Ten minutes later Rhoda stood fastening her glove at her father’s door and looking out upon a world of suddenly novel charm. The door opened, as it were, upon eternity, with a patch of garden between, but eternity was blue and sun-filled and encouraging. The roses and sweet-williams stood sheer against the sky, with fifty yellow butterflies dancing above them. Over the verge of the garden—there was not more than ten feet of it in any direction—she saw tree-tops and the big green shoulders of the lower hills, and very far down a mat of fleecy clouds that hid the flanks of some of these. The sunlight was tempting, enticing. It made the rubble path warm beneath her feet and drew up the scent of the garden until the still air palpitated with it. Rhoda took little desultory steps to the edge of the She stepped with a rattle of pebbles into the wide main road round the mountain, and there stood for a moment undecided. It was the chief road, the Mall; and if she turned to the right it would lead her past the half-dozen tiny European shops that clung to the side of the hill, past the hotels and the club, and through the expansion where the band played in the afternoon, where there were benches and an admirable view, and where new-comers to Darjiling invariably sat for two or three days and contentedly occupied It suited her mood, when once she had taken that direction, to walk very fast. She had an The road grew boskier and lonelier. Miss Daye met a missionary lady in a jinricksha, and then a couple of schoolboys sprinting, and then “It’s going to rain, Buzz,” she said, as the little dog mutely inquired for encouragement and direction, “and neither of us have got an E. “Do you understand?” As she spoke they passed the blurred figure of a man, walking rapidly in the other direction. “Buzz!” Rhoda cried, as the dog turned and trotted briskly after: “Come back, sir!” Buzz took no notice whatever, and immediately she heard him addressed in a voice which made a sudden requirement upon her self-control. She had a divided impulse—to betake herself on as fast as she could into remote indistinguishability, and to call the dog again. With a little effort of hardihood she turned and called him, turned with a thumping heart, and waited for his restoration and for anything else that might happen. The mist drifted up for a moment as Philip Doyle heard her and came quickly back; and when they shook hands they stood in a little white temple with uncertain walls and a ceiling decoration of tree-ferns in high relief. She asked him when he had come, although she knew that already, and he inquired for her “I suppose you are going to some friend in the neighbourhood,” he said, lifting his hat, “if there is any neighbourhood—which one is inclined to doubt.” “Oh, no, I’m only walking.” “All alone?” “Buzz,” she said, with a downcast smile. “Buzz is such an effective protection that I’m inclined to ask you to share him.” His voice was even more tentative than his words. He fancied he would have made a tremendous advance if she allowed him to come with her. “Oh, yes,” she said foolishly, “you may have half.” “Thank you. I am three miles from my club, twenty-four hours from my office, and four thousand feet above sea-level—and I don’t mind “Yes,” she said again, and they turned back; but they sauntered along among the clouds at precisely the pace they might have taken in the meadows of the world below. She asked him where he had spent his leave and how he had enjoyed it, and she gathered from his replies that one might stay too long in India to find even Italy wholly paradisaical, although Monte Carlo had always its same old charm. “You should see Monte Carlo before some cataclysm overtakes it,” he said. “You would find it amusing. I spent a month at Homburg,” he went on humorously, “with what I consider the greatest possible advantage to my figure. Though my native friends have been openly condoling with me on my consequent loss of prestige, and I have no doubt my sylph-like condition will undermine my respectability.” Rhoda looked at him with the conviction that he had left quite ten years in Europe, but she found herself oddly reluctant to say so. “Mummie will tell you,” she said. “Mummie always discovers the most wonderful changes in people when they have been home. And why did you come back so soon?” “Why?” he repeated, half facing round, and then suddenly dropping back again. “I came to see about something.” “Oh, yes, of course you did. I know about it. And do you think you will win?” She looked at him with a smile of timid intelligence. Under it she was thinking that she had never had such a stupid conversation with Mr. Doyle before. He smiled back gravely, and considered for a moment. “I don’t in the least know,” he said with courageous directness; “but I mean to try—very hard.” If he had