The Great Amulet

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With a quick turn of the wrist she brought the picture into view, and
set it on the table in a good light.

"Can't you feel the soft wind against their faces, . . the ease, the
swiftness, and the thrill of it all; the thrill of yielding to earth
and the beauty of earth, of giving up for a while one's futile
strugglings to reach the moon?"

Honor stood silent, gazing at the picture with rapt interest. To this
deep-hearted passionate woman, whose sympathies stretched upward and
downward along the whole gamut of human feeling, its appeal was far
stronger than Quita--in whom passion was mainly an imaginative
quality--was likely to realise. For the small picture was heavy with
heat and colour, and the glamour of high mid-summer; the sky's blue
intensity glowing between masses of white thunderous cloud; the
hillsides clothed in their August splendour of purple, and pink, and
green: and down the white track that sloped to the valley a man and a
woman, hand in hand, the woman leading, appeared to be coming straight
out of the picture. Her flying hair, and the sweep of her draperies,
showed the speed of their going; and the ecstasy of it shone in the
faces of both.

"It's a powerful little poem," Quita exclaimed. "As they go on they
meet with grisly portents, the track gets steeper, and they are afraid.
But by that time it is 'too steep for hill-mounting, and too late for
cost-counting; the down-hill path is easy, but there's no turning
back.'"

Honor gave a little shiver.

"It's a wonderful bit of work," she said. "But is it always the man
who leads up, and the woman who leads down, Quita?"

"No. By no manner of means! I happened to see it so in those two
instances. Probably the sainted Christina saw it the other way
round.--But come and sit in Eldred's chair now, and let's get back to
realities."

"Realities? Why, my dear, your pictures touch the height and depth of
the biggest realities. I never knew you did that sort of thing."

"I don't as a rule. But those poems possessed me."

"Well, I can only say, go on and do more."

"I will . . if I can." And gently pushing Honor into the chair, she
settled herself on the carpet, and flung an arm over her friend's knee.
"It's high time I started work again. I've been idling far too long."

Honor smiled. "Don't be in a hurry to put an end to it, dear. It's
one of the divinest and most profitable kinds of idling you will ever
know. You are building up your future in these first months together."

Quita's sigh was a little anxious, though not sad.

"Are we? Well, I hope we've got the foundations right," she said,
looking thoughtfully up into the other's face. Something in its veiled
brilliance caught her attention, and bent her flexible mind in another
direction. "Do you know, Honor," she went on, "you've blossomed out
amazingly just lately. Your eyes are shining like two stars, as if you
had some heavenly secret hidden behind them."

"It's an open secret, and a very human one!" Honor answered, smiling.
"You are well on the way to discovering it for yourself."

With a low sound, Quita captured the hand lying near her own.

"Oh, you utter woman!" she murmured. "Is it still so beautiful . . .
after three years?"

Honor's colour deepened. "It's more beautiful. Much more beautiful.
Because now . . there are two of them."

There was a moment of silence, while Quita fidgeted with the great
square sapphire on her friend's wedding-finger.

"You'll think me dreadful," she said at last. "But I'm not quite sure
that I see the logic of that. For the present, at all events, I only
want Eldred, and these . . my spirit children," she indicated her
pictures with a little nervous laugh. "You must make allowances for
the artist woman, Honor. She so seldom feels and does the things she
ought to feel and do!"

"That's just why she is apt to be so refreshing!--But believe me,
Quita, the most perfect marriage is not quite perfect till it becomes
'the trio perfect,' three persons and one love. That's not fantastic
idealism but simple fact. Besides," she hesitated and caressed a stray
tendril of Quita's hair, "doesn't it seem to you a bigger thing, on the
whole, to make men and women to the best of one's power, than to make
books or pictures, even fine ones?"

"Yes, in some ways . . it does. And for that very reason I doubt
whether I am fitted to make them. It's a gift, an art, like everything
else. Not the creating of them, of course. That's a privilege, or a
fatality, as the case may be! But the moulding of them, after they are
created. You can't deny that they complicate things: and even at this
stage, I find marriage a far more complicated affair than I imagined it
to be. Didn't you?"

Honor's smile was sufficient evidence to the contrary. But she was
old-fashioned enough to have a difficulty in talking about the hidden
poem of her life.

