She went down on her knees as she spoke, and Helen blinked at her.
“And shall you say morning or evening ones?” she murmured.
Adela raised her head and looked puzzled.
“I always say my evening prayers when I come to bed,” she said.
“And shall you say just the same as usual?”
“Yes. Do hush, Helen,” and Adela’s head with the loose chestnut curls was buried in her hands.
Helen snuggled down and drifted comfortably back along the impalpable ways of sleep, but as Adela rose from her devotions she was again disturbed.
“Helen, would you have the wedding-dress satin, or a really good thick silk?”
This time Miss Wilmot was roused to anger.
“I don’t care if you are married in your chemise,” she declared, and Adela was too much shocked and offended to pursue the conversation.
CHAPTER V
THE PASSING OF A DREAM
Man is as old as his burden, but when will he understand
That a wayward woman is bridled, when a rope has been made from the sand?
Adela Lauriston was married in the beginning of September. She wore white satin, and a wreath, and was not in the least agitated.
“I must say I think a bride should be pale” said her Aunt Harriet with a disapproving eye on Adela’s soft, steady colour. “Either pale, or blushing. But there, I always did say that Adela had no heart.”
“Helen is pale enough,” said Hetty Lavington.
“Helen is always pale,” returned Mrs. Middleton with severity. “It is perfectly absurd for a healthy girl to have so little colour. However, there is one thing, India cannot possibly make her any paler, whereas Adela will probably lose her complexion entirely within a year. Good gracious me, Lucy will require a second pocket-handkerchief if she is going to cry like that all through the service. I hope Helen has seen that she is provided.”
After a brief honeymoon, Captain and Mrs. Morton sailed for India, and Helen Wilmot went with them, poor papa having managed at last to send the money for her passage.
Azimullah Khan and Mr. Francis Manners were also on their way to the East, at a not very much later date, but they halted for a while in Constantinople, where they acquired an exhaustive knowledge of the current rumours as to British reverses and British incompetence in the Crimea. And if some of the rumours were exaggerated, others, it is to be feared, were only too true. By the time Azimullah brought his master the account of an unsuccessful mission, he could bring him also flattering hopes of such decay of the British power as should one day place the Peishwa’s representative upon the Peishwa’s throne, and meanwhile there was pleasure enough.
An Oriental prince may be vicious at his will. There are none to check, and many to pander to him.
Dhundoo Punth’s vices became a byword amongst his own people. He drank deeply. Francis Manners drank with him, and when his unstrung nerves played him false, he drugged them with opium, and followed his uncle deeper and deeper into the morass of vice.
Captain and Mrs. Morton reached Peshawur at the barest and ugliest time of the year. It was quite cold too, and Adela wrote pettishly to Helen Wilmot at Mian Mir:
“My dear Helen: This place is frightful. I can’t think how Richard could have drawn such glowing pictures of it. I would never have come to India if I had known what it was like. And the houses! Tumble-down mud heaps, and you never in your life saw such frumps and frights as all the women are. I shall make Richard sell out.”
Richard laughed consumedly when his wife repeated her remarks to him.
“And how are we to live, my child?”
“Why, you have some money,” said Adela, colouring.
“Yes, goose, and I have some ambition. You know I told you so before you married me. Come, madam, I didn’t deceive you with false pretences, did I? I told you I was an ambitious devil, and you took him, and now you must make the best of him.”
“Richard, I do wish you wouldn’t.”
“Wouldn’t what?”
“Use such language. It’s not nice.” And Adela held up her head and looked so pretty that Richard kissed her, and told her she was a dear little saint, which she quite believed.
Presently, however, she returned to the charge.
“Richard, how can we live in a house like this? The floor is all soft mud, under that horrid, untidy matting, and the walls are all soft too, and Ayah says thieves sometimes get in by
just scraping a hole in the wall. Ayah says the people here are dreadful. They are all thieves.”
“Well, my dear, when one pays us a visit, I’ll shoot him for you. Will that do? He shall make his hole in the wall, and as sure as ever his head comes through, I shall shoot, and then we will dig another hole in the nice soft floor, and bury him, and no one will be a penny the wiser.”
“Richard, how horrid! But really that floor—”
“I’ll give you a Persian carpet for a Christmas present. You shall come down into the city and choose it, if you like. Does that make things any better?”
Adela smiled a little, but her soft voice was still complaining.
“I wish Helen were here. She is clever about houses, and curtains, and things like that. I never was. If she were here she would be such a help. I’m sure Uncle Edward did without her very well for all those years, and by all accounts he isn’t a very proper person for Helen to be with. Now, Richard, you said so yourself. I do wish Helen had come on with us.”
“I don’t know that I do.”
“Why, I thought you liked Helen. She likes you. She always did.”
“I want my wife to myself,” said Richard Morton, putting his arm about the said wife’s waist.
“But don’t you like Helen?”
“Of course I do, we are great friends. You may send her my love when you write—and a kiss, too—for the matter of that.”
“Richard!”
“Shocked again?”
“I don’t call it a very nice way to speak. Well, Richard, I’m sure I’ve said nothing to laugh at,” Captain Morton laughed all the same.
