CHAPTER XII.
WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN.
“COME! all’s well that ends well,” said Major Keeling to Sir Dugald, as they rode into the town after escorting Mr Crayne back to the fort. “I don’t remember ever feeling so happy before.”
“I don’t wonder,” was the laconic reply.
“But I do. After all, Ferrers’ charge was a preposterous one. Why should I feel so extraordinarily glad to have cleared myself? The relief seems out of all proportion to the trouble.”
“I hope you are not fey, Major, as we say in Scotland?”
“If you are asking whether I have a presentiment of approaching misfortune, I never was freer from it in my life.”
“No, it’s just the other way. You feel particularly happy, and you can’t see any reason for it. Then you know that misfortune is on its way.”
“Oh, that’s what it is to be fey? Haigh, I’ll tell you what would have been a misfortune—if your wife and Miss Ross had turned against me.”
“Do you think they’re fools?” growled Sir Dugald.
“No; but the charge must have seemed very serious to them. By the way, I don’t think they ever asked what the charge was, though!” He laughed, a great ringing laugh. “They acquitted me on trust. On my honour, Haigh, if those two women had believed me guilty, I should have been ready to blow out my brains!”
“The ladies ought to be flattered,” said Sir Dugald soberly. Major Keeling gave him a sharp look, but he was gazing straight between his horse’s ears, with an absolutely impassive face. No one looking at him would have guessed that he was trying to break through his natural reserve so far as to inform the Commandant of Penelope’s engagement. What instinct impelled him to the effort he could not have told, and the fear of committing a breach of confidence combined with his Scottish prudence to keep his mouth shut. Major Keeling leaned over from his tall horse and slapped him on the back.
“Don’t look so doleful, Haigh!” he commanded. “We shall see better things for the frontier from to-day. The old man’s apology was really handsome, and I like him better than I should ever have thought I could like a civilian. I can even forgive Ferrers, if he doesn’t do anything to put my back up again before I see him next.”
Sir Dugald turned and looked at him in silence—a look which Major Keeling remembered afterwards; but if he had at last made up his mind to speak, his opportunity was gone, for Dr Tarleton came flying out of his surgery to demand whether all was right. In spite of the secrecy Mr Crayne had honestly tried to preserve, some rumour of the crisis had got about through the gossip of the servants at the fort, and every white man in Alibad felt that he was standing his trial at the side of the Commandant. One after another dropped in at Major Keeling’s office, all with colourable excuses, but really to learn the news, and were received and sent on their way again with a geniality that astonished and delighted them. Better days must indeed be in store for the frontier if the Chief had time not to be curt.
Sir Dugald had gone round to the artillery lines after leaving the office, and returned thither in the course of an hour or two, expecting to find Major Keeling still at work; but the room was empty, save for the presence of young Bigg, the European clerk, and the native writers. Bigg looked up and grinned when Sir Dugald entered.
“Want the Chief? He’s gone up to the fort.”
“Already? Why, dinner isn’t for two hours yet.”
“I didn’t say he had gone to dinner, did I? If you asked me, I should say he had gone for something quite different. I heard him giving his boy gali [a scolding] because his spurs were not bright. What does that look like, eh?”
“Looks to me as if you wanted your head punched. It’s like your impudence to go spying on the Chief,” said Sir Dugald gloomily, but Bigg chuckled unabashed.
At the fort Lady Haigh, immersed in preparations for the dinner-party, found herself suddenly addressed by Major Keeling.
“Miss Ross is not helping you?” he said.
“No, she was worn out after all the excitement this morning, so I made her go and rest in the drawing-room with a book. I wanted her to be fresh for to-night.”
“Then I will go and find her.” There was repressed excitement in his manner, and Lady Haigh, looking after him, found herself confronted with the question her husband had already faced. Ought she to tell him?
“No,” she said to herself, setting her teeth with a snap. “Dugald forbade me to interfere in the matter in any way, and I won’t. And I only hope the Major will be able to persuade her to have him and give up Ferrers.”