"Perhaps we were exceptions, Theo and I," she said at last. "We knew
one another . . intimately, before starting; and to live with him,
and . . in him, seemed to come as natural as breathing. But then, my
dear, I'm simply a wife and a mother: not a woman of genius, like you."

"Aren't you, indeed? Don't pulverise me with sarcasms, please! In my
opinion this exquisite passion of yours for being 'simply a wife and a
mother' is in itself a kind of genius: perhaps the highest there is.
You see and feel the essential beauty of both relations so vividly that
you make one see and feel it also; just as certain other kinds of women
make one half-ashamed of being a woman at all! Yours is the
temperament that gives, Honor, . . gives royally; and is always sure of
return because it looks for none. While as for me, my present
complications are the natural outcome,--multiplied by six years,--of my
long-ago blindness and folly, that sprang from my capacity for taking,
without a thought of giving in return. You see, Eldred and I have both
an ample time to crystallise in different directions: and the years we
let slip may be trusted to exact their debt to the uttermost
farthing.--Ah, there he is!"

The words were a mere throb of the heart. She was on her feet when the
man entered: and Honor, watching her face, thought she had never seen
it so nearly beautiful. She herself rose also, with a prompt excuse
for departure.

"I haven't even _seen_ Theo since breakfast," she said as they shook
hands. "Tent-pegging days are hopeless: and I promised to go down
early. Don't trouble to come out with me, please."

But Lenox insisted: and on his return found Quita back at her canvas,
to all appearance working diligently at a difficult bit of detail in
one corner. She greeted him with lifted brows.

"Finished your article already?"

"No."

"Then what on earth are you doing, loafing about in here? I'm busy. I
want to get this bit done before I go out."

"Do you though?" but instead of retreating, he came closer,
deliberately confiscated palette and brushes, and drew her into his
arms.

"Shall I send Desmond a 'chit,' to say 'I have married a wife, and
therefore I cannot come'?"

"Yes,--do. He'll forgive you."

"And shall we go for a long ride across country, when I'm through with
my work: and look in at the tent-pegging later?"

For answer she leaned against him with a sigh of content.

CHAPTER XXVII.

"Elfin and human, airy and true;
* * * * * *
Your flowers and thorns you bring with you."
--R.L.S.

But the stumbling-block reasserted itself, and prevailed.

The articles on Tibet were solid affairs, for a solid journal; twelve
of them, to be paid for on acceptance; and since Lenox needed the money
to clear off debts incurred when furnishing and pay for their trip to
Kashmir, he decided to get them written as soon as might be, before the
stealthy increase of heat made mental effort a burden. Thus, while the
Battery absorbed his mornings, Tibet made unlawful inroads upon his
afternoons and evenings; and the narrow margin of leisure thus left to
him did not by any means satisfy Quita's healthy appetite for
companionship. More than once she attempted remonstrance, pitched in
the wrong key, only to be routed by the unanswerable argument that the
work must be done, and that there was no other time in which to do it.
Finally, in a mood between pride and resignation, she shrugged her
shoulders and turned elsewhere for companionship; for interests to fill
the long hours which Eldred's devotion to work left empty on her hands.

And here, in a virtue pushed to the confines of vice, in the man's
blind unintentional neglect of the woman for whom he would wring the
last blood-drop out of his heart, you have the nucleus of more than
half the pitiful domestic tragedies of India. It is the crucial
moment, the genesis of a hundred unsuspected possibilities, this first
divergence of the man and woman, along separate paths of interest.
Love may be strong enough to stand the strain, but it will be love
debarred from that intimate fusion of heart and brain which alone
constitutes true marriage. The other kind is at best a permanent
'friendship recognised by the police':--a tacit confession of failure
which this high-hearted, if contrarious couple were by no means minded
to arrive at, now or ever. But there is no warning sign-post at the
turn of the road; and already their feet were nearing it, without
knowledge that its easy gradient slips into the Valley of Dry Bones.

