"Doesn't it? That shows what you know about steel. Also it proves
you've been reading penny novelettes again. Still, there is such a thing
as poetic licence, and as a compliment it will pass. No, I shan't rust,
Smithy--I'd rather snap like the good blade of your metaphor----" She
drifted along the currents of her thoughts for a moment, and then added
abruptly, "So it's hey for England and the end of things."
"The beginning, my dear."
"I don't know. We're almost at the end of our tether."
"Well, you knew that would happen."
"Yes--I suppose I did. I remember making admirable, lucid plans to meet
the event. Nothing particular has happened to upset them."
"Nothing at all, my dear."
"By the way, the Rajah has asked me to marry him."
Mrs. Smithers laughed. Her amusement was usually of a more restrained
kind, and the laugh had a rusty, disused sound.
"That's a good joke."
"Isn't it? I don't think he would have offered me anything so
respectable if he had had more pluck. He's terrified of me and of Gaya.
He imagines Gaya would make him impossible if he insulted me. I've
outgrown his original intentions altogether."
"What did you say?"
"I told him he wasn't rich enough. It was horribly vulgar, but it's the
sort of thing he understands. I've never seen a man more humiliated.
If I had told him he was a blackguard, he wouldn't have minded. It's
wonderful how he has assimilated our Western ideals."
"Sigrid----"
"Yes, I know--I'm in a detestable mood. I'm upset, Smithy. I've always
controlled my life, moulded it into the shape I wanted. I was so sure
that I could never be beaten by it. I thought there was only one real