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

well go about quite alone; it would be uncomfortable.'

'Except that you Americans are so perfectly independent.'

'On the contrary. If I could order about a servant the way an Englishwoman does--'

'Say you are not going to tell him! I've got such a lot of other calls to make,' exclaimed Mrs. Innes. 'Dear Lady Bloomfield won't understand it if I don't call today, especially after the baby. What people in that position want with more babies I can not comprehend. Of course you haven't noticed it, but a baby is such a shock to Simla.'

'Don't let me keep you,' Madeline said, rising.

'But you haven't promised. Do promise, Miss Anderson. You gain nothing by telling him, except your revenge; and I should think by this time you would have forgiven me for taking Frederick away from you. He didn't turn out so well! You can't still bear me malice over that convict in Sing Sing.'

'For his sake, poor fellow, I might.'

'Coming along I said to myself, "She CAN score off me badly, but surely she doesn't want to so much as all that." Besides, I really only took your leavings, you know. You threw poor Fred Prendergast over.'

'I am not prepared to discuss that,' Madeline said, at no pains to smooth the curve out of her lip.

'Then I thought, "Perhaps--you never can tell with people--she will think it her DUTY to make a fuss."'

'That is a possible point of view.'

'I know. You think I'm an imposter on society and I ought to be exposed, and I suppose you could shut every door in Simla against me if you liked. But you are a friend of my husband's, Miss Anderson. You would not turn his whole married life into a scandal and ruin his career?'

'Ruin his career?'

'Of course. Government is awfully particular. It mayn't be his fault in the least, but no man is likely to get any big position with a cloud over his domestic affairs. Horace would resign, naturally.'

'Or take long leave,' Mrs. Innes added to herself, but she did not give Madeline this alternative. A line or two of nervous irritation marked themselves about her eyes, and her colour had faded. Her hat was less becoming than it had been, and she had pulled a button off her glove.

'Besides,' she went on quickly, 'it isn't as if you could do any good, you know. The harm was done once for all when I let him think he'd married me. I thought then--well, I had to take it or leave it--and every week I expected to hear of Frederick's death. Then I meant to tell Horace myself, and have the ceremony over again. He couldn't refuse. And all these years it's been like living on a volcano, in the fear of meeting New York people. Out here there never are any, but in England I dye my hair, and alter my complexion.'

'Why did you change your mind,' Madeline asked, 'about telling Colonel Innes?'

'I haven't! Why should I change my mind? For my own protection, I mean to get things put straight instantly--when the time comes.'

'When the time comes,' Madeline repeated; and her eyes, as she fixed them on Mrs. Innes, were suddenly so lightened with a new idea that she dropped the lids over them as she waited for the answer.

'When poor Frederick does pass away,' Mrs. Innes said, with an air of observing the proprieties. 'When they put him in prison it was a matter of months, the doctors said. That was one reason why I went abroad. I couldn't bear to stay there and see him dying by inches, poor fellow.'

'Couldn't you?'

'Oh, I couldn't. And the idea of the hard labour made me SICK. But it seems to have improved his health, and now--there is no telling! I sometimes believe he will live out his sentence. Should you think that possible in the case of a man with half a lung?'

'I have no knowledge of pulmonary disease,' Madeline said. She forced the words from her lips and carefully looked away, taking this second key to the situation mechanically, and for a moment groping with it.

'What arrangement did you make to be informed about--about him?' she asked, and instantly regretted having gone so perilously near provoking a direct question.

'I subscribe to the "New York World". I used to see lots of things in it--about the shock the news of my death gave him--'

A flash of hysterical amusement shot into Mrs. Innes's eyes, and she questioned Madeline's face to see whether it responded to her humour. Then she put her own features straight behind her handkerchief and went on.

'And about his failing health, and then about his being so much better. But nothing now for ages.'

'Did the "World" tell you,' asked Miss Anderson, with sudden interest, 'that Mr. Prendergast came into a considerable fortune before--about two years ago?'

Mrs. Innes's face turned suddenly blank. 'How much?' she exclaimed.

'About five hundred thousand dollars, I believe. Left him by a cousin. Then you didn't know?'

'That must have been Gordon Prendergast--the engineer!' Mrs. Innes said, with excitement. 'Fancy that! Leaving money to a relation in Sing Sing! Hadn't altered his will, I suppose. Who could possibly,' and her face fell visibly, 'have foreseen such a thing?'

'No one, I think,' said Madeline, through a little edged smile. 'On that point you will hardly be criticized.'

Mrs. Innes, with clasped hands, was sunk in thought. She raised her eyes with a conviction in them which she evidently felt to be pathetic.