Penelope, in the shaded drawing-room, lifted her heavy eyes from the book she had obediently chosen, and saw Major Keeling’s tall figure framed in the doorway. She had heard him ride up, had heard his voice speaking to Lady Haigh, and had assured herself, with what she thought was relief, that he would come no further. Mr Crayne had brought him in, when he returned to the fort, and demanded the congratulations of the ladies on his behalf, and what more could he have to say? But here he was, entering the room with the care which had aroused Ferrers’ derision months before, and trying to lower his voice lest it should be too loud for her.
“Shall I worry you, Miss Ross, or may I come and talk to you a little? I feel as if I couldn’t work this afternoon.”
“I don’t wonder,” said Penelope, surprising herself in a sudden pang as she thought how splendid he looked. “Won’t you sit down?”
To her surprise he took a chair at some distance from her, and seated himself thoughtfully. “I am going to ask you to let me talk about myself,” he said—“unless it would bore you?”
“Oh no!” she answered quickly. “I should like to hear it very much.”
He looked at her with a questioning smile. “You know they call me a woman-hater?” he said. “I wonder whether you agree with them? Don’t believe it, please; it is not true. A woman-worshipper—at a distance—would be nearer the truth. But I see you think I must be off my head to begin in this way. Well, it was thinking of the way I was brought up that made me do it. My mother died when I was barely three years old: I can just remember her. When she died my father simply withdrew from society altogether. It was said he had vowed never to speak to a woman again: I don’t know whether that was true, but he never did. It was easier for him than for most men to drop out of the usual run of life, for he was not in the regular army. He had raised a body of horse towards the end of the Mahratta Wars, and done such good service that when they were over his commission was continued, and his regiment recognised as irregular cavalry. But Keeling’s Horse was never brigaded with other regiments. He had a jaghir [fief] of his own from the Emperor of Delhi, and lived there among his men and their relations, with only one other white man, his second in command. They both fell in love with the same woman, the daughter of a King’s officer, and agreed to draw lots who should speak to her first, the loser to abide loyally by the lady’s choice. My father won, and was accepted—though how it happened I don’t know, for my mother’s friends swore to cast her off if she married him, and did it, too. The two of them lived perfectly happily away from other Europeans, except poor old Franks, whose friendship with my father was not a bit interrupted, and when my mother died, those two chummed together again as they had done before the marriage. They both kept a sharp eye on me, and brought me up something like the Persian boys—to ride and shoot and to speak the truth. I shall never forget the day when I came out with something I had picked up from the servants—of course I was a restless little beggar, always about where I had no business to be. My father gave me the worst thrashing I ever had in my life, and he and Franks rubbed it into me that I had disgraced my colour and my dead mother. I feel rather sorry for myself when I remember that night, for I knew my father’s high standard, and I felt as if I could never look a fellow-creature in the face again. After that the two were always consulting together, and at last they announced to me that Franks was going to take me home and put me to school. That was how they settled it: my father could not leave his people and his regiment, but Franks took the business upon himself without a murmur, and he did his duty like a man. The funny thing was, that we were almost as solitary on the voyage and in England as we had been in India. Franks must have grown out of the society of his kind,—I had never known it. We took lodgings in a little country town; there was a school there recommended by the captain of the Indiaman we came home in. I think the country-people looked on us as a set of wizards, Franks and I with our brown faces and queer nankeen clothes, and his boy who couldn’t speak English. The boy cooked for us, and we managed to get along somehow. I went to school, and hated the place, the lessons, the usher, and the boys about equally. My only happy time was when I could get home to Franks and talk Hindustani again. I suppose there must have been kind people who would have been good to us if we had let them, but we were both as wild and shy as jungly ponies, and they seemed to give it up in despair. I think the general opinion was that Franks had sold himself to the devil, and was bringing me up to follow in his footsteps, and yet, except my father, I never knew a more honourable, simple soul. Well, the years passed on, and we began to feel that the end of our exile was at hand. When I was fifteen we might come back to India, my father had said. And so I did go back, but not poor Franks. Our last winter was a frightfully severe one, and he fell ill. He gave me full directions about going back, sent messages to my father, and died. The clergyman of the place was kind, and it was only by piecing together what the people said as they whispered and nudged one another when I passed that I learned they grudged my dear old friend a grave in consecrated ground. However, the parson put that right, and found some one who would take me up to