“Well, I’ll kiss you instead. I don’t know, on the whole—on the whole, you know—that I wouldn’t rather. One, two, three—there I give up the kiss, but I insist on your sending my love.”
Adela pursed her lips.
“Richard, I do think you are foolish, and I wish you would be serious. No, you are not to kiss me again. Oh, Richard, this dress crushes—I sha’n’t be writing to Helen for a whole week. I do wish she would come and stay. She’d be some one to talk to when you are out all day. I am sure I shall never care for any of the ladies here. They are such dowds!”
Captain Morton laughed.
“Well, my dear, you are a bride and a beauty, and you wouldn’t like it if they were better dressed than you, or better looking, would you? But there are some nice people here, and one great friend of mine—Mrs. Lister; you haven’t seen Mrs. Lister yet.”
“Yes, I have; she called to-day. Richard, she’s plain—and she must be quite thirty. You can’t admire her?”
Richard Morton frowned.
“She’s a dear,” he declared.
“That plain woman!”
He looked at Adela in surprise.
“Good Lord, child, one doesn’t choose one’s friends for their looks!”
“I thought men did—when the friends were women,” said Adela, flushing.
She slipped off her husband’s knee, and he let her go, with half a sigh.
“Mrs. Lister is a real trump,” he said. “I wish you would make a friend of her. They took me in when I had fever once, and she nursed me as if I were a brother.”
“Oh—a brother!” said Adela. Her tone was peculiar, and Richard Morton looked at her sharply.
“What do you mean, Adela?” he said in
a voice that matched his look.
Adela was frightened into further imprudence. With a little toss of the head that was half temper and half nervousness, she exclaimed:
“Mean—oh, nothing. Brother, or cousin—it’s all the same, and very convenient when people want to flirt.”
Richard turned white with anger; his brows made a straight line, and beneath them his eyes blazed.
Adela burst into tears.
“Richard! Don’t look at me like that! What did I say? I am sure I don’t know why it should make you so angry. Did you never flirt with any one? I thought all men did—especially in India. And as to her—I am sure any one might want you to—to admire them—you can’t expect me to think that strange, or an impossible sort of thing to happen. No, you really can’t.” And Richard called himself a brute, and petted her, and tried to forget what she had said, and the sharp revulsion of feeling which had seized him when she said it. All the same, the scene, and others like it, left a little sting, a little soreness, and on the whole, it was just as well that Captain Morton was kept very busy over the much-discussed Afghan Treaty and the impending visit of Hyder Khan, son and heir-apparent of the Amir.
In March Adela’s letters became more cheerful.
“This place is getting rather pretty now,” she wrote to Miss Wilmot, “and it’s warm, and we have been quite gay. The peach blossom was out a little while ago. We gave a dinner-party, and I wore my peach-coloured silk, and a wreath of real peach blossoms in my hair. Captain Bannister of the 150th said some rather pretty things. And I haven’t lost my complexion and if you write to Aunt Harriet, or to Hetty, you might say so. You could say I was ‘much admired.’ It would really be quite true, and I don’t see why some one shouldn’t tell them. Mamma seems very poorly. I expect it is a great deal fancy, but she writes such depressed letters. It is rather selfish of her. I get quite moped after reading one.”
A week later it was:
“I saw Hyder Khan, the Amir’s son, yesterday. He is a big fat man, with a black beard, and black eyes, but his skin is quite fair. He wore a sort of dressing-gown, and bundles and bundles of clothes underneath it. I am sure he asked who I was. He did stare, and then he turned and spoke to Major Edwardes, and Captain Bannister who was with me got quite red, and said something I couldn’t catch, and when I told Richard about it in the evening, he was just as ridiculous. I believe they were both jealous!”
Helen Wilmot laid down the rustling sheets, and frowned at them.
She was trying very hard to live amongst her dreams. She was trying very hard to keep them intact and beautiful.
Papa’s little weakness had proved to be an inability ever to say “No “to a brandy peg. On the infrequent occasions upon which he was quite sober he was a mournful person, with a manner of impenetrable gloom. When he was drunk, he was either jovial or violent. When jovial, Helen was called upon to listen to songs and anecdotes of a broadly convivial nature.
When violent, she went in terror, for once already he had struck her. The bruise ached for a long time under the thin muslin of her bodice. Her bruised ideals ached longer still. Under such stress as this, the stuff of which dreams are made wears very thin indeed. The grey star-bordered robe of self-sacrifice, the golden garment of romance, she drew them tightly about her, denying the rents and the worn places in them—dreading to find them fall away and leave her naked and ashamed—oh, how ashamed.
Adela, and Adela’s happiness, belonged to the dream life. Surely with Richard Morton, Adela would be happy and safe. Helen and he had made great friends during the long sea-voyage. They had enjoyed many a battle of wits, and had come to a pleasant sense of comradeship, and understanding. And how he loved Adela! His very voice changed when he spoke of her. His every look proclaimed the tender pride with which he regarded her. Helen had felt so happy for them both, but now—She frowned again as she took up another letter and looked through it.
“Captain Bannister thinks my new muslin dress a great success. It is made with five flounces.”
