Anna Lombard | Page 7

to have quickened in me; how all the senses seemed tuning themselves to the enjoyment of existence; how the compound seemed to smile before me, the scent from the thousand opening flowers to delight me; the blood seemed spinning gayly along through my veins; I wanted to laugh, hum, or whistle out of mere light-heartedness, and what was it all? Surely some electricity had passed out of that soft, fail form I had held in my arms last night and kindled a fresh life in me. I sat down at the breakfast-table and glanced at the pile of letters waiting my attention, but deferred opening them and giving my thoughts over to business for a few moments longer. After I had sipped my coffee and mused another ten minutes, I laid my hand on a long, official-looking letter, and rather absent-mindedly broke it open and unfolded it.
I read the letter through to its last word it was curt enough for that matter then I crushed it down on th& table under my hand.
"D--n! D--n everything!"
The two native servants, mute bronze statues, though they understood no other word of English, understood that, one of four letters. They both started violently. The kitmargar removed my unfinished cup of coffee tenderly, and inquired, softly:
"The sahib has had bad news?"
"Yes," I groaned, and then added, "Pack everything-have everything ready. We leave for Burmah by the night train."
"Protector of the poor!" exclaimed the man, clasping his hands. "The sahib is transferred?"
"Yes. To Lihuli, Burmah. You wish to accompany me?"
The man hesitated, and great tears filled his large, brown eyes and then rolled down his cheeks. They are hysterical, these natives, and my news had startled him.
"That is in my heart. I wish to. But my wives are sick. Yet if I stay I have no money for them."
I knitted my brows. My own case dictated more sympathy for his wives than I should otherwise have felt.
"Allah forbid that I should take them from you, or that you should want. Stay till they are well, and I will see you get the same pay as now. When they are recovered you can follow me, with them, if you wish. Now go. I want to be alone."
For all answer the man flung himself at my feet and clasped them and kissed them and wept over them. All of which is extremely embarrassing to an Englishman, and makes him feel somehow that he is not so fine a thing aa he generally takes himself to be. Then they withdrew, and I was alone in the room full of gold light, reflected from the desert through thejilmils, alone with that letter, my bad news, and my feelings. I stared at the open paper, feeling doubtless as many a prisoner may have felt when shown his death-warrant. How curious it was, a flimsy sheet of paper, with a few scrawly words the handwriting was execrable, I remember could deal such a blow of deadly pain.
Since a few moments ago, the whole situation was changed for me: my hopes of last night, that pleasant vista of days spent here, that yielding to the intoxication of passion for Anna, that teaching and arousing of her dormant soul, and that drinking at last of the one cup that this life holds worth draining all this that had floated before me, not as certainties, indeed, but as delicious possibilities, was stamped out, and a hideous reality rose in its place. I was transferred to Lihuli, a lonely, desolate station in Burmah, at once, and for five years. Lihuli, or the place of swamps! I read the letter through again.
"This means separation from Anna, and separation means loss."
This is what I thought as I laid it down, and the resentment against it was so great that a hundred means of rejecting it rose in my brain. "Go to her; carry her away by the storm of your passion, and take her with jou." Then came the thought, "Take her with you! Where? n To the place of swamps; to a place where there is always some epidemic raging sometimes it is called the black cholera, sometimes the plague, sometimes smaH-pox; where there is a never-varying accompaniment of malarial fever and dysentery; where the air, night and day, is tainted and suffocating; where the evening, that brings coolness elsewhere, brings but a sickly white, miasma-tainted mist from the swamps and clouds of mosquitoes; where the face of a white woman is never seen; where there are no bands, no dinners, no dances; and where there is nothing but desert, disease, death, and duty. How could I take her there? And if I could, could I keep her there? And I shuddered. "Then make her wait for you," was the next angry, turbulent thought that came rolling