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

in the drawing,' I said.

'What does that signify?'

'Why, immaturity, of course--not enough discipline.'

'He's a student. Not that it amounts to a defect, you know'--she was as jealous already as if she possessed the things--'only a sign to read by. I should be grateful for more signs. Why should a student come to Simla?'

'To teach, perhaps,' I suggested. Naturally one sought only among reasons of utility.

'It's the Kensington person who teaches. When they have worked in the ateliers and learned as much as this they never do. They paint fans and menu cards, and starve, but they don't teach.'

Sir William Lamb, Member of Council for the Department of Finance, was borne by the stream to our sides. The simile will hardly stand conscientious examination, for the stream was a thin one and did no more than trickle past, while Sir William weighed fifteen stone, and was so eminent that it could never inconvenience him at its deepest. Dora detached her gaze from the pictures and turned her back upon them; I saw the measure of precaution. It was unavailing, however. 'What have we here?' said Sir William. Dora removed her person from his line of vision, and he saw what we had there.

'The work of a friend of yours?' Sir William was spoken of as a 'cautious' man. He had risen to his present distinction on stepping-stones of mistakes he conspicuously had not made.

'No,' said Dora, 'we were wondering who the artist could be.'

Sir William looked at the studies, and had a happy thought. 'If you ask me, I should say a child of ten,' he said. He was also known as a man of humour.

'Miss Harris had just remarked a certain immaturity,' I ventured.

'Oh, well,' said Sir William, 'this isn't the Royal Academy, is it? I always say it's very good of people to send their things here at all. And some of them are not half bad--I should call this year's average very high indeed.'

'Are you pleased with the picture that has taken your prize, Sir William?' asked Dora.

'I have bought it.' Sir William's chest underwent before our eyes an expansion of conscious virtue. Living is so expensive in Simla; the purchase of a merely decorative object takes almost the proportion of an act of religion, even by a Member of Council drawing four hundred pounds a month.

'First-rate it is, first-rate. Have you seen it? "Our Camp in Tirah." Natives cooking in the foreground, fellows standing about smoking, and a whole pile of tinned stores dumped down in one corner, exactly as they would be, don't you know! Oh, I think the Committee made a very good choice indeed, a very good choice.'

Sir William moved on, and Dora was free to send me an expressive glance. 'Isn't that just LIKE this place?' she demanded. 'Let me see, the Viceroy's medal, the Society's silver medal, five prizes from Members of Council. Highly Commended's as thick as blackberries, and these perfectly fresh, original, admirable things completely ignored. What an absurd, impossible corner of the earth it is!'

'You look very cross, you two,' said Mrs. Sinclair, trailing past. 'Come and see the crazy china exhibit, all made of little bits, you know. They say the photograph frames are simply lovely.'

Mrs. Sinclair's invitation was not sincere. Miss Harris was able to answer it with a laugh and a wave. We remained beside the serious fact of exhibits 97-103.

'Who are the judges this year?' I asked, not that I did not know precisely who they were likely to be. There is a custom in these matters, and I had been part of Simla for eleven years.

Dora took the catalogue from my hand and turned its pages over.

'Mr. Cathcart, of course; the Private Secretary to the Viceroy would be on the Committee almost ex officio, wouldn't he? Impossible to conceive a Private Secretary to the Viceroy whose opinion would not be valuable upon any head. The member for Public Works--I suppose he can build bridges, or could once, therefore he can draw, or could once; besides, look at his precedence and his pay! General Haycock--isn't he head of the Ordnance Department? I can't think of any other reason for putting him on. Oh yes--he's a K.C.B., and he is inventing a way of taking coloured photographs. Mr. Tilley, the old gentleman that teaches elementary drawing to the little girls in the diocesan school, that's all right. And Mr. Jay, of course, because Mr. Jay's water-colours are the mainstay of the exhibition, and he must be given a chance of expressing his opinion of them.' She handed me back the catalogue. 'I have never been really angry with them before,' she said.

'Are you really angry now?' I asked.

'Furious,' Dora replied, and indeed her face expressed indignation. Its lines were quite tense, and a spark shone oddly in the middle of the eyes. One could not credit her with beauty, but as her lady friends were fond of saying, there was something 'more' in her face. I saw a good deal more at this moment, and it gave me pleasure, as all her feelings did when they came out like that. I hasten to add that she was not unpleasing; her features had a symmetry and a mobility, and her eyes could take any transient charm they chose to endow themselves with; though there were moments when she compared very badly with the other young ladies of Simla with their high spirits and their pretty complexions, very badly indeed. Those were occasions when the gay monotony of the place pressed, I imagine, a little heavily upon her, and the dullness she felt translated itself in her expression. But she was by no means unpleasing.

