Death, we are told, changes our vile bodies and minds. It is at any rate to be hoped so, if orthodox heaven is to be endurable to some of us. And when mind and body have gone nigh to death, so nigh that he has stilled us in his arms for long days and nights, when he has kissed the sight of all things mortal from our eyes, and charmed away love and dread till soul could part from flesh without one sigh; does not that sometimes send us back, as it were, to a new life, and make us feel strangers even to ourselves?

Belle Raby felt this as she came back discreetly, decently, according to her wont in all things, from the Valley of the Shadow. Everything was changed, and she herself was no longer the girl who had cried uselessly, "Not now! Ah, dear God, not now!"

When she first floated up to consciousness through the dim resounding sea which for days and nights had seemed to lull her to sleep, it had been to find herself in John's arms, while he fed her with a teaspoon, and she had drifted down again into the dark, carrying with her a faint, half-amused wonder why a man who had so deceived his wife should trouble himself about her beef-tea. Neither was it a fit season for tragedy when, with hair decently brushed for the first time, and a bit of pink ribbon disposed somewhere to give colour to the pale face, she lay propped up on the pillow at last, fingering a bunch of roses brought her by the traitor. Nor when he had carried her to the sofa with pleasant smiles at the ease of the task, could she begin the dreadful accusation, "You knew I was an heiress,--that was why you married me." Horrible, hateful! The blood would surge over her face, the tears come into her eyes at the thought of the degradation of such a mutual understanding. Better, far better, that the offender should go scot-free. And after all, where was the difference? What had she lost? Only ignorance; the thing itself had always been the same. And yet she had not found it out--yet she had been content! That was the saddest, strangest part of all, and in her first bitterness of spirit she asked herself, more than once, if she had any right to truth, when lies satisfied her so easily. He had not chosen her out of all the world because he loved her, and yet she had not found him out. Was it not possible that she had not found herself out either? And what then? Did it make any difference, any difference at all?

During her tedious convalescence she lay turning these things over and over in her mind, almost as if the problem referred to the life of some one else. It was a critical time for the new venture, and long before she could leave the sofa, her husband had to spend a day here, two days there, arranging for labour and machinery; above all for the new house into which he was so anxious for her to settle comfortably before the hot weather came on. All was very natural and right; nevertheless it marked the beginning of the epoch which comes about in most marriages; the time when Adam and Eve leave the garden of Eden, and face the world; the time when different dispositions naturally drift apart to different interests. Belle, still weak and unstrung, found a morbid significance in her husband's growing absorption in the business; she seemed to see the greed of gold in his handsome face as he sat descanting, over his cigarette, on the many projects of his busy brain. Yet she said no word of blame or warning, for she began to lack the courage of criticism. The fact was, she did not want to know the extent of the gulf between them; therefore she kept silence on all points which might serve as a landmark to their relative positions. Even so she came on the knowledge unawares.

"I'm glad you don't fret over the baby," he said to her one day; "but you were always sensible. The poor little thing might have got ill, you know, and it would have been a bore if you had had to go to the hills this year, when there is so much to be done."

After that she would have died sooner than mention a grief that was always with her, despite her smiling face. Yet, when he was away, she wept unrestrained tears over a forlorn little spot in the dreary garden where they told her the lost hope lay hidden away, for ever, from her eyes. If she had only seen it once, she used to think; if she could only have shed one tear over the little face of which she used to dream! If she could only have whispered to it that she was sorry, that it was not her fault. Such grief, she told herself, was natural even in the happiest wife; it could not be construed into a complaint, or counted as a surrender to Fate. She was not going to do that, whatever happened. Never, never! That was the ruling idea to which even her own unhappiness gave place; and the cause of this fixed purpose was a curious one. Nothing more or less than a passionate desire not to defeat the purpose of Philip Marsden's legacy. He had meant kindly by her; when, she thought with the glow of ardent gratitude which his memory invariably aroused, had he not meant kindly by her and hers! And no one, least of all she herself, should turn that kindness to unkindness. Poor Belle! She was bound hand and foot to hero-worship, and life had shown her unmistakably that it was safer to canonise the dead. She lived, it must be remembered, in a solitude hard even of explanation to those unacquainted with out-station life in India. The growing gulf between her and her husband had to be bridged over a dozen times a day by their mutual dependence on each other even for bare speech. The saying, "It takes two to make a quarrel," falls short of truth. It takes three; two to fight, and one to hold the sponge, and play umpire. After a few days of silence consequent on his frequent absences, Belle was quite ready to welcome John back with smiles; and this very readiness gave her comfort. Things could not be so far wrong after all. And so every time he went away, she set herself to miss his company with a zest that would have seemed to the spectators--had there been any--right-minded, wrong-headed, and purely pitiful. It was so even to herself, at times, when, for instance, the shadows of day lifted in the night-time, and she woke to find her pillow wet with tears,--why, she knew not. Perhaps because those who had loved her best were lying in unknown graves far away among the everlasting hills. It seemed so strange that they should have met such similar fates; their very deaths mysterious, if all too certain. In her mind they seemed indissolubly mixed up with each other, living and dying, and her thoughts were often with them. Not in sadness, in anything but sadness; rather in a deep unreasoning content that they had loved and trusted her.