Quita, however, was in a better case than many wives so circumstanced;
in that her art was no mere distraction for spare hours, but a living
reality; though, unhappily, a capricious one. And now when she would
have returned to it in earnest after months of philandering with brush
and pencil, it stood aloof, unmanageable as Eldred himself! She was
too genuinely an artist to attempt the completion of an imaginative
picture against the stream; and for fresh work, fresh mental stimulus
was needed. This was not readily to be found in the everyday
happenings--the riding, tennis, and gatherings at the Club
Gardens--that made up the cold-weather life at Dera Ishmael; and she
had little taste for small social or domestic amenities, in themselves.
The call of the wild was in her blood. One might as well hope to
domesticate a sea-gull as a woman of this type. She managed her
household on broad lines, ignoring minor details, and Zyarulla, to his
secret relief, found himself still the lynx-eyed custodian of the
Sahib's _Izzat_[1] in houses and compound, still the controller of his
petty cash. Quita received his monthly account--plus a minute
percentage on each item--in perfect good faith. His visions of
possible dismissal evaporated. He heartily commended his master's
choice of a wife; and, in moments of expansion over the evening hookah,
confided to the Khansamah--a friend and ally in the matter of
accounts--his conviction that Mem Sahibs who made pictures were of a
different _jat_ to those who played tennis, harried their ayahs, and
rode rough-shod over the sensibilities of honest bearers like himself!
[Transcriber's note: The "a" in "_jat_" is an a-macron, Unicode U+0101.]

And, in truth, the Bohemian and cosmopolitan elements in Quita made her
airily contemptuous of trifles, of the petty point of view, the 'local'
attitude of mind often found in isolated Indian stations, more
especially among the women. And setting aside Honor and Frank, the
half-dozen officers' wives belonging to the Infantry Regiments were for
the most part colourless average types of femininity such as Quita was
something too ready to despise.

But the woman element had never played a large part in her life; and it
was to the men she turned instinctively for mental companionship; for
the larger outlook, the saner grasp of things big and small. She drew
them by a natural magnetism; and held them by a talent for comradeship
which never degenerated into familiarity or freedom. The four Battery
subalterns, headed by Richardson, surrendered at discretion. And there
were others also; notably George Rivers, Desmond's subaltern, a
promising Lothario with a profile, a tenor voice, and an unimpeachable
taste in ties and waistcoats. But Quita gave the preference to
Eldred's brother officers; and to their open delight made them free of
the house. One or more of them dined with her at least three nights
a-week; and her instantaneous gravitation to Max Richardson had already
resulted in an informal friendship equally delightful for both.

Lenox accepted these developments without comment, yet not without
inward regret. For he craved the restfulness of quiet evenings alone
with his wife, after a hard day's work: and indeed saw more than enough
of his subalterns--always excepting Dick--on the parade-ground and in
the orderly room every morning. Very soon he took to excusing himself
early, on these convivial evenings, with the result that before long
the old habit of working at night had him in its clutches once again,
the charm of it heightened by months of abstinence. For a while he
held out against it; but the quiet within and without, the certainty of
freedom from interruption, the lucidity of thought that brains of a
certain order seem only able to arrive at in the small hours, were
powerful advocates for surrender; and little by little habit conquered.
He smoked more and slept less; and the quality of his work improved in
great strides.

But Quita objected strongly to this barefaced revival of 'bachelor
habits' within six months of marriage; and more than once--waking in
the small hours to find herself alone--she had slipped on her
dressing-gown and boldly invaded his study; a disarming vision enough,
her face flushed with sleep, looking absurdly young in a halo of
tumbled hair, her eyes alight with tenderness and enjoyment of her own
daring. On each occasion she was reproved without severity;
established herself in the deck-lounge of old days; fell asleep
promptly, and was carried protesting back to bed; but not until she had
seen the lamp put out and the detestable litter of papers tidied up for
the night.

In this fashion the first half of March slipped uneventfully by, each
day bringing with it that imperceptible advance of heat which strikes
an undernote of dread through the rose-scented languor of a Punjab
March. For in the vast Northern Plains of India, it is autumn, not
spring, that bears the winged word of resurrection. But Quita was
still at that enviable stage in love's progress when times and seasons
and places shrink to mere pin-points beside the one supreme fact. A
Frontier hot weather in Eldred's company held no terrors for her.
Possibly two months' leave would be available later on, when they would
spend the honeymoon--of which they had been twice defrauded--in
Kashmir; and, in the meantime, so long as one roof covered them, all
was well; in spite of her secret wish that Tibet and the Pamirs could
be expunged from the map of Asia by means of a private deluge!

