The Great Amulet

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"Are you peculiarly lenient towards those three failings?"

"I am quite culpably lenient towards the whole tribe of human failings.
They are the salt of life. I have never really understood that
incessant harping on the mystery of pain and sin. The question, Why
should they be allowed to exist? seems to me simply fatuous. No world
worth living in could have been created without them. They are the
backbone of all drama; and I love drama inordinately. They put the
iron into men's souls, and the grit into their characters. Think what
a nauseating crew of sentimentalists we should be,

'If all had love, as every nest hath eggs,
And every head of maize her feathery cap.'

I, for one, should beg to be excused from spending three-score years
and ten on a planet full of sugar-plums and kisses!"

She left her perch on the railings, and stood erect, in an unconscious
attitude of defiance; and Garth watched her speculatively through
narrowed lids. He was wondering whether Mrs Desmond's remark that she
had persuaded Captain Lenox to go shooting beyond Chumba, instead of
deserting Dalhousie for the interior, might not be accountable for this
unusual burst of eloquence.

"I had no notion that you went in for studying big questions of that
kind," he remarked, with an amused air of interest.

"Studying them! But no! What call is there to study them? I have my
ears and eyes, and my priceless intuitions. It is enough. An artist
will learn more about life and character with the help of those three,
than all the _savants_ in creation could imbibe from a hecatomb of
books. Michel--where are you? What has been keeping you so quiet
since Mrs Desmond's departure?"

Michael, who promptly appeared on the threshold, held up a large
drawing-block for his sister's inspection.

"_Voila donc_! _Que dis-tu_? Is it not to the life?"

The picture was a rapid, delicate pastel study of Honor Desmond,
presenting her, as Michael had said, "to the life." The broad brow,
the short straight nose, the strength and tenderness of the mouth and
chin, the smile that hovered like a light in her serious eyes; every
detail was faultlessly rendered. But Quita's cry of surprise expressed
annoyance rather than admiration.

"What possessed you to do _that_?" she asked, sharply. "It is a living
likeness--yes. Better send it to her friend, Captain Lenox. He would
give you a hundred and fifty rupees for it like a shot."

The instant the words were out she tingled with mortification at having
spoken them in Garth's presence. But he assumed a critical interest in
the picture, and Michael, in the first flush of achievement, had eyes
and thoughts for nothing else.

"A hundred and fifty? _Parbleu, non_!" he answered, hotly. "It is a
possession, a triumph. I do not part with it for money. All the while
she talked to you, I never took my eyes from her face, and I struck
while the iron was hot. _Mon Dieu, mais die est superbe_! _C'est une
deesse veritable_! _Rien non plus_!"

In ecstatic moments Michael deserted English altogether for the natural
language of the emotions; and Quita flashed a glance of amusement at
Garth.

"The pedestal already, you see!"

But Michael, deaf or unheeding, continued his paean of praise.

"But the head alone is not enough. _Il faut le tout ensemble_. _Ca
sera magnifique_. Now at last I have the centre figure for my great
picture--Mater Triumphans. In a day or two I call on her. I ask her
permission to immortalise her and myself in one achievement. No woman
in her senses could refuse so flattering a request; and her lips, her
eyes, betray that, goddess or not, she is before all things a woman."

"But, my good Michel," Quita interposed, with a deliberate lightness,
"ride your enthusiasm on the curb, I beg of you. Isn't one goddess at
a time enough to fill your expansive heart? I warn you that if you are
going to disgrace me by ostentatiously falling in love with this Mrs
Desmond, I shall give you up for good, and insist on a legal
separation! Now, I am tired of idling, and it's high time I went back
to my picture." She held out a hand to Garth. "_A demain_," she said,
with a gracious smile of dismissal. "But not till tea-time, please. I
have a certain amount of work to get through every day if _you_ have
not!"

Garth's reply was conveyed to a lingering pressure of her hand. He was
a past master in this discreet method of expressing the inexpressible;
and he had the satisfaction of seeing the colour deepen in her cheeks,
as she released herself hastily, and passed on into the house.

