Stories by English Authors: The Orient (Selected by Scribners)

She had lost command over her voice, and the shrill note of horror in it was unmistakable. The man heard it, and shrank in his turn.

“I’m so sorry, John,” she murmured, raising her great bright eyes to his face. They had not lost their goaded expression, though they were full of tears. “I’m awfully sorry; but I’m just nervous and stupid, and I can’t bear any one to touch me when I’m nervous.”

“Here’s Broomhurst, my dear! I made a mistake in his name after all, I find. I told you Brookfield, I believe, didn’t I? Well, it isn’t Brookfield, he says; it’s Broomhurst.”

Mrs. Drayton had walked some little distance across the plain to meet and welcome the expected guest. She stood quietly waiting while her husband stammered over his incoherent sentences, and then put out her hand.

“We are very glad to see you,” she said, with a quick glance at the new-comer’s face as she spoke.

As they walked together toward the tent, after the first greetings, she felt his keen eyes upon her before he turned to her husband.

“I’m afraid Mrs. Drayton finds the climate trying?” he asked. “Perhaps she ought not to have come so far in this heat?”

“Kathie is often pale. You do look white to-day, my dear,” he observed, turning anxiously toward his wife.

“Do I?” she replied. The unsteadiness of her tone was hardly appreciable, but it was not lost on Broomhurst’s quick ears. “Oh, I don’t think so. I feel very well.”

“I’ll come and see if they’ve fixed you up all right,” said Drayton, following his companion toward the new tent that had been pitched at some little distance from the large one.

“We shall see you at dinner then?” Mrs. Drayton observed in reply to Broomhurst’s smile as they parted.

She entered the tent slowly, and, moving up to the table already laid for dinner, began to rearrange the things upon it in a purposeless, mechanical fashion.

After a moment she sank down upon a seat opposite the open entrance, and put her hand to her head.

“What is the matter with me?” she thought, wearily. “All the week I’ve been looking forward to seeing this man —any man, any one to take off the edge of this.” She shuddered. Even in thought she hesitated to analyse the feeling that possessed her. “Well, he’s here, and I think I feel worse.” Her eyes travelled toward the hills she had been used to watch at this hour, and rested on them with a vague, unseeing gaze.

“Tired Kathie? A penny for your thoughts, my dear,” said her husband, coming in presently to find her still sitting there.

“I’m thinking what a curious world this is, and what an ironical vein of humour the gods who look after it must possess,” she replied, with a mirthless laugh, rising as she spoke.

John looked puzzled.

“Funny my having known Broomhurst before, you mean?” he said doubtfully.

“I was fishing down at Lynmouth this time last year,” Broomhurst said at dinner. “You know Lynmouth, Mrs. Drayton? Do you never imagine you hear the gurgling of the stream? I am tantalised already by the sound of it rushing through the beautiful green gloom of those woods —aren’t they lovely? And I haven’t been in this burnt-up spot as many hours as you’ve had months of it.”

She smiled a little.

“You must learn to possess your soul in patience,” she said, and glanced inconsequently from Broomhurst to her husband, and then dropped her eyes and was silent a moment.

John was obviously, and a little audibly, enjoying his dinner. He sat with his chair pushed close to the table, and his elbows awkwardly raised, swallowing his soup in gulps. He grasped his spoon tightly in his bony hand, so that its swollen joints stood out larger and uglier than ever, his wife thought.

Her eyes wandered to Broomhurst’s hands. They were well shaped, and, though not small, there was a look of refinement about them; he had a way of touching things delicately, a little lingeringly, she noticed. There was an air of distinction about his clear-cut, clean-shaven face, possibly intensified by contrast with Drayton’s blurred features; and it was, perhaps, also by contrast with the gray cuffs that showed beneath John’s ill-cut drab suit that the linen Broomhurst wore seemed to her particularly spotless.

Broomhurst’s thoughts, for his part, were a good deal occupied with his hostess.

She was pretty, he thought, or perhaps it was that, with the wide, dry lonely plain as a setting, her fragile delicacy of appearance was invested with a certain flower-like charm.

“The silence here seems rather strange, rather appalling at first, when one is fresh from a town,” he pursued, after a moment’s pause; “but I suppose you’re used to it, eh, Drayton? How do you find life here, Mrs. Drayton?” he asked, a little curiously, turning to her as he spoke.

