From One Generation to Another | Page 7

his own port wine, pressed him to pass into the drawing-room and take a dish of tea with the ladies. The subaltern accepted, chiefly because it was the Director's self that pressed, and presently followed that short-winded gentleman into the drawing-room--thereby shaping lives yet uncreated--thereby unconsciously helping to work out a chain of events leading ultimately to an end which no man could foresee.
"Yes," he said, in reply to Mrs. Agar's question, "I am just back from India."
It happened that these two were left almost beyond earshot at the far end of the room. The old people, among whom was Mrs. Agar's husband, were settling down to a game of whist. Mrs. Agar was leaning forward with considerable interest. This was not a mere passing curiosity to hear further of a country and of an event which have not lost their glamour yet.
The very word "India" had stirred something up within her heart of the presence of which she had been unsuspicious. She was as one who, having a closed room in her life, and thinking the door thereof securely barred, suddenly finds herself within that room.
"Whereabouts in India were you?" she asked, with a sudden dryness of the lips.
"Oh--I was north of Delhi."
"North of Delhi--oh, yes."
She moistened her lips, with a strange, sidelong glance round the room, as if she were preparing to jump from a height.
"And--and I suppose you saw a great deal of the Mutiny?"
Even then--after many months, in a drawing-room in peaceful Clapham--the young man's eyes hardened.
"Yes, I saw a good deal," he answered.
Mrs. Agar leant back in her chair, drawing her handkerchief through her fingers with jerky, unnatural movements.
"And did you lose many friends?" she asked.
"Yes," answered the young fellow, "in one way and another."
"How? What do you mean?" She had a way of leaning forward and listening when spoken to, which passed very well for sympathy.
"Well, a time like the Mutiny brings out all that is in a man, you know. And some men had less in them than one might have thought, while others--quiet-going fellows--seemed to wake up."
"Yes," she said; "I see."
"One or two," he continued, "betrayed themselves. They showed that there was that in them which no one had suspected. I lost one friend that way."
"How?"
It was marvellous how the merest details of India interested this woman, who, like most of us, did not know herself. Moreover, she never learnt to do so thoroughly, thereby being spared the horrid pain of knowing oneself too late.
"I made a mistake," he explained. "I thought he was a gentleman and a brave man. I found that he was a coward and a cad."
Something urged her to go on with her pointless questions--the same inevitable Fate which, according to the Italians, "stands at the end of everything," and which had prompted Mr. Hethbridge to bring this stranger into the drawing-room.
"But how did you find it out?"
"Oh, I did not do it all at once. I first began by a mere trifle. It happened that this man was reported dead in the Gazette--I showed it to him myself."
The young officer, who was not accustomed to ladies' society, and felt rather nervous at his own loquaciousness, kept his eyes fixed on his boots, and did not notice the deathly pallor of Mrs. Agar's face, nor the convulsive clutch of her fingers on the velvet arm of the chair.
She turned right round, with a peculiar movement of the throat as if swallowing something, and made sure that the whist-players were interested in their game. In that position she heard the next words.
"He did not even take the trouble to write home to his friends. I thought it rather strange at the time, and told him so. Later on I heard the truth of it. I heard him tell some one else that he was engaged to a girl in England, and he thought it a very good way of getting out of the engagement."
"You heard him tell that, with your own ears?"
"Yes; and he seemed to think it a good joke."
Mrs. Agar was shuffling about in the chair as if in pain.
Then she asked again in a strangely metallic voice, "Did he say that he--did not love her?"
"Yes, the cad!"
"He cannot have been a nice man," she said, with that evenness of enunciation which betrays that the tongue is speaking without the direct aid of the mind.
The young officer rose with a glance towards the clock.
"No," he said, "he was not. He did other things afterwards which made it quite impossible for a man with any self-respect whatever to look upon him as a friend."
"Did he," asked Mrs. Agar, "say anything about her personal appearance? Was it that?"
The subaltern looked puzzled. It was as well for Mrs. Agar that he was not a man of deep experience. Instead of