During a long ride homeward, Garth found time for much interested
speculation on the possible issue of events. The situation appeared
sufficiently incomprehensible to afford scope for dramatic
developments; and he shared to the full Quita's taste for drama,
provided always that it did not deprive him of sleep, or render him
personally uncomfortable. He shared also her magnanimous attitude
towards human shortcomings; frankly acknowledging his own, and
skilfully utilising those of other men--and women. But bad men are as
often tripped up by the unquenchable spark of good in human nature as
good men are by the equally unquenchable spark of evil; and James Garth
was not altogether devoid of the little leaven that leavens the whole
lump. There were even moments--and the present was one--when it
asserted itself to the detriment of his cool-headed schemes. Generally
speaking, a husband in the background in no way disturbed his
accommodating code of morals. But scruples, hitherto unknown, seemed
set like a hedge of defence about this girl, who was, in every respect,
so very much a woman.

For all her love of dangerous ground, her airy scorn of conventions,
she had a knack of compelling some measure of uprightness, even from so
unpromising a subject as James Garth. Thus, bone-bred gossip though he
was, his silence in respect of her astounding revelation was assured.
Her words, "I trust you, as a gentleman," had quickened that good grain
in him, which is the saving grace of us all. Also the knowledge itself
hurt him more than he could have believed. It seriously upset his
equanimity for no less than a week; not indeed to the extent of
damaging his appetite, or his sleep, but enough to make her society a
distraction more bitter than sweet; enough to drive him into dining at
the Strawberry Bank Hotel, though the cuisine of that mixed
establishment compared very unfavourably with his own.

Here he naturally met Lenox, and the meeting reawakened his consuming
curiosity; awakened also those primitive savage instincts which no
surface civilisation will ever annihilate while the world holds one
woman and two men. And how should it be accounted theft to rob a man
of that which, to all appearance, he neither possessed nor desired to
recapture?

In twenty years of philandering he had never experienced so keen a
desire for conquest; and if this inexplicable husband chose to leave
his wife in an equivocal position, he must be prepared to accept the
consequences, which are, in general, the last things that any average
man is prepared to accept. Shrewdness and vanity alike convinced Garth
that Quita's attitude on Dynkund, viewed in the light of her subsequent
disclosure, counted for nothing; while the fact that for six months she
had readily accepted his companionship counted for much. Her fine
sense of honour had naturally compelled her to "head him off" dangerous
ground. But he consoled himself with the reflection that a woman's
sense of honour is rarely her strongest point. Pit her heart against
it, and the outcome is merely a question of time. A conviction founded
on his own complicated past!

In his esteem, then, nothing stood between him and his desire but a
poor crop of scruples, readily trampled under foot; and by a fine
stroke of irony Lenox himself completed the trampling process. He, who
rarely took an active part in the random, unedifying talk congenial to
after-dinner "pegs" and cigars, had one night been moved to administer
advice to a rapturous subaltern, in the shape of a few trenchant
cynicisms in respect of women and marriage, bidding him not be fool
enough to run his misguided head into the noose; and the subaltern had
collapsed like a pricked air-ball. But Garth, to his own surprise,
retorted with no little warmth; and Lenox, turning in his chair, looked
at him deliberately--a glint of steel in his eyes.

"I couldn't presume to cross swords with you, Major," he remarked, on a
quiet note of contempt. "Your experience is as extensive as my own is
limited; and you have the good luck to be popular. I have not. But
that is simply a question of _metier_. Yours is to flatter women, even
behind their backs; whilst I am blockhead enough to speak the truth
about them, even to their faces. And the last thing a normal woman
wants from any man is--the truth."

From that moment Garth had hardened his heart. And now--a week
later--as he rode down from the Crow's Nest, he chuckled to himself
over the satisfactory way in which Lenox was playing into his hands by
adopting an attitude that would plainly act as a foil to his own
deferentially persistent courtship; a metaphorical walking round the
walls of Jericho, that must end in capitulation, soon or late.

From his point of view, Quita's unique position of personal freedom,
coupled with legal bondage, added a distinct flavour to the whole
affair: and so well pleased was he with the aspect of things in
general, that, before reaching Potrain, he headed his pony up another
corkscrew path, that climbed to another doll's house bungalow. Here he
spent a couple of hours, lounging in the drawing-room of one of the
lesser lights in his firmament, flattering her by a delicately conveyed
impression that he found her the only woman in the station worth
talking to. And so, home to his own well-appointed house, where, two
hours after an irreproachable dinner, he slept the sleep of the man
whose conscience has been trained not to make inconvenient remarks.

CHAPTER VII.