She hesitated a second. “Oh, much the same as I should find it anywhere else, I expect,” she replied; “after all, one carries the possibilities of a happy life about with one; don’t you think so? The Garden of Eden wouldn’t necessarily make my life any happier, or less happy, than a howling wilderness like this. It depends on one’s self entirely.”

“Given the right Adam and Eve, the desert blossoms like the rose, in fact,” Broomhurst answered, lightly, with a smiling glance inclusive of husband and wife; “you two don’t feel as though you’d been driven out of Paradise, evidently.”

Drayton raised his eyes from his plate with a smile of total incomprehension.

“Great heavens! what an Adam to select!” thought Broomhurst, involuntarily, as Mrs. Drayton rose rather suddenly from the table.

“I’ll come and help with that packing-case,” John said, rising, in his turn, lumberingly from his place; “then we can have a smoke – eh! Kathie don’t mind, if we sit near the entrance.”

The two men went out together, Broomhurst holding the lantern, for the moon had not yet risen. Mrs. Drayton followed them to the doorway, and, pushing the looped-up hanging farther aside, stepped out into the cool darkness.

Her heart was beating quickly, and there was a great lump in her throat that frightened her as though she were choking.

“And I am his wife– I belong to him!” she cried, almost aloud.

She pressed both her hands tightly against her breast, and set her teeth, fighting to keep down the rising flood that threatened to sweep away her composure. “Oh, what a fool I am! What an hysterical fool of a woman I am!” she whispered below her breath. She began to walk slowly up and down outside the tent, in the space illumined by the lamplight, as though striving to make her outwardly quiet movements react upon the inward tumult. In a little while she had conquered; she quietly entered the tent, drew a low chair to the entrance, and took up a book, just as footsteps became audible. A moment afterward Broomhurst emerged from the darkness into the circle of light outside, and Mrs. Drayton raised her eyes from the pages she was turning to greet him with a smile.

“Are your things all right?”

“Oh, yes, more or less, thank you. I was a little concerned about a case of books, but it isn’t much damaged fortunately. Perhaps I’ve some you would care to look at?”

“The books will be a godsend,” she returned, with a sudden brightening of the eyes; “I was getting desperate– for books.”

“What are you reading now?” he asked, glancing at the volume that lay in her lap.

“It’s a Browning. I carry it about a good deal. I think I like to have it with me, but I don’t seem to read it much.”

“Are you waiting for a suitable optimistic moment?” Broomhurst inquired, smiling.

“Yes, now that you mention it, I think that must be why I am waiting,” she replied, slowly.

“And it doesn’t come – even in the Garden of Eden? Surely the serpent, pessimism, hasn’t been insolent enough to draw you into conversation with him?” he said, lightly.

“There has been no one to converse with at all – when John is away, I mean. I think I should have liked a little chat with the serpent immensely by way of a change,” she replied, in the same tone.

“Ah, yes,” Broomhurst said, with sudden seriousness; “it must be unbearably dull for you alone here, with Drayton away all day.”

Mrs. Drayton’s hand shook a little as she fluttered a page of her open book.

“I should think it quite natural you would be irritated beyond endurance to hear that all’s right with the world, for instance, when you were sighing for the long day to pass,” he continued.

“I don’t mind the day so much; it’s the evenings.” She abruptly checked the swift words, and flushed painfully. “I mean – I’ve grown stupidly nervous, I think – even when John is here. Oh, you have no idea of the awful silence of this place at night,” she added, rising hurriedly from her low seat, and moving closer to the doorway. “It is so close, isn’t it?” she said, almost apologetically. There was silence for quite a minute.

Broomhurst’s quick eyes noted the silent momentary clinching of the hands that hung at her side, as she stood leaning against the support at the entrance.

“But how stupid of me to give you such a bad impression of the camp – the first evening, too!” Mrs. Drayton exclaimed, presently; and her companion mentally commended the admirable composure of her voice.

“Probably you will never notice that it is lonely at all,” she continued; “John likes it here. He is immensely interested in his work, you know. I hope you are too. If you are interested it is all quite right. I think the climate tries me a little. I never used to be stupid – and nervous. Ah, here’s John; he’s been round to the kitchen tent, I suppose.”

“Been looking after that fellow cleanin’ my gun, my dear,” John explained, shambling toward the deck-chair.

Later Broomhurst stood at his own tent door. He looked up at the star-sown sky, and the heavy silence seemed to press upon him like an actual, physical burden.