“Captain Bannister is teaching me to ride.”
“Captain Bannister valses divinely. His step suits mine in the most delightful manner.”
“Now I wonder what Richard thinks of so much Captain Bannister,” reflected Miss Wilmot, frowning so deeply that poor papa, who came in very irritable, remarked, with much vehemence and profanity, that it was enough to make any man cut his throat, when he came home to find his daughter looking like a mute at a funeral.
“I like a lively woman,” he observed, and Helen took her thoughts to her own room.
Richard had thought, too. One day he spoke them out very plainly. He had been up to his eyes in work, but at last there came a breathing space.
On the 30th of March, Hyder Khan and Mr. John Lawrence, representing those high contracting parties, the Amir of Afghanistan, on the one side, and on the other the British Government, signed the Treaty which bound Dost Mohammed Khan, his heirs, and his successors to perpetual peace and friendship with the Honourable East India Company. Three years later the Treaty was to save India for us, when mutiny, fanned by a tempest, ran through all the length and breadth of the land.
On the frontier, all the wild tribes stirred. The whisper went round that a Mohammedan Emperor sat on the Peacock Throne at Delhi, and that there was much loot to be had. But Delhi was far—Cabul nearer—and on the throne of Cabul the Amir, whose word was as the word of the Prophet. And the word that came from Dost Mohammed was a word of peace. All along the frontier it passed. The Amir says, “sit still”—and Eusufzai, and Utmankhel, Orakzai, and Malikdin Khel Afridi, stayed in their villages in peace, whilst their sons went down to Peshawur and took service with the hard-pressed British Raj.
Herbert Edwardes reaped his reward then, but now he stood aside and let another take the praise for what was his own achievement.
He had worked for it against heavy odds, fought for it against official coldness and discouragement in his quarters. Now it was accomplished and he was content.
John Lawrence signed the Treaty, and then tents were struck, presents exchanged, elaborate farewells taken, and Hyder Khan and his retinue moved off through the Khyber Pass.
Peshawur settled into quiet, and Captain Morton had leisure to contemplate his own private affairs. What he saw was very far from pleasing him.
“Bannister comes to the house too often,” he said with the abrupt directness which Adela had learned to dread. She fluttered a little.
“Mayn’t I have any friends? It is rather hard, I think, and when I have scarcely seen you for six weeks. What did you wish me to do? Sit indoors and do plain sewing, like your Mrs. Lister?”
She looked so pretty—her spurt of temper was so like a child’s that Richard softened.
“Now, Adela,” he said, and she repeated:
“Mayn’t I have even one friend?”
“You are a silly baby,” he said, putting his arm round her. “Yes, you are. Why don’t you make friends with some of the other ladies?”
“Oh, Richard, I told you I never could, you must remember that I told you so. You might be fair, even if you are cross. Now Captain Bannister—”
Richard’s arm dropped.
“My dear child, not to put too fine a point upon it, Captain Bannister has completely lost what little head he ever had. He always was an ass.”
“Richard!”
“The man’s in love with you, Adela,” said Richard in his most annoyed tones. “That is why I won’t have him here.”
Adela looked down, modest but complacent.
“I don’t see why,” she said.
Richard Morton’s face hardened. Adela said afterwards that he glared at her.
“I do,” he observed, and there was a disagreeable silence.
After a moment Adela stole a glance at him.
“Really, of all the fusses—” she though
t, and aloud she murmured:
“How jealous you are, Dick!”
“It’s not a question of jealousy, it’s a question of common decency. I won’t have a man in my house, when he makes no secret of being in love with my wife.”
He looked hard at Adela as he spoke, and then began to walk up and down the room, a proceeding which always got upon her nerves.
“Oh, Richard, don’t!” she said sharply. “It’s exactly like having a wild beast in the room. And you are too ridiculous about poor Captain Bannister, who is most nice and respectful—a great deal more respectful than you are, sir”; and she ventured a little coquettish glance which sent the blood to Richard Morton’s head.
He came across to her with a couple of great strides, and took her by the shoulders,
“Adela, do you put us on the same footing?”
“Oh, you are hurting me!”
“Answer me. Do you?”
“Dick, how ridiculous! As if one could have two husbands, or wanted to! I am sure one is enough. More than enough.”
“Are you sorry that you married me?” asked Richard Morton.
There was something in his tone that would have gone to the heart of a woman who loved him. Adela welcomed it.
“Not when you are nice. When you are jealous, and unreasonable, and horrid—well, I don’t know,” and she threw him a teasing glance.
A few months ago it would have brought him to her feet. Now he let go of her, and said with rather a heavy sigh:
“My dear, you took me with your eyes open. I suppose some one else might have made you happier, but I am your husband, and you mustn’t forget it. You mustn’t forget it, Adela.”
He went out of the room without kissing her, and Adela sat down pouting, to tell Captain Bannister that she was afraid she could not ride with him as she had promised.
This was the first of many like scenes. Captain Bannister went his way, and next it was Mr. Burnet, the young civilian, whose name occurred in every letter. Dick was very unreasonable about him too, “and really, my dear Helen,” wrote Adela, “it is too hot to have fusses.”
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