"God uses us to help each other so,
Lending our lives out."
--Browning.

Before May was out Honor met her unpromising acquaintance several
times, by chance. But nothing beyond formal greetings passed between
them. Twice she happened to be riding alone with Lenox; the third
time, her husband was with them: and on every occasion Quita's
companion was James Garth,--the only one among them all who enjoyed the
situation. Quita herself found a perverse satisfaction, unworthy of
her best moments, in thus emphasising her indifference to her husband's
presence; ignoring, with characteristic heedlessness, the fact that a
two-edged weapon is an ill thing to handle: and Lenox, accepting her
unspoken intimation _au pied de la lettre_, steeled himself to
half-cynical, half-stoical endurance.

He had returned heartened, and fortified by a week of stirring sport,
and by closer contact with a personality wholesome and invigorating as
a hill wind; a sympathy of the practical order, that found expression
in matter-of-fact service and good fellowship, rather than in speech.
He had given up all thought of leaving the station; had decided to set
his teeth, and go through with his ordeal, sooner than disappoint these
new-found friends, who seemed already to have become a part of his
life. Such rapid intimacies are a distinctive feature of a country
where a guest may come for a night, and stay for a month; where all
white men are brothers, in the widest sense of the word.

And Eldred Lenox did not hold with half measures. Since he stood his
ground in order to please the Desmonds, he held himself ready to fall
in with any joint plans they might choose to make. Thus, he agreed to
share in their arrangements for the June camp, at Kajiar,--a natural
glade hid in the heart of Kalatope Forest: and even accepted, without
demur, Colonel Mayhew's proposal to preface the 'week' with a two days'
house-party at the Chumba Residency;--a picturesque house, whose garden
of lawns, and roses, and English trees falls sheer to the eddying river
below. The two sportsmen had spent a couple of days here on their way
back, the Resident being down in Chumba on State business; and his
suggestion had been the natural outcome of Desmond's keen interest in
the book which was his hobby of the moment.

"I must be down here then," he explained, "for the _Minjla Mela_, a
superstitious ceremony by which we test the luck of the State for the
coming year. An unfortunate buffalo is flung into the Ravee, just
above the rapids; and if he succumbs, or scrambles out on the far side,
the gods will not fail us. But if he lands on the town bank, they
won't trouble their heads about us till next June. Naturally we do our
best to prevent such a catastrophe, in spite of our conviction that the
matter is settled by the will of the gods! As far as I know, the
ceremony is peculiar to Chumba; and this would be a good chance for you
to see it, if you don't mind a trifle of heat, and if your wife would
care to come too, so much the better."

"She'll come like a shot, thanks," Desmond answered heartily.

"Good!--We'll get up a native dinner at the Palace in honour of the
occasion. My little girl has set her heart on the plan, rather to my
wife's dismay. The Maurices want to come too; and we may have to
include Garth, on her account; though I confess I wanted her for
myself! She's worth talking to, that girl. There's a touch of genius
in her composition, and a touch of the folly that's apt to go along
with it; or she would never give the gossips a chance to couple her
name with Garth's. If he is in earnest, so much the worse for her.--We
may count on you, Lenox, I hope?" he added, turning to the impassive
man at his side, whom he had unwittingly smitten between the joints of
his harness.

Lenox's muttered assent was a trifle indistinct, owing to the thick
pipe-stem between his teeth, and rising deliberately, he passed out of
the smoking-room into the wistaria-shadowed verandah, where the
turbulent voice of the river seemed to echo his own mood. It was well
for himself, and for James Garth also, that he ran no risk of meeting
the man at that moment.

The thought of that first fortnight in June unnerved him. For Colonel
Mayhew's words had done more than turn the knife in an open wound.
Lenox was blest, or curst, with that most pitiless of mentors, a Scotch
conscience. Whatever Quita's failings, or her attitude to himself,
there could be no shelving the fact that he was her husband:--the
guardian of her good name, the one man on earth who could claim the
right to criticise her conduct. Her probable repudiation both of his
criticism, and his right to offer it, did not, in his view, justify him
in standing aloof, if need for speech should arise. Possibly passion,
smouldering at the heart of duty, urged him towards the desperate
experiment. But if so, he would not admit it, even to himself. He
merely decided--with an access of fastidious disgust at the whole
situation--to accept this fate-sent opportunity for judging how far her
behaviour warranted Colonel Mayhew's kindly concern. For he knew
enough of Garth and his methods to feel certain that, in his case, to
covet an invitation was to procure it.