He took his cigar from between his lips presently, and looked at the glowing end reflectively before throwing it away.

“Considering that she has been alone with him here for six months, she has herself very well in hand —very well in hand,” he repeated.

It was Sunday morning. John Drayton sat just inside the tent, presumably enjoying his pipe before the heat of the day. His eyes furtively followed his wife as she moved about near him, sometimes passing close to his chair in search of something she had mislaid. There was colour in her cheeks; her eyes, though preoccupied, were bright; there was a lightness and buoyancy in her step which she set to a little dancing air she was humming under her breath.

After a moment or two the song ceased; she began to move slowly, sedately; and, as if chilled by a raw breath of air, the light faded from her eyes, which she presently turned toward her husband.

“Why do you look at me?” she asked, suddenly.

“I don’t know, my dear,” he began slowly and laboriously, as was his wont. “I was thinkin’ how nice you looked – jest now – much better, you know; but somehow,” – he was taking long whiffs at his pipe, as usual, between each word, while she stood patiently waiting for him to finish, – “somehow, you alter so, my dear – you’re quite pale again, all of a minute.”

She stood listening to him, noticing against her will the more than suspicion of cockney accent and the thick drawl with which the words were uttered.

His eyes sought her face piteously. She noticed that too, and stood before him torn by conflicting emotions, pity and disgust struggling in a hand-to-hand fight within her.

“Mr. Broomhurst and I are going down by the well to sit; it’s cooler there. Won’t you come?” she said at last, gently.

He did not reply for a moment; then he turned his head aside, sharply for him.

“No, my dear, thank you; I’m comfortable enough here,” he returned, huskily.

She stood over him, hesitating a second; then moved abruptly to the table, from which she took a book.

He had risen from his seat by the time she turned to go out, and he intercepted her timorously.

“Kathie, give me a kiss before you go,” he whispered, hoarsely. “I – I don’t often bother you.”

She drew her breath in deeply as he put his arms clumsily about her; but she stood still, and he kissed her on the forehead, and touched the little wavy curls that strayed across it gently with his big, trembling fingers.

When he released her, she moved at once impetuously to the open doorway. On the threshold she hesitated, paused a moment irresolutely, and then turned back.

“Shall I – does your pipe want filling, John?” she asked, softly.

“No, thank you, my dear.”

“Would you like me to stay, read to you, or anything?”

He looked up at her wistfully. “N-no, thank you; I’m not much of a reader, you know, my dear – somehow.”

She hated herself for knowing that there would be a “my dear,” probably a “somehow,” in his reply, and despised herself for the sense of irritated impatience she felt by anticipation, even before the words were uttered.

There was a moment’s hesitating silence, broken by the sound of quick, firm footsteps without. Broomhurst paused at the entrance, and looked into the tent.

“Aren’t you coming, Drayton?” he asked, looking first at Drayton’s wife and then swiftly putting in his name with a scarcely perceptible pause. “Too lazy? But you, Mrs. Drayton?”

“Yes, I’m coming,” she said.

They left the tent together, and walked some few steps in silence.

Broomhurst shot a quick glance at his companion’s face.

“Anything wrong?” he asked, presently.

Though the words were ordinary enough, the voice in which they were spoken was in some subtle fashion a different voice from that in which he had talked to her nearly two months ago, though it would have required a keen sense of nice shades in sound to have detected the change.

Mrs. Drayton’s sense of niceties in sound was particularly keen, but she answered quietly, “Nothing, thank you.”

They did not speak again till the trees round the stone well were reached.

Broomhurst arranged their seats comfortably beside it.

“Are we going to read or talk?” he asked, looking up at her from his lower place.

“Well, we generally talk most when we arrange to read; so shall we agree to talk to-day for a change, by way of getting some reading done?” she rejoined, smiling. “You begin.”

Broomhurst seemed in no hurry to avail himself of the permission; he was apparently engrossed in watching the flecks of sunshine on Mrs. Drayton’s white dress. The whirring of insects, and the creaking of a Persian wheel somewhere in the neighbourhood, filtered through the hot silence.

Mrs. Drayton laughed after a few minutes; there was a touch of embarrassment in the sound.

“The new plan doesn’t answer. Suppose you read, as usual, and let me interrupt, also as usual, after the first two lines.”

He opened the book obediently, but turned the pages at random.

She watched him for a moment, and then bent a little forward toward him.

