第51章

I find it difficult,' he said, 'to answer you.How can it matter--it is impossible.I suppose you have heard some story, and it is like you to want to be in a position to negative it.Ignore it instead.She has very successfully championed herself.Believe nothing to her disadvantage that may be said about that--that time.

I was pleased to marry her, and she was pleased to marry me.But for God's sake don't let us talk about it!'

As he spoke Madeline saw the vivid clearness of the situation grow blurred and confused.It was as if her point of view had suddenly changed and her eyes failed her.Her eager impulse had beat less and less strongly from the Worsley's door; now it seemed to shrink away in fetters.Her eyes filled with vaguely resentful tears, which sprang, if she could have traced them, from the fact that the man she loved was loyal to his own mistake, and the formless premonition that he might continue to be.She contorted her lip to keep her emotion back, and deliberately turned away from a matter in which she was not mistress, and which contained ugly possibilities of buffeting.She would wait a little, and though consideration for Violet Prendergast had nothing to do with it, she would not tell him tonight.

'I am sorry,' she said; and, after a moment, 'Did I tell you that Ihave changed my plans?'

'You are not going so soon?' she took all the comfort there was in his eagerness.

'I am not going at all for the present.I have abandoned my intentions and my dates.I mean to drift for a little while.Ihave been too--too conscientious.'

'Are you quite serious--do you mean it?'

'Indeed I do.'

'And in less than a fortnight you will not go out of one's life.

You will stay on--you summer day! It's hard to believe in luck like that.I sent a poor devil of a sepoy a reprieve last week--one knows now how he must have felt about it.'

'Does it make all that difference?' Madeline asked, softly.

'It makes a difference,' he answered, controlling his words, 'that Iam glad you can not conceive, since that would mean that your life has been as barren as mine.' He seemed to refrain from saying more, and then he added, 'You must be careful when you plant your friendship that you mean it to stay, and blossom.It will not come easily up by the roots, and it will leave an ugly hole.'

He was helping her out of her rickshaw, and as they followed the servant who carried her wraps the few yards to the door, she left her hand lightly on his arm.It was the seal, he thought, of her unwritten bond that there should be no uprooting of the single flower he cherished; and he went back almost buoyantly because of it to the woman who had been sitting in the sackcloth and ashes of misfortune, turning over the expedients for which his step might make occasion.

By the time the monkeys began to scramble about the roof in the early creeping of the dawn among the deodars, Madeline had groped her way to a tolerably clear conception of what might happen.The impeding circumstance everywhere, it must be acknowledged, was Frederick Prendergast's coffin.The case, had convict No.1596 been still alive and working out his debt to society, would have been transcendentally simple, she told herself.Even a convict has a right--a prospective right--to his wife, and no honest man should be compelled to retain a criminal's property.This was an odd reflection, perhaps, to be made by Madeline Anderson, but the situation as a whole might be described as curious.And there was no doubt about the coffin.