London and secure a passage back to India for me. This time I was so desperately lonely that I made friends among the youths of my own age on board as much as they would let me. They thought me rather a swell, travelling with a boy of my own, and only a few of them turned up their noses at me because my father was nothing but a commandant of black irregulars, and lived away among the natives. There were several ladies on board, but I never attempted to go near them. I should as soon have thought of trying to make the acquaintance of so many angels. When we reached Calcutta, I spent only a few days in the town, and hurried up-country as fast as I could, for I heard tales of my father that made me anxious. He had resigned the command of his regiment two or three years before, on learning that it was to be assimilated with the rest of the irregular cavalry, and people said that he had become quite a native in his way of living. Very few had ever seen him, for when travellers came in his direction, he had a way of leaving his house and servants at their disposal, and retiring to a garden-house at some distance, where he shut himself up till they were gone. Well, I found him, and the pleasure of seeing me seemed to give him new life for a while. He took me out shooting, and taught me all I know of shikar. But he was not satisfied; he would not have me live on among natives when he was gone, and suddenly he astonished me by saying he had managed to get me attached as a volunteer to the —th Bombay Cavalry. The Commander-in-chief was an old friend of his, and had promised to nominate me for a commission on the first opportunity, and meanwhile I was to pick up my drill and any other knowledge that might be useful to me. This time I was fairly thrown out to sink or swim, for I had no Franks to take refuge with when I was off duty, and a pretty tough fight I found it. I got on well enough with my comrades, though there has always been a prejudice against me for entering the army by a backdoor, as they say, and it has been against me with my superiors too. And then I was not the kind of chap who makes himself pleasant and gets liked. I have always been a sort of Ishmael, and I suppose I always shall be. As for the ladies—well, I tried hard to get in with them at first to please my dear old father, who had no idea that he and poor Franks between them had made me a regular wild man of the woods. But I couldn’t do it. I could never talk of things that interested them, or pay them compliments, or do the things that it seemed natural to them to expect. One or two kind creatures did take me in hand, but they dropped me like a hot coal, and at last I gave it up. I got my commission in the end, and I told my father I meant to marry my regiment. He agreed with me, I am glad to say, for it was the last time I saw him. His jaghir lapsed to the Emperor, for I was on the frontier by that time, and never meant to go back to the jungle. My chance came when it fell to me to raise the Khemistan Horse, and I knew I had found my place in the world. Sir Henry Lennox put me here, and I have given all my thoughts and every rupee I could lay my hands on to the frontier ever since. I made up my mind almost at once that I would have no married men up here. A wife was a drag to a man in such a service as this, I said, and even if she was content to endure it, it was not fair to her. Then—you know the way I was taken in about Haigh and his wife?” Penelope smiled. “Then you came,” he went on, “and you were different from any woman I had ever met. When I saw you first, I knew that you would help a man, not hinder him, in his work, and you have helped me all these months. I could talk to you of what I was doing and hoped to do, and you would understand and sympathise. You can never guess what it has been to me, and until this morning I thought there was nothing more I could want. But it is not enough. I want more.”
“Don’t! don’t! oh, please don’t!” entreated Penelope, covering her eyes with her hands as he rose and stood over her.
“You must let me finish what I have to say. I will speak very quietly; I don’t want to frighten you. See, I will sit down again, quite at the other side of the room. This morning it struck me like a blow, What should I have done if you had believed me guilty? If it had been Lady Haigh I could have stood it, though it would have cut me to the heart; but it was not Lady Haigh whose sympathy had made Alibad a different place to me. Then I remembered that the Haighs can’t remain here always, and if they went away, you would go with them, and I should be left here without you. But you have spoilt me for my old solitary life. You have drawn my soul out to talk to you—I know it was not your fault, you never meant to do it,” as Penelope tried to speak, “but you can’t give it me back. I know I have nothing to offer you. I am unpopular with my superiors and with the civil government; my life is devoted to the frontier. I don’t know how I have the face to ask you to think whether you could possibly marry me, but I only ask you to think about it. Tell me when you have decided. I can wait. The only thing I cannot bear is to lose you.”
Utter misery and pent-up feeling combined to give Penelope’s words a thrill of bitterness. “If you have only felt this since the morning, it cannot hurt you much to lose me,” she said.
He rose and came towards her again. “I think I have felt it all along without knowing it,” he said. “It is as if I had been looking for something all my life, and had found it to-day.”