“It is my turn now,” she said, suddenly; “is anything wrong?”

He raised his head, and their eyes met. There was a pause. “I will be more honest than you,” he returned; “yes, there is.”

“What?”

“I’ve had orders to move on.”

She drew back, and her lips whitened, though she kept them steady.

“When do you go?”

“On Wednesday.”

There was silence again; the man still kept his eyes on her face.

The whirring of the insects and the creaking of the wheel had suddenly grown so strangely loud and insistent that it was in a half-dazed fashion she at length heard her name – “Kathleen!”

“Kathleen!” he whispered again, hoarsely.

She looked him full in the face, and once more their eyes met in a long, grave gaze.

The man’s face flushed, and he half rose from his seat with an impetuous movement; but Kathleen stopped him with a glance.

“Will you go and fetch my work? I left it in the tent,” she said, speaking very clearly and distinctly; “and then will you go on reading? I will find the place while you are gone.”

She took the book from his hand, and he rose and stood before her.

There was a mute appeal in his silence, and she raised her head slowly.

Her face was white to the lips, but she looked at him unflinchingly; and without a word he turned and left her.

Mrs. Drayton was resting in the tent on Tuesday afternoon. With the help of cushions and some low chairs, she had improvised a couch, on which she lay quietly with her eyes closed. There was a tenseness, however, in her attitude which indicated that sleep was far from her.

Her features seemed to have sharpened during the last few days, and there were hollows in her cheeks. She had been very ill for a long time, but all at once, with a sudden movement, she turned her head and buried her face in the cushions with a groan. Slipping from her place, she fell on her knees beside the couch, and put both hands before her mouth to force back the cry that she felt struggling to her lips.

For some moments the wild effort she was making for outward calm, which even when she was alone was her first instinct, strained every nerve and blotted out sight and hearing, and it was not till the sound was very near that she was conscious of the ring of horse’s hoofs on the plain.

She raised her head sharply, with a thrill of fear, still kneeling, and listened.

There was no mistake. The horseman was riding in hot haste, for the thud of the hoofs followed one another swiftly.

As Mrs. Drayton listened her white face grew whiter, and she began to tremble. Putting out shaking hands, she raised herself by the arms of the folding-chair and stood upright.

Nearer and nearer came the thunder of the approaching sound, mingled with startled exclamations and the noise of trampling feet from the direction of the kitchen tent.

Slowly, mechanically almost, she dragged herself to the entrance, and stood clinging to the canvas there. By the time she had reached it Broomhurst had flung himself from the saddle, and had thrown the reins to one of the men.

Mrs. Drayton stared at him with wide, bright eyes as he hastened toward her.

“I thought you – you are not – ” she began, and then her teeth began to chatter. “I am so cold!” she said, in a little, weak voice.

Broomhurst took her hand and led her over the threshold back into the tent.

“Don’t be so frightened,” he implored; “I came to tell you first. I thought it wouldn’t frighten you so much as – Your – Drayton is – very ill. They are bringing him. I – ”

He paused. She gazed at him a moment with parted lips; then she broke into a horrible, discordant laugh, and stood clinging to the back of a chair.

Broomhurst started back.

“Do you understand what I mean?” he whispered. “Kathleen, for God’s sake —don’t– he is dead.”

He looked over his shoulder as he spoke, her shrill laughter ringing in his ears. The white glare and dazzle of the plain stretched before him, framed by the entrance to the tent; far off, against the horizon, there were moving black specks, which he knew to be the returning servants with their still burden.

They were bringing John Drayton home.

One afternoon, some months later, Broomhurst climbed the steep lane leading to the cliffs of a little English village by the sea. He had already been to the inn, and had been shown by the proprietress the house where Mrs. Drayton lodged.

“The lady was out, but the gentleman would likely find her if he went to the cliffs – down by the bay, or thereabouts,” her landlady explained; and, obeying her directions, Broomhurst presently emerged from the shady woodland path on to the hillside overhanging the sea.

He glanced eagerly round him, and then, with a sudden quickening of the heart, walked on over the springy heather to where she sat. She turned when the rustling his footsteps made through the bracken was near enough to arrest her attention, and looked up at him as he came. Then she rose slowly and stood waiting for him. He came up to her without a word, and seized both her hands, devouring her face with his eyes. Something he saw there repelled him. Slowly he let her hands fall, still looking at her silently. “You are not glad to see me, and I have counted the hours,” he said, at last, in a dull, toneless voice.