thought, he might have kept the suggestion out of his voice—it was certainly a “It is going to pour,” she said; and, as they walked on with a futile quickening of pace, she heard him talk of something else, and called herself a fool for the tumult in her heart. The rain gathered itself together and pelted them. She was glad of the excuse to break blindly into a run, and Doyle needed all his newly acquired energy to keep up with her. The storm was behind them, and as it darkened and thickened and crashed and drove them on, Rhoda’s blood tingled with a wild sweet knowledge that she fled before something stronger and stranger than the storm, and that in the end she would be overtaken, in the end she would cede. Her sense of this culminated when Philip Doyle put “Come back!” he shouted; and, without knowing why, she did as he bade her, struggling at every step, it seemed, into a chaos out of which the rain smote her on both cheeks, with only one clear sensation—that he had her hand very closely pressed to his side, and that somewhere or other, presently, there would be shelter. They found it not ten yards behind—one of those shallow caves that Sri Krishna scooped out long ago to lodge his beggar priests in. Some Bhutia coolies had been cooking a meal there; a few embers still glowed on a heap of ashes in the middle of the place. Doyle explained, as he thrust her gently in, that these had caught his eye. “You won’t mind my leaving you here,” he said, “while I go on for a dandy and wraps and things? I shall not be a moment longer than I can help. You won’t be afraid?” “In this rain! It would be wicked. Yes, I shall—I shall be horribly afraid! You must stay The little imperious note thrilled Doyle; but he stayed where he was. “My dear child,” he said, “this may last for hours, and, if you don’t get home somehow, you are bound to get a chill. Besides, I must let your mother know.” “It will probably be over by the time you reach the house. And my mother is always quite willing to entrust me to Providence, Mr. Doyle. And if you go I’ll come, too.” She looked so resolute that Doyle hesitated. “Won’t you be implored to stay here?” he asked. She shook her head. “Not if you go,” she said. And, without further parley, he stooped and came in. They could not stand upright against the shelving sides and roof of the place, so perforce they sat upon the ground—she, with her feet tucked under her, leaning upon one hand, in the way of her sex, he hugging his knees. There might have been thirty cubic feet of space in the cave, “Are you very wet?” he asked her at last. “No; only my jacket.” “Then you ought to take it off, oughtn’t you? Let me help you.” He had to lean closer to her for that. The wet little coat came off with difficulty; and then he put an audacious hand upon the warm shoulder in its cambric blouse underneath, with a suddenly taught confidence that it would not shrink away. “Only a little damp,” he said. It was the most barefaced excuse for his caressing fingers. “Tell me, darling, when a preposterously venerable person like me wishes to make a proposal of marriage to somebody who is altogether sweet and young and lovable like you, has he any business to take advantage of a romantic situation to do it in?” She did not answer. The lightness of his words somewhat disturbed her sense of their import. Then she looked into his face, and saw the wonderful difference that the hope of her “Think about it for a little while,” he said, and came a good deal nearer, and drew her head down upon his breast. He knew a lifetime of sweet content in the space it rested there, while he laid his lips softly upon her hair and made certain that no other woman’s was so sweet-scented. “Well?” he said at last. “But——” “But?” “But you never did approve of me.” “Didn’t I? I don’t know. I have always loved you.” “I have never loved anybody—before.” That was as near as she managed to get, then or for long thereafter, to the matter of her previous engagement. “No. Of course not. But for the future?” Without taking her head from his shoulder, she lifted her eyes to his; and he found the pledge he sought in them. And that upturning of her face brought her “It is her tryst!” Rhoda cried, jumping up. “Let us leave it to her.” Then they went home through a world of their own, which the piping birds and the wild roses and the sun-decked mosses reflected fitly. The clouds had gone to Thibet; all round about, in full sunlight, the great encompassing, gleaming Snows rose up and spoke of eternity, and made a horizon not too solemn and supreme for the vision of their happiness. “I’ll go to church in a cotton blouse and a serge skirt this time, if that’s what you’re thinking of, mummie.” “There! I was sure of it! Do think seriously, Rhoda, of the injustice to poor Mr. Doyle, if you’re merely marrying him for pique!” |