'I must go and see Lady Pilkey's picture,' I said.

'What is the use?' said Dora. 'It's a landscape in oils--a view of the Himalayas, near Narkanda. There are the snows in the background, very thin and visionary through a gap in the trees, and two hills, one hill on each side. Dark green trees, pine-trees, with a dead one in the left foreground covered with a brilliant red creeper. Right foreground occupied by a mountain path and a solitary native figure with its back turned. Society's silver medal.'

'When did you see it?' I asked.

'I haven't seen it--this year. But I saw the one she sent last, and the one the year before that. You can trust my memory, really.'

'No,' I said, 'I can't. I'm dining there tonight. I must have an original impression.'

'Congratulate her on the warm blaze of colour in the foreground. It's perfectly safe,' urged Miss Harris, but I felt compelled to go myself to see lady Pilkey's landscape. When I returned I found her still sitting in grave absorption before the studies that had taken us so by surprise. Her face was full of a soft new light; I had never before seen the spring touched in her that could flood it like that.

'You were very nearly right,' I announced; 'but the blaze of colour was in the middle distance, and there was a torrent in the foreground that quite put it out. And the picture does take the Society's silver medal.'

'I can not decide,' she replied without looking at me, 'between the Kattiawar fair thing and those hills in the rain. I can only have one--father won't hear of more than one.'

'You can have two,' I said bluntly, so deeply interested I was in the effect the things had on her. 'And I will have a third for myself. I can't withstand those apricot-trees.'

I thought there was moisture in the eyes she turned upon me, an unusual thing--a most unusual thing--in Dora Harris; but she winked it back, if it was there, too quickly for any certainty.

'You are a dear,' she said. Once or twice before she had called me a dear. It reminded me, as nothing else ever did, that I was a contemporary of her father's. It is a feeble confession, but I have known myself refrain from doing occasional agreeable things apprehending that she might call me a dear.


Chapter 2.II.

Dora had been out three seasons when these things happened. I remember sharing Edward Harris's anxiety in no slight degree as to how the situation would resolve itself when she came, the situation consisting so considerably in his eyes of the second Mrs. Harris, who had complicated it further with three little red-cheeked boys, all of the age to be led about the station on very small ponies, and not under any circumstances to be allowed in the drawing-room when one went to tea with their mother. No one, except perhaps poor Ted himself, was more interested than I to observe how the situation did resolve itself, in the decision of Mrs. Harris that the boys, the two eldest at least, must positively begin the race for the competitive examinations of the future without further delay, and that she must as positively be domiciled in England 'to be near' them, at all events until they had well made the start. I should have been glad to see them ride their ponies up and down the Mall a bit longer, poor little chaps; they were still very cherubic to be invited to take a view of competitive examinations, however distant; but Mrs. Harris's conviction was not to be overcome. So they went home to begin, and she went with them, leaving Dora in possession of her father, her father's house, his pay, his precedence, and all that was his. Not that I would suggest any friction; I am convinced that there was nothing like that--at least, nothing that met the eye, or the ear. Dora adored the three little boys and was extremely kind to their mother. She regarded this lady, I have reason to believe, with the greatest indulgence, and behaved towards her with the greatest consideration; I mean she had unerring intuitions as to just when, on afternoons when Mrs. Harris was at home from dusk till dinner, she should be dying for a walk. One could imagine her looking with her grey eyes at dear mamma's horizon and deciding that papa was certainly not enough to fill it by himself, deciding at the same time that he was never likely to be ousted there, only accompanied, in a less important and entirely innocent degree. It may be surprising that any one should fly from so broad-minded a step-daughter; but the happy family party lasted a bare three months. I think Mrs. Harris had a perception--she was the kind of woman who arrived obscurely at very correct conclusions--that she was contributing to her step-daughter's amusement in a manner which her most benevolent intentions had not contemplated, and she was not by any means the little person to go on doing that indefinitely, perhaps increasingly. Besides, it was in the natural order of things that Dora should marry, and Mrs. Harris doubtless foresaw a comfortable return for herself in the course of a year or two, when the usual promising junior in 'the Department' should gild his own prospects and promote the general well-being by acquiring its head for a father-in-law. Things always worked out if you gave them time. How much time you ought to give them was doubtless by now a pretty constant query with the little lady in her foggy exile; for two years had already passed and Dora had found no connection with any young man of the Department more permanent than those prescribed at dinners and at dances. It is doubtful, indeed, if she had had the opportunity. There was no absolute