'After all,' she said, 'there is something in what the padres say about our reaping the reward of our misdeeds in this world--some of us, anyway. If I had stayed in New York--'

'Yes?' said Madeline. 'I shall wake up presently,' she reflected, 'and find that I have been dreaming melodrama.' But that was a fantastic underscoring of her experience. She knew very well she was making it.

Mrs. Innes, again wrapped in astonished contemplation, did not reply. Then she jumped to her feet with a gesture that cast fortunes back into the lap of fate.

'One thing is certain,' she said; 'I can't do anything NOW, can I?'

Madeline laid hold of silence and made armour with it. At all events, she must have time to think.

'I decline to advise you,' she said, and she spoke with a barely perceptive movement of her lips only. The rest of her face was stone.

'How unkind and unforgiving you are! Must people would think the loss of a hundred thousand pounds about punishment enough for what I have done. You don't seem to see it. But on top of that you won't refuse to promise not to tell Horace?'

'I will not bind myself in any way whatever.'

'Not even when you know that the moment I hear of the--death I intend to--to--'

'Make an honest man of him? Not even when I know that.'

'Do you want me to go down on my knees to you?'

Madeline glanced at the flowered fabric involved and said, 'I wouldn't, I think.'

'And this is to hang over me the whole season? I shall enjoy nothing--absolutely NOTHING.' The blue eyes were suddenly eclipsed by angry tears, which the advent of a servant with cards checked as suddenly.

'Goodbye, then, dear,' cried Mrs. Innes, as if in response to the advancing rustle of skirts in the veranda. 'So glad to have found you at home. Dear me, has Trilby made her way up--and I gave such particular orders! Oh, you NAUGHTY dog!'


Chapter 3.VII.

From the complication that surged round Miss Anderson's waking hours one point emerged, and gave her a perch for congratulation. That was the determination she had shown in refusing to let Frederick Prendergast leave her his money, or any part of it.

It has been said that he had outlived her tenderness, if not her care, and this fact, which she never found it necessary to communicate to poor Frederick himself, naturally made his desire in the matter sharply distasteful. She was even unaware of the disposition he had made of his ironical fortune, a reflection which brought her thankfulness that there was something she did not know. 'If I had let him do it,' she thought, 'I should have felt compelled to tell her everything, instantly. And think of discussing it with her!' This was quite a fortnight later, and Mrs. Innes still occupied her remarkable position only in her own mind and Madeline's, still knowing herself the wife of 1596 and of 1596 only, and still unaware that 1596 was in his grave. Simla had gone on with its dances and dinners and gymkhanas quite as if no crucial experience were hanging over the heads of three of the people one met 'everywhere,' and the three people continued to be met everywhere, although only one of them was unconscious. The women tried to avoid each other without accenting it, exchanging light words only as occasion demanded, but they were not clever enough for Mrs. Gammidge and Mrs. Mickie, who went about saying that Mrs. Innes's treatment of Madeline Anderson was as ridiculous as it was inexplicable. 'Did you ever know her to be jealous of anybody before?' demanded Mrs. Mickie, to which Mrs. Gammidge responded, with her customary humour, that the Colonel had never, in the memory of the oldest inhabitant, been known to give her occasion.

'Well,' declared Mrs. Mickie, 'if friendships--UNSENTIMENTAL friendships--between men and women are not understood in Simla, I'd like to be told what is understood.'

Between them they gave Madeline a noble support, for which--although she did not particularly require it, and they did not venture to offer it in so many words--she was grateful. A breath of public criticism from any point of view would have blown over the toppling structure she was defending against her conscience. The siege was severe and obstinate, with an undermining conviction ever at work that in the end she would yield; in the end she would go away, at least as far as Bombay or Calcutta, and from there send to Mrs. Innes the news of her liberation. It would not be necessary, after all, or even excusable, to tell Horace. His wife would do that quickly enough--at least, she had said she would. If she didn't--well, if she didn't, nothing would be possible but another letter, giving HIM the simple facts, she, Madeline, carefully out of the way of his path of duty--at all events, at Calcutta or Bombay. But there was no danger that Mrs. Innes would lose the advantage of confession, of throwing herself on his generosity--and at this point Madeline usually felt her defenses against her better nature considerably strengthened, and the date of her sacrifice grow vague again.

Meanwhile, she was astonished to observe that, in spite of her threat to the contrary, Mrs. Innes appeared to be enjoying herself particularly well. Madeline had frequent occasion for private comment on the advantages of a temperament that could find satisfaction in dancing through whole programmes at the very door, so to speak, of the criminal courts; and it can not be denied that this capacity of Mrs. Innes's went far to increase the vacillation with which Miss Anderson considered her duty towards that lady. If she had shown traces of a single hour of genuine suffering, there would have been an end to Madeline's hesitation. But beyond an occasional watchful glance at conversations in which she might be figuring dramatically, and upon which she