But if Quita were inclined to quarrel with her husband's industry, Max
Richardson was not. He was enjoying, for the first time in his life,
the mere pleasantness of a woman's intimate companionship;--in Quita's
case a companionship full of incident, of delicate reticences,
alternating with unexpected revelations of thought and feeling; and
through it all a frank interest in everything that concerned himself,
which is perhaps the subtlest form of coquetry. Not that Quita meant
it as such. In her entire devotion to her husband, she simply did not
consider her effect upon other men; to whom, in consequence, she showed
her true self almost with the freedom and spontaneity of a child.
Richardson's own simplicity of character, and the ease with which one
slips into a pleasant path, helped matters forward; and before long,
they had fallen quite naturally into the habit of riding or driving
together when Lenox happened to be very much engaged. Quita saw no
reason to conceal her pleasure in these outings. Lenox thanked his
friend once or twice, bluntly enough, yet with evident sincerity; and
Richardson accepted his own good fortune with an unquestioning
appreciation very characteristic of the man.

His thoughts were running definitely upon this pleasant state of
things, as he drove Quita Lenox homeward through the main street of the
native city, on a glowing evening, some two weeks after Honor's visit
to the studio. Behind them clattered a small guard of native police,
without whom it would not be advisable to explore a frontier city; and
on either hand stretched a narrowing vista of open shop fronts noisy
with vituperative buyers and sellers; brilliant with piled vessels of
brass and copper, with the rainbow tints of dyed silks and muslins,
piles of parched corn and spices, oranges, bananas, and pomegranates;
their upper storeys breaking out into quaintly carved windows and
balconies, strange splashes of colour, or rough childish pictures,
innocent of proportion. And, better than these, in Quita's esteem, was
the wide street itself, packed with the noisy, leisurely life of an
Indian city:--goats and cattle; women and children; open bullock-carts
that seemed to have all eternity to travel in; princely-looking Afghan
traders in long coats and peaked turbans; Waziris, with keen, Jewish
faces framed in greasy locks that fell upon their shoulders; the _sais_
from his tail-board shouting ineffectual commands to make way for the
Sahib; long-legged fowls, leaping and fluttering up under the pony's
nose; pariahs, lazily insolent, almost allowing the wheel to graze
thigh-bone or paw, before they condescended to loaf away to a fresh
resting-place; and over all an arch of blue, so deep and passionate as
to be almost vocal; and pervading all, the indefinable, unforgettable
smell of the East:--a smell compounded of musk, spices, open drains,
and humanity.

When at last they emerged into the open, and quickened their pace,
Quita drew a breath of satisfaction, and smiled up at her companion,
who allowed his eyes to linger in hers a moment longer than the
occasion required.

Their outing had been an unusually long one; for whenever she could
find her way into the city Quita was insatiable. Again and again
Richardson had sat waiting in the sun, while she made thumb-nail
sketches of street corners, bargained with curio-sellers for the
Alexander coins and relics which abound at Dera Ishmael, or extracted
information from shy, smiling women, whose faces happened to take her
fancy in passing.

"You have been a miracle of patience!" she assured him, as they neared
cantonments. "And I daresay you hated it half the time, and scorned my
globe-trotter behaviour! I've noticed how quickly most Anglo-Indians
get bored if one asks questions, or shows the smallest interest in the
country and the people."

"Probably they don't enjoy airing their own ignorance," he suggested,
with lazy amusement in his eyes. "_I'm_ not bored with you, though.
Shouldn't be, even if you were to pelt me with questions till midnight."

She laughed lightly.

"Don't dare me to put you to the test! It might make us enemies for
life. And it's really capital that we get on so well. Just think how
awkward for Eldred if I had taken one of my strong unreasoning dislikes
to you!"

"Still more awkward for me! I never thought you carried hidden weapons
of that sort about with you."

"Wait till you know me better. I am a hopeless creature of extremes!
You can't think how I hated my dear Honor Desmond last year,--though
I'd cut off a hand for her now; nor how I still hate . . . some one I
have never seen;--some one who wrote to Eldred--about me--years ago."

She broke off, remembering that in his eyes she had only been married
nine months; though if she had been looking at him instead of
contemplating the hands that lay clasped in her lap, she must have
noticed his start, the sudden tension of his face and figure. Lenox
had never told her, then. He might have guessed as much. And why
should she ever know, after all? His native honesty prompted him to
make a clean breast of it, and ask her forgiveness. But something
stronger,--a new imperative desire to stand well with her at any
price,--held him silent. Presently, she glanced up at him curiously;
but his straight-featured profile and steady hands upon the reins
revealed nothing beyond a momentary abstraction of thought.

