The Pool in the Desert by Sara Jeannette Duncan (ebook reader browser txt) 📖

'you had better get off now, as you didn't then, and look at your animal's near fore. The swelling's as big as a bun already.'

Again he made me no answer, but looked intently and questioningly at Dora.

'Get off, Mr. Armour,' she said, sharply, 'and lead your horse home. It is not fit to be ridden. Goodbye.'

I have no doubt he did it, but neither of us were inclined to look back to see. We pushed on under the deodars, and I was indulgent to a trot. At the end of it Dora remarked that Mr. Armour naturally could not be expected to know anything about riding, it was very plucky of him to get on a horse at all, among these precipices; and I of course agreed.

Lord Arthur was waiting when we arrived, on his chestnut polo pony, but Dora immediately scratched for the brilliant event in which they were paired. Ronald, she said, was simply cooked with the heat. Ronald had come every yard of the way on his toes and was fit for anything, but Lord Arthur did not insist. There were young ladies in Simla, I am glad to say, who appealed more vividly to his imagination than Dora Harris did, and one of them speedily replaced her, a fresh-coloured young Amazon who was staying at the Chief's. She wandered about restlessly over the dry turf for a few minutes, and then went and sat down in a corner of the little wooden Grand Stand and sent me for a cup of tea.

'Won't you come to the tent?' I asked a little ruefully, eyeing the distance and the possible collisions between, but she shook her head.

'I simply couldn't bear it,' she said, and I went feeling somehow chastened myself by the cloud that was upon her spirit.

I found her on my return regarding the scene with a more than usually critical eye, and a more than usually turned down lip. Yet it was exactly the scene it always was, and always, probably, will be. I sat down beside her and regarded it also, but more charitably than usual. Perhaps it was rather trivial, just a lot of pretty dresses and excited young men in white riding-breeches doing foolish things on ponies in the shortest possible time, with one little crowd about the Club's refreshment tent and another about the Staff's, while the hills sat round in an indifferent circle; but it appealed to me with a kind of family feeling that afternoon, and inspired me with tolerance, even benevolence.

'After all,' I said, 'it's mainly youth and high spirits--two good things. And one knows them all.'

'And who are they to know?' complained Dora.

'Just decent young Englishmen and Englishwomen, out here on their country's business,' I replied cheerfully; 'with the marks of Oxford and Cambridge and Sandhurst and Woolwich on the men. Well-set-up youngsters, who know what to do and how to do it. Oh, I like the breed!'

'I wonder,' said she, in a tone of preposterous melancholy, 'if eventually I have to marry one of them.'

'Not necessarily,' I said. She looked at me with interest, as if I had contributed importantly to the matter in hand, and resumed tapping her boot with her riding-crop. We talked of indifferent things and had long lapses. At the close of one effort Dora threw herself back with a deep, tumultuous sigh. 'The poverty of this little wretched resort ties up one's tongue!' she cried. 'It is the bottom of the cup; here one gets the very dregs of Simla's commonplace. Let us climb out of it.'

I thought for a moment that Ronald had been too much for her nerves coming down, and offered to change saddles, but she would not. We took it out of the horses all along the first upward slopes, and as we pulled in to breathe them she turned to me paler than ever.

'I feel better now,' she said.

For myself I had got rid of Armour for the afternoon. I think my irritation with him about his pony rose and delivered me from the too insistent thought of him. With Dora it was otherwise; she had dismissed him; but he had never left her for a moment the whole long afternoon.

She flung a searching look at me. With a reckless turn of her head, she said, 'Why didn't we take him with us?'

'Did we want him?' I asked.

'I think I always want him.'

'Ah!' said I, and would have pondered this statement at some length in silence, but that she plainly did not wish me to do so.

'We might perfectly well have sent his pony home with one of our own servants--he would have been delighted to walk down.'

'He wasn't in proper kit,' I remonstrated.

'Oh, I wish you would speak to him about that. Make him get some tennis-flannels and riding-things.'

'Do you propose to get him asked to places?' I inquired.

She gave me a charmingly unguarded smile. 'I propose to induce you to do so. I have done what I could. He has dined with us several times, and met a few people who would, I thought, be kind to him.'

'Oh, well,' I said, 'I have had him at the Club too, with old Lamb and Colonel Hamilton. He made us all miserable with his shyness. Don't ask me to do it again, please.'

'I've sent him to call on certain people,' Dora continued, 'and I've shown his pictures to everybody, and praised him and talked about him, but I can't go on doing that indefinitely, can I?'

'No,' I said; 'people might misunderstand.'

