The Hermit Doctor of Gaya: A Love Story of Modern India
He waited. He could not have said for what, but he knew that it was
something great in her. He had seen this moment many times before and
seen it both as an end and as a beginning of a new life between them.
It was in her hands. But at the last a kind of proud confidence had
swept over him. It did not occur to him to appeal to her.
Understanding is above forgiveness. Either she understood, and there
would be no need to forgive, or he was simply a murderer, and then her
forgiveness would be valueless.
But he had believed that now she would understand. She crouched in her
chair, looking at him with horror in her eyes.
"I can't--it's too terrible--to have done that--and then to have shirked
the responsibility----"
Still he waited. He had to explain--that was only fair to her and to
himself. But he began to lose hope. He saw himself with her eyes and
the eyes of her world.
"You know that I was delirious for a long time afterwards. When I
recovered the whole thing seemed finished. No one was suspected as far
as I knew. Well, your father meant to smash me. I saw that much in his
face. And, frankly, Anne, I did not choose to be ruined for his sake.
My life--my work--was of value to others to whom I owed more than I did
to him. If I made no effort to escape the consequences of what I had
done I also did not immolate myself to a false idea of justice----" He
broke off. It was not what he had meant to say to her. It was cold and
ugly. But her eyes told him that everything he could tell her, of the
deliberately accepted burden of silence, of the motive of a great filial
love which had chosen to crush the inborn, conventional instincts of
honour rather than tread the easy, chivalrous road of self-accusation,
of all that the intervening time had held of doubt, and weariness--would
be to her so much hypocrisy and cowardly subterfuge. The crisis struck
no fire of sympathy in her which might have illuminated his curt and
clumsy sentences. To her he was simply a criminal, and before her he
became one--tongue-tied, self-distrustful.
She spoke at last and instinctively he braced himself.
"Are you taking shelter behind your mother, or whom?" she asked
sneeringly. Then, as he did not answer, she got up. The stupor which
had restrained her hitherto gave way. She shivered from head to foot,
and her face was twisted and livid with the violence of her feeling.
"And then you married me!" she cried out--"just to shield yourself----"
"Anne!"
"Well, didn't you?"
He strode at her and took her by the shoulders. For a moment she
thought, in her horror of him, that he would have struck her, and she
threw back her head defying the blow with all the strength of her
contempt. But his eyes daunted her. They were neither angry nor
guilty--but bewildered.
"Anne, why in God's name did you marry me if you thought of me like
that?"
Her lips quivered.
"I didn't think of you like that."
"No, perhaps you didn't. You couldn't have thought of me at all. You
just imagined me--you never knew or wanted to know the man I really am.
Now that the image is broken, there's nothing left. I am just--somebody
you don't know--a total stranger, capable of anything----"
"Isn't it true?" she persisted stubbornly.
"No," he said. "It is not true." He thought a moment and then added
with grave simplicity, "It would never have occurred to me. You were
just some one I was very fond of. I wanted to take care of you."
She tried to laugh.
"I suppose, having murdered the father, you thought it was your duty to
marry the daughter."
His hands dropped wearily to his sides.
"If I hadn't been instrumental in your father's loss, if I had had the
faintest hope of his ever being able to take his place in your life
again, I wouldn't have asked you to be my wife. I shouldn't have dared
draw you into my life. But you were lonely and unhappy--much as I
was----"
"You felt guilty and you pitied me," she interrupted with feverish
excitement. "I suppose you think you've sacrificed yourself. You never
wanted to marry me. It was always that woman--that woman----"
"For pity's sake--don't, Anne!" he pleaded.
"Why shouldn't I? I've the right----"
"You have not the right to say that," he said sternly. "I have behaved
like a fool--I have done you, as things turned, a great wrong; but I
have never thought of any other woman as my wife."
"Not as your wife, perhaps," she interrupted wildly.
He turned away from her. He felt physically sick and broken. The room,
with its suffocating propriety, its prim order, seemed to him an
integral part of the scene's sordidness. He had only one instinct
left--the thirst for the free air and the loneliness of the life to
which he had belonged. She watched him in breathless silence, clasping
and unclasping her thin hands. She was the more resentful because he
had driven her to an outburst of which she was ashamed.
"When you found my father was going to get better, what did you expect?"
she began again. "I wonder since you had gone so far--that you didn't
finish your work."
A faint, bitter amusement touched his white lips.
"Yes, Anne, you would wonder that. But I am a doctor--not so much by
profession as by instinct. I have to save--to heal where I can. Even
then I might have failed in this instance and not found myself guilty.
But he was your father--I wanted you to be happy--I think it--it
inspired me to do more than I could otherwise have done."
"What did you expect--between us afterwards?" she persisted.
The smile lingered, but without its bitterness.
"Oh, I don't know, Anne--but something different from this. I knew that
you'd be pained, even horrified--that was only natural. But I thought
you knew me well enough to see the less ugly side. I had a foolish
fancy even--that in such a crisis we might find each other--understand
each other better. Well--I've been wrong all the way."