"I forgot, when I spoke just now," she said in a changed voice--a voice
of closer intimacy--"that you don't know how long we have really been
married,--do you?"

"Yes, I do know," he answered, still intent upon the pony. Every
moment made him more exquisitely uncomfortable. But he could not lie
to her.

"Did my husband tell you?" she flashed out almost angrily.

"No, indeed. He's not that sort. I--found out by chance."

"How strange! Another man did the same. One can never keep a secret
in this world. Well--it was the letter I spoke of that did all the
harm; that broke up everything between us for five years. Can you
wonder that I've never forgiven the writer, and never shall? Not
because he wrote unfairly of me, but because of all that Eldred
suffered then, and afterwards."

"Did you never make allowance for the fact that he could not have known
how things were between you,--that he meant no harm?"

"I'm afraid I made _no_ allowances; though I'm quite aware that,
speaking justly, one can't blame him. Probably Eldred never did. But
I told you my dislikes were unreasonable; and it makes me hate him to
think that he was quite happy away there in England all those five
years, while Eldred was half-killing himself with work and misery."

"Yes, I understand that. But it's all over now; and the harm's
repaired."

"I hope so, in a measure; though it's my belief that harm done can
never really be repaired; only patched up."

"That's a very terrible doctrine, Mrs Lenox."

"I'm afraid facts go to prove the truth of it."

Although she spoke quietly, a touch of hardness had invaded her voice;
and Richardson had no answer to give her. His cheerful, easy-going
nature had rarely been so deeply stirred. A new and delightful
experience seemed to be taking an unlooked-for turn, and his lame
attempts at self-defence in the third person struck him as bordering on
the grotesque. He set his teeth and flicked the pony viciously; then
hauled at his mouth because he broke into a canter. Yet he was a
tender-hearted man.

"Poor little beast! Don't treat him like that," she rebuked him,
between jest and earnest, "What's wrong? The city seems to have
disagreed with you."

Again he did not answer: and for a time they drove on without speaking,
each, if the truth be told, thinking of the other. Then she startled
him with one of her direct, inconsequent questions.

"Mr Richardson, how old are you?"

He laughed.

"Just thirty. Why?"

"I was only wondering. You're the sort of man who ought to marry.
Have you never thought of it yet?"

"No. Too little money. Besides, I'm a lazy beggar, and I shirk the
responsibility."

"That means you've never been in love!"

"I suppose not. Nothing more serious than a passing inclination. Mere
growing pains!" He smiled at the remembrance of a certain romantic
episode in his early twenties. "What's your notion? Have I been
overdosing you with my company that you are so keen to marry me off?"

"Don't talk nonsense. I was simply thinking of you. You've the right
stuff in you for a husband. But personally, I prefer you unattached.
I should probably quarrel with your wife; and she would break up our
friendship; which would be a thousand pities."

"Mrs Lenox--d'you mean that? Do you really value it one little bit?"

His repressed eagerness puzzled her, and she lifted her eyebrows. "But
yes, _mon ami_! Would I go about with you so much if I didn't? I have
failings enough, Heaven knows, but insincerity is not one of them. By
the way, am I to put you on my other side to-night? Wouldn't you
prefer Mrs Norton, or Mrs Lacy Smith for a change? I couldn't get the
Desmonds; and Eldred hates my poor little party in consequence."

"So shall I, if you banish me from your end of the table."

"Well, that settles it. Two conspicuously large men in open mutiny
would be more than the rest of us could stand!"

They swerved in between the gate-posts, and drew rein as she spoke.
The sound of their wheels had brought Lenox into the verandah.

"It's high time you were back again, you two," he said, with a touch of
decision, as he lifted his wife from the cart. "I was wondering what
had come to you. See you again at eight, Dick."

And Richardson, having quite recovered from his bad quarter of an hour,
drove off humming the refrain of a song Quita had sung to him a few
evenings back. After all, so long as she liked him, and valued his
friendship, she was welcome to hate the supposed unknown, whose
identity she must never be allowed to guess.

Meanwhile Lenox and his wife went on into the house, Quita disarming
reproof by instant apology. "It was delightful; but I'm sorry we were
away too long, dear."

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