Her lips quivered. “Don’t be angry with me – I can’t help it – I’m not glad or sorry for anything now,” she answered; and her voice matched his for grayness.

They sat down together on a long flat stone half embedded in a wiry clump of whortleberries. Behind them the lonely hillsides rose, brilliant with yellow bracken and the purple of heather. Before them stretched the wide sea. It was a soft, gray day. Streaks of pale sunlight trembled at moments far out on the water. The tide was rising in the little bay above which they sat, and Broomhurst watched the lazy foam-edged waves slipping over the uncovered rocks toward the shore, then sliding back as though for very weariness they despaired of reaching it. The muffled, pulsing sound of the sea filled the silence. Broomhurst thought suddenly of hot Eastern sunshine, of the whir of insect wings on the still air, and the creaking of a wheel in the distance. He turned and looked at his companion.

“I have come thousands of miles to see you,” he said; “aren’t you going to speak to me now I am here?”

“Why did you come? I told you not to come,” she answered, falteringly. “I – ” she paused.

“And I replied that I should follow you – if you remember,” he answered, still quietly. “I came because I would not listen to what you said then, at that awful time. You didn’t know yourself what you said. No wonder! I have given you some months, and now I have come.”

There was silence between them. Broomhurst saw that she was crying; her tears fell fast on to her hands, that were clasped in her lap. Her face, he noticed, was thin and drawn.

Very gently he put his arm round her shoulder and drew her nearer to him. She made no resistance; it seemed that she did not notice the movement; and his arm dropped at his side.

“You asked me why I had come. You think it possible that three months can change one very thoroughly, then?” he said, in a cold voice.

“I not only think it possible; I have proved it,” she replied, wearily.

He turned round and faced her.

“You did love me, Kathleen!” he asserted. “You never said so in words, but I know it,” he added, fiercely.

“Yes, I did.”

“And – you mean that you don’t now?”

Her voice was very tired. “Yes; I can’t help it,” she answered; “it has gone – utterly.”

The gray sea slowly lapped the rocks. Overhead the sharp scream of a gull cut through the stillness. It was broken again, a moment afterward, by a short hard laugh from the man.

“Don’t!” she whispered, and laid a hand swiftly on his arm. “Do you think it isn’t worse for me? I wish to God I did love you!” she cried, passionately. “Perhaps it would make me forget that, to all intents and purposes, I am a murderess.”

Broomhurst met her wide, despairing eyes with an amazement which yielded to sudden pitying comprehension.

“So that is it, my darling? You are worrying about that? You who were as loyal as – ”

She stopped him with a frantic gesture.

“Don’t! don’t!” she wailed. “If you only knew! Let me try to tell you – will you?” she urged, pitifully. “It may be better if I tell some one – if I don’t keep it all to myself, and think, and think.”

She clasped her hands tight, with the old gesture he remembered when she was struggling for self-control, and waited a moment.

Presently she began to speak in a low, hurried tone: “It began before you came. I know now what the feeling was that I was afraid to acknowledge to myself. I used to try and smother it; I used to repeat things to myself all day – poems, stupid rhymes —anything to keep my thoughts quite underneath – but I —hated John before you came! We had been married nearly a year then. I never loved him. Of course you are going to say, ‘Why did you marry him?’” She looked drearily over the placid sea. “Why did I marry him? I don’t know; for the reason that hundreds of ignorant, inexperienced girls marry, I suppose. My home wasn’t a happy one. I was miserable, and oh —restless. I wonder if men know what it feels like to be restless? Sometimes I think they can’t even guess. John wanted me very badly; nobody wanted me at home particularly. There didn’t seem to be any point in my life. Do you understand?.. Of course, being alone with him in that little camp in that silent plain” – she shuddered – “made things worse. My nerves went all to pieces. Everything he said, his voice, his accent, his walk, the way he ate, irritated me so that I longed to rush out sometimes and shriek – and go mad. Does it sound ridiculous to you to be driven mad by such trifles? I only know I used to get up from the table sometimes and walk up and down outside, with both hands over my mouth to keep myself quiet. And all the time I hated myself – how I hated myself! I never had a word from him that wasn’t gentle and tender. I believe he loved the ground I walked on. Oh, it is awful to be loved like that when you – ” She drew in her breath with a sob. “I – I – it made me sick for him to come near me – to touch me.” She stopped a moment.