She was silent for a moment, gathering together the storm-scattered
principles of her life. She was trying to be just, charitable, towards
him. The tears glistened on her cheeks.
"I daresay you did mean to make me happy, Tris. But you see, you
couldn't. One can't build up happiness on sin."
"I did not feel myself guilty--not in that way," he said gently.
"But you were guilty." Her voice hardened. "It was a crime to have
struck a man down for the sake of a mongrel dog----"
He turned quickly. He felt mysteriously outraged, as though she had
struck straight and deep into something vital in him.
"It wasn't only a dog, Anne," he said. "It was the pain--all the
needless suffering----" He did not try to finish. He could not have
explained, because he knew it was not in her power to understand. For
the first time he saw all that separated them--not so much a gulf as a
world, making her day his night. They were both silent. In a few
minutes the superficial wrappings of their life had been torn off and
its nakedness held them appalled.
The door opened softly and the new nurse who had come with Dr. Martin
looked in for an instant.
"He is coming round, Major Tristram," she said.
"Very well, nurse. I'll be with you at once."
He went towards the door, but Anne forestalled him. Her face was
composed and very set, though the tears still hung on her long lashes.
"I don't want you to--I don't think you ought to----"
He looked at her grimly.
"As you wish. Dr. Martin must be outside somewhere. I'll explain. He
can take over the case."
"Explain--what do you mean?"
He shrugged his shoulders.
"We've got to begin somewhere. Better now."
She stared at him blankly.
"You don't mean--you can't mean--you're not going to tell people?"
"I must. Besides, isn't it what you wish?"
She turned away and sat down, burying her face in her hands. She was
crying softly, helplessly, like a child. He came back to her and stood
over her as though his first impulse to comfort, her had been checked by
recollection.
"Anne, I am a clumsy beggar--I don't understand--I don't know what you
want----"
"You can't tell everyone," she sobbed wildly. "You can't, Tris. It
would be too cruel. Think of all the people you'd hurt--who would have
to suffer with you--all of us, even--even our child--even father. You
mustn't do it, Tris. Father may have changed--he will be so happy--I
shall beg him for his own sake as well as for mine. He'll do as I
ask--I'm sure he will. Tris--it's awful to know this awful thing
oneself--but for others to know too--and all the scandal----"
She was incoherent in her piteous despair, but now he understood her.
"You forget Ayeshi, Anne," he said, "and all I owe him."
"Ayeshi----? But people only suspect--he's in hiding because of some
money he took--what does he matter? No one could prove anything--only
father--and he can clear Ayeshi best of all. Don't you see that--or
don't you care? Do you want me to suffer?"
He winced.
"I'll do whatever you want, Anne," he said heavily. "Everything on earth
I can do. But I've got to think. I'll tell Martin I've had marching
orders, or some lie. He knows the case, and can do everything as well as
I could. I'll clear out to Heerut. I've got to see Ayeshi. In the
meantime, you'll have breathing space to think things over too--and to
decide. You can let me know." He went to the door and there hesitated
and looked back at her with pitying wistfulness. "Anne, I don't repent
much what I did to your father--I can't--but you didn't deserve to be
hurt. And I've hurt you. I can't forgive myself that--ever."
He waited an instant. She did not move and he went out closing the door
softly behind him.
*CHAPTER VIII*
*RETURN*
"When I heard folks say the place was haunted I just laughed in their
faces," Mrs. Smithers asserted moodily. "I don't hold with ghosts and
them sort, and in a general way I don't believe in them. But I believe
in this ghost all right. We've tried to scrub it out, but it won't go
and it's got the grouch on us for trying. It's just sucking the polish
out of the furniture. And it's sucking the life out of me; I know
that."
She turned to her companion lying curled up in the big basket chair and
challenged contradiction with her own appearance. Sigrid looked back at
her gravely.
"Your wig's crooked, Smithy dear. Of late its angle has been
persistently drunken."
"What's it matter!" Mrs. Smithers returned. "Who cares? We might as
well be drunk for all the notice these stuck-up nobodies take of us.
What's the use of being respectable, if there's no one to see? Might as
well fade away, comfy, that's my opinion." Whereupon, suiting her
action to her words, she snatched the offending erection from her head,
sat on it, and proceeded to rumple up the short grey hair till the last
vestige of propriety was lost in a ludicrously rakish disorder. "Well,
I've been respectable for your sake for two solid years, Sigrid, and
it's nigh done for me. Now I'm myself again, and I mean to stick to
meself or bust; so there."
Sigrid gave a laugh that ended with a sigh.
"Your nice, wicked, unprincipled self, Smithy! It reminds me of old
times."
"H'm, does it? Well, nothing reminds me of old times in this horrible
place. Nothing--not even you. You're just the outsides of what you
were, Sigrid--a sort of husk. I don't know where you are--but the real
you isn't here at all--and a good job too." She paused and then
wistfully, rather shyly: "You don't even play nowadays, my dear."
Sigrid got up slowly.
"Smithy, one couldn't play in this room. I could play in a garret or in
the streets, but not here. Fancy Beethoven and that marble atrocity!