“Oh, if you had only spoken sooner, I might have stood out against them!” The words were wrung from Penelope, but she crushed down her pain fiercely. “No, no, I did not mean that,” she said hastily. “It is too late, Major Keeling. There is some one else.”
“Some one to whom you are engaged?” She bowed her head. “Forgive me for boring you so long, but I had no means of knowing. It is Porter, I suppose? He is a fine fellow. I hope you will be very happy; I believe you will.”
“It is not Captain Porter,” said Penelope. She must tell him the truth, or he might congratulate Porter—poor Porter, who had proposed to her and been refused three months ago. Her voice fell guiltily. “It is Captain Ferrers.”
“Ferrers! Not Ferrers?” He repeated the name, as if the idea was incredible. “It cannot be Ferrers. Why, you can’t know——”
“Yes, I know; but he is different, he has given it all up. He says I can help him, and I have promised to try.”
“But it is not fit. He is no more worthy of you—— Of course I am not worthy either, but still—— I must speak to your brother. Who am I to say that I am better than Ferrers? But I can’t see you sacrificed. Your life would be one long misery.”
“Please, please say nothing. Oh, forgive me, but don’t you see you are the one person who ought not to interfere?”
He looked at her with something of reproach. “If it set up an eternal barrier between you and myself, I would still try to save you.”
“But indeed, it is no use speaking to Colin. I have promised——”
“Do you care for this man?” he interrupted her.
“I have promised to marry him in the hope of helping him, and I shall keep my promise.”
“You don’t care for him. You have not even that hold over him, and how do you think you can do him any good?”
“He thinks I can, and I have promised. I am bound by that promise unless George Ferrers himself gives me release, and he won’t.”
“I’ll wring it out of him.”
The growl, like that of an angry lion, terrified Penelope. She laid her hand on her champion’s arm.
“Major Keeling, I ask you—I entreat you—to do nothing. It is my own fault. Elma Haigh warned me against Captain Ferrers, and if I had listened to her, I should never have renewed my promise. But it is given, and I must keep it. One can’t wriggle out of a promise because it turns out to be hard to keep. You would not do it yourself; why should you think I would?”
He took her hand and held it between his. “Do you ask me,” he said slowly, “to stand by, and see you give yourself to a man who at his best is well meaning, but generally isn’t even that? It’s not as if you cared for him. You might manage to be happy somehow if you did, but as it is——”
“Don’t make it harder for me,” entreated Penelope.
“Am I doing that? Heaven knows I don’t want to, unless I could make it so hard you couldn’t do it. Why, it’s preposterous!” he broke out again. “That you should feel bound to sacrifice yourself——”
“Is a promise a sacred thing to you? You know it is. So it is to me. I must keep it, but you can make it much harder to do.”
“I will do anything in the world that will help you.”
“Then please go away, and never speak of this again.” Penelope’s strength was exhausted. In another moment she must break down, she knew, and if he pleaded with her again, how could she resist him? He seemed about to protest, but after one look at her face, he dropped her hand and went out. She moved to the window, and watched him between the slats of the blind as he mounted Miani and rode away. Would he ride out into the desert, she wondered, and try to rid himself of his grief in the old way? But no, he turned in that direction at first, but almost immediately took the road to the town again. If he were absent from the dinner-party that night, she might be questioned, as the person who had seen him last, and he must do nothing that might reflect on her. He rode to his own house, and going into his private office, sat down resolutely at his desk and pulled out paper and ink. He had been promising himself a controversy with no less a person than the Governor-General, a fiery, indomitable little man of a type of character not unlike his own. Lord Blairgowrie had observed, in a moment of irritation, that every frontier officer in India was a Governor-General in his own estimation, and would have to be taught his mistake, whether he were Major Keeling, C.B., or the latest arrived subaltern. An injudicious friend—he possessed a good many of these—had passed on the remark to Major Keeling, who had been prepared to resent it in his usual style. But on this occasion he got no further than writing, “To the Right Honourable the Earl of Blairgowrie. My Lord——” It was no use. The caustic words he had been turning over in his mind would not come. His thoughts were running on a very different subject, and he pushed away the pen and paper, and buried his face in his hands.