After all, he reflected bitterly, a closer acquaintance with facts
might cure him of an infatuation against which pride and inherited
instinct had rebelled ill vain: and so intricate are the mazes of
self-deception, that he firmly believed in his own desire to be cured.

It was, no doubt, solely in pursuance of this purpose that, a few days
later, he added his initials, with a wry face of resignation, to a
subscription list, proposing that the bachelors of the station should
give a ball on the third of June. He had not seen the inside of a
ballroom for years: but since the season seemed marked for strange
experiences, this one might as well be included with the rest. And in
the meantime, this inconsistent misogynist slept little, smoked
inordinately, and spent the greater part of his leisure at Terah
Cottage. Perhaps this also was part of the cure!

Desmond noted the fact, not without an occasional spark of annoyance.
For all his magnanimity, the man was masculine to the core;
hot-blooded, and still very much a lover at heart. But pride and a
boundless trust in the woman he had won had withheld him as yet from
serious comment.

Lenox dined with them on the night of the dance; and came armed with
programmes, at Honor's request.

"Are you going to give me my share before we start?" he asked, as they
shook hands.

"If I do, will you try to dance?"

He laughed abruptly. "Not I. It would be a sight to make angels weep!
I shall take you right away from the whole thing, and talk to
you--that's all. Is that good enough?"

"Quite good enough!"

He scanned an open programme with perplexed interest, as though it were
an Egyptian hieroglyph.

"How long do each of these things last?" he asked, with evident
amusement.

"About twelve minutes, with the pause."

"What's the good of twelve minutes? Can't I have them in batches,
three at a time. Or would that be going quite out of bounds?"

Honor laughed. . . . "I'm afraid so! Though it would be far nicer.
But I will give you one 'batch,' and two isolated ones; and that's a
generous allowance, I assure you."

"Thanks.--I suppose Desmond takes you in to supper?"

"Yes. It's a standing engagement! Why don't you ask Miss Maurice?"
There was a moment of silence.

"We are not intimate enough for that," he answered, with a bad
imitation of unconcern; and Honor wondered, as she had done before now,
wherein lay the key to a curiosity-provoking situation. But just then
Desmond joined them; and no more was said.

The moment they entered the ballroom Lenox was aware of his wife,--the
focal point in a circle of men, distributing her favours with a smiling
impartiality that was, in itself, a delicate form of coquetry, while
Garth stood sentinel beside her, with an unmistakable suggestion of 'No
Thoroughfare,' which he could assume to a nicety; and which Lenox noted
with a curse at the restrictions imposed upon civilised man.

But a second glance at Quita crowded all else out of his mind. It was
his first sight of her in full evening dress, and he stood spellbound
by the radiant quality of her charm: a charm that triumphed over minor
imperfections of feature and form; a mental and spiritual vitality that
had deepened rather than diminished with the years. Her dress, like
everything about her, was an instinctive expression of herself: though
Lenox, while appreciating its harmony, could not have defined it in set
terms. He knew that it was of velvet; that it sheathed her rounded
slenderness as a rind sheathes its fruit; that the light and shade on
its surface, as she moved, reminded him of willows in a wind; that,
from shoulder to hem, the eye was nowhere checked, the simplicity of
outline nowhere marred by objectless incidents of adornment. He noted
also that its indefinite colour was repeated in a row of aquamarines,
that glistened like drops of sea-water at her throat.

A light touch on his arm recalled him to outward things.

"Captain Lenox, where are your manners?" Honor Desmond remonstrated,
with laughter in her eyes. "The Mayhews have just gone past, and you
looked straight through them! Is that the way you welcome your guests?"

He muttered an incoherent apology, and fervently hoped that she had not
observed the direction of his gaze. A vain hope, seeing that she was a
woman!

"Better get safe into the card-room before I do anything worse!" he
added uneasily. "I'll be back for number five. Trust me not to
forget."