'I don't think they would MISunderstand,' replied this astonishing girl, without flinching. She even sought my eyes to show me that hers were clear and full of purpose.

'Good God!' I said to myself, but the words that fell from me were, 'He is outside all that life.'

'What is the use of living a life that he is outside of?'

'Oh, if you put it that way,' I said, and set my teeth, 'I will do what I can.'

She held out her hand with an affectionate gesture, and I was reluctantly compelled to press it.

The horses broke into a trot, and we talked no more of Armour, or of anything, until Ted Harris joined us on the Mall.

I have rendered this conversation with Dora in detail because subsequent events depend so closely upon it. Some may not agree that it was basis enough for the action I thought well to take; I can only say that it was all I was ever able to obtain. Dora was always particularly civil and grateful about my efforts, but she gave me only one more glimpse, and that enigmatic, of any special reason why they should be made. Perhaps this was more than compensated for by the abounding views I had of the situation as it lay with Ingersoll Armour, but of that, other persons, approaching the subject without prejudice, will doubtless judge better than I.


Chapter 2.VIII.

It was better not to inquire, so I never knew to what extent Kauffer worked upon the vanity of ancient houses the sinful dodge I suggested to him; but I heard before long that the line of Armour's rejected efforts had been considerably diminished. Armour told me himself that Kauffer's attitude had become almost conciliatory, that Kauffer had even hinted at the acceptance of, and adhesion to, certain principles which he would lay down as the basis of another year's contract. In talking to me about it, Armour dwelt on these absurd stipulations only as the reason why any idea of renewal was impossible. It was his proud theory with me that to work for a photographer was just as dignified as to produce under any other conditions, provided you did not stoop to ideals which for lack of a better word might be called photographic. How he represented it to Dora, or permitted Dora to represent it to him, I am not so certain--I imagine there may have been admissions and qualifications. Be that as it may, however, the fact was imperative that only three months of the hated bond remained, and that some working substitute for the hated bond would have to be discovered at their expiration. Simla, in short, must be made to buy Armour's pictures, to appreciate them, if the days of miracle were not entirely past, but to buy them any way. On one or two occasions I had already made Simla buy things. I had cleared out young Ludlow's stables for him in a week--he had a string of ten--when he played polo in a straw hat and had to go home with sunstroke; and I once auctioned off all the property costumes of the Amateur Dramatic Society at astonishing prices. Pictures presented difficulties which I have hinted at in an earlier chapter, but I did not despair. I began by hauling old Lamb, puffing and blowing like a grampus, up to Amy Villa, filling him up all the way with denunciations of Simla's philistinism and suggestions that he alone redeemed it.

It is a thing I am ashamed to think of, and it deserved its reward.

Lamb criticized and patronized every blessed thing he saw, advised Armour to beware of mannerisms and to be a little less liberal with his colour, and heard absolutely unmoved of the horses Armour had got into the Salon. 'I understand,' he said, with a benevolent wink, 'that about four thousand pictures are hung every year at the Salon, and I don't know how many thousand are rejected. Let Mr. Armour get a picture accepted by the Academy. Then he will have something to talk about.'

Neither did Sir William Lamb buy anything at all.

The experiment with Lady Pilkey was even more distressing. She gushed with fair appropriateness and great liberality, and finally fixed upon one scene to make her own. She winningly asked the price of it. She had never known anybody who did not understand prices. Poor Armour, the colour of a live coal, named one hundred rupees.

'One hundred rupees! Oh, my dear boy, I can never afford that! You must, you must really give it to me for seventy-five. It will break my heart if I can't have it for seventy-five.'

'Give me the pleasure,' said Armour, 'of making you a present of it. You have been so kind about everything, and it's so seldom one meets anybody who really cares. So let me send it to you.' It was honest embarrassment; he did not mean to be impertinent.

And she did.

Blum, of the Geological Department--Herr Blum in his own country--came up and honestly rejoiced, and at end of an interminable pipe did purchase a little Breton bit that I hated to see go--it was one of the things that gave the place its air; but Blum had a large family undergoing education at Heidelberg, and exclaimed, to Armour's keenest anguish, that on this account he could not more do.

Altogether, during the months of August and September, persons resident in Simla drawing their income from Her Majesty, bought from the eccentric young artist from nowhere, living on Summer Hill, canvases and little wooden panels to the extent of two hundred and fifty rupees. Lady Pilkey had asked him to lunch--she might well! and he had appeared at three garden-parties and a picnic. It was not enough.

It was not enough, and yet it was, in a manner, too much. Pitiful as it was in substance, it had an extraordinary personal effect. Armour suddenly began