As he crossed the barn of a room,--lavishly draped with bazaar bunting,
and starred with radiating bayonets,--his eyes lighted on Kenneth
Malcolm, the Engineer subaltern, whose current of courtship had been
checked by Maurice's arrival on the scene:--a boy of stalwart build;
his straight features and well-poised head justifying the sobriquet of
Apollo, bestowed upon him by an effusive admirer, whose sole reward had
been a cordial detestation. He leaned against the wall, absently
twirling the cord of his programme; his attention centred on a corner
of the room, where Elsie Mayhew--an incarnate moonbeam of a girl--was
critically examining the pattern on her fan, while Maurice possessed
himself of her programme, and sprinkled it liberally with the letter M.
In the boy's bottled-up resentment Lenox saw a reflection of his own;
and the fact moved him to scorn rather than sympathy.

"Damned idiots, both of us!" he reflected savagely. "A couple of dogs
whose bones have been confiscated, and we haven't even the pluck to
snarl."

The opening valse struck up as he reached the cardroom. Without
looking directly at his wife, he saw Garth's arm encircle her waist,
saw him hold her thus, for an appreciable moment, before starting; and
sat down to the whist table with murder in his heart.

At number five he re-entered the ballroom to claim Honor Desmond for
his 'batch' of dances, and to take her, as he had said, right away from
it all. She found him little inclined for talk; yet none the less
quick to appreciate her understanding of his mood.

"Thank you for bearing with me," he said, as they parted in one of the
many doorways opening on to the long verandah. "I won't come in. I am
in the humour for the profound philosophies of tobacco and the stars."

"Better companions than a mere woman!" she answered, smiling into the
gravity of his eyes. "Don't deny it. I have no taste for lip service."

"Nor I the smallest gift for it. Still, truth is truth; and a good
deal depends on the quality of--the mere woman."

She vouchsafed him the stateliest shadow of a curtsey.

"I believe I shall end in converting you, after all! Number twelve.
Don't forget."

And turning from him she saw that her husband stood a few paces off,
watching them with a thoughtful scrutiny that caught at her heart.
Gliding across the polished floor, she slipped a hand under his elbow,
and leaned close to him.

"Darling," she whispered, "I am so glad this is ours." Without a word,
he put his arm round her, and swept her into the crowd.

For a while Lenox followed them with his eyes, as they circled smoothly
in and out among the dancers, as notable a couple as the room
contained. Then he raked the shifting crowd for Quita's grey-green
figure,--in vain. Neither she nor Garth was to be seen. It needed
small perspicacity to locate them: and grinding his teeth Lenox went
out again into a night jewelled with the unnumbered bonfires of the
universe. Striking a match, he lit his pipe, in defiance of the
knowledge that for the past few weeks he had been persistently
overstepping his self-imposed allowance, and fell to pacing the railed
path outside the building.

Was it altogether his own fault, he wondered bitterly, that he stood
thus, cut off from the core of life, breaking his teeth upon the husks
of it, and making believe that they satisfied his hunger? In the
tragedies resulting from 'the ill-judged execution of the well-judged
plan of things,' that question flung, again and again into the
'derisive silence of eternity,' mocks the soul with echo's answer.
Where lies the blame? Where, indeed? For all his vaunted supremacy
man is not always master of his fate. Circumstance, heredity, the
despicable trifle, the inexpert finger, which a certain type of human
is so zealous to thrust into an alien life, compass him about with a
cloud of witnesses to his own impotence.

With which conclusion, softened by the kindly influence of drugged
tobacco, Lenox knocked the ashes out of his pipe; and decided that
since he was here to observe his wife and Garth, and to cure himself of
an undignified infatuation, it would be well to return to the ballroom
till number twelve.

But as he moved forward a low laugh, near at hand, chained him to the
spot. Then Quita emerged from a patch of shadow, closely followed by
Garth. She tilted her chin, and flung a smiling threat at him over her
shoulder.

"If you can't be more reasonable, I shall cancel your remaining dances
and give them to the Riley boy." Which announcement brought him
swiftly to her side; and Lenox failed to catch his murmured reply.
They passed on without perceiving him; and he followed . . . merely
from a sense of duty!

At one of the open doorways, that flung panels of light across the
verandah, they paused; and he paused also, a few paces off. The
couples within were forming themselves into ordered squares.

"Lancers," she said, in a tone of distaste.

"Are you dancing them?" he asked.

"No."

"Come and sit out again, then; and I'll be as reasonable as you please."

She glanced quickly round the room, as if in search of something.

"Very well," she said: and turning on the threshold, came face to face
with her husband.

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