And all the while Fate was arranging a cunning blow against her hard-contested peace.

She was expecting her husband one evening when the rapid Indian twilight had begun to fill the large bare room with shadows, and as, driven by the waning light from her books, she sat down at the piano, her fingers found one theme after another on the keys. Quite carelessly they fell on the FrÜhlingslied, which three years before had wrought poor Dick's undoing. And then, suddenly, she seemed to feel the touch of his warm young lips on hers, to see the fire and worship of his eyes. Was that Love? she wondered, as her fingers stilled themselves to silence; or was that too nothing but a lie? Dear, dear old Dick! The shadows gathered into an eager protesting face, the empty room seemed full of the life that was dead for ever. Ah, if it could be so really? If those dear dead could only come back just to know how sorely the living longed for them.

A sound behind made her rise hastily. "Is that you, John? How late you are!" she said with face averted, for, dark as it was, the unbidden tears in her eyes craved concealment.

"No! it is I, Philip Marsden."

Her hand fell on the keys with a jarring clang that set the room ringing. Philip! Nervous, overwrought, unstrung as she was by long months of silence and repression, it seemed to her that the dead had heard her wish. How terribly afraid she was! Afraid of Philip? A swift denial in her heart made her turn slowly and strain her eyes into the shadow by the door. He was there, tall and still, for darkness dazzles like day and Philip Marsden's eyes were seeking her in vain by the sound of her voice until he saw a dim figure meeting him with outstretched hands. "Philip, oh, Philip! kindest! best! dearest!"

In the shadows their hands met, warm clinging hands; and at the touch a cry, half-fear, half-joy, dominated the still echoing discord. The next instant like a child who, frightened in the dark, sees a familiar face, she was in his arms sobbing out her relief and wonder. "Ah, Philip, it is you yourself! You are not dead! You have come back to me, my dear, my dear!"

He had entered the room cynically contemptuous over the inevitable predicament into which Fate and his impulsive actions had led him. During his long captivity he had so often faced the extreme probability of her marrying John Raby that the certainty which had met him on his arrival at KohÂt two days before had brought no surprise, and but little pain. The past, he had said, was over. She had never liked him; and he? That too was over; had been over for months if, indeed, it had ever existed. He must go down at once, of course, explain about Dick's legacy and settle what was to be done in the meantime--that was all. And now she was in his arms and everything was swept away in the flood of a great tenderness that never left him again.

"Oh, Belle! You are glad, you are glad that I have come back!"

The wonder and joy of his voice seemed to rouse her to realities; she drew away from him, and stood with one hand raised to her forehead in perplexity. "How dark it is!" she cried, petulantly. "I did not see. I cannot,--Why did you come like a thief in the night? Why did you not write? Why?--you should not have come, you should not!"

"I did write," he answered gently, the blame in her tone seeming to escape his ear. "I wrote from KohÂt to tell you. The dog-cart was at the station and I thought--"

"It was for John, not for you," she interrupted almost fiercely. "It was for my husband--" She broke off into silence.

"Yes; I heard at KohÂt you were married."

He could not see her face, nor she his, and once more her voice was petulant in complaint. "You startled me. No one could have seen in the dark."

"Shall I call for lights now?"

"If you please."

When he returned, followed by a servant bringing the lamp, she was standing where he had left her. Great Heavens, how she had changed! Was this little Belle Stuart with her beautiful grey eyes? This woman with the nameless look of motherhood, the nameless dignity of knowledge in her face; and yet with a terror, such as the tyranny of truth brings with it, in the tired eyes which used to be so clear of care.

"I am sorry," he began; then his thought overflowed conventional speech, making him exclaim--"Don't look so scared, for pity's sake!"

"Don't look like that!" she echoed swiftly. "That is what you said the last time I saw you: 'Don't, Belle, the whole world is before you, life and happiness and love.' It was not true, and you have only made it worse by coming back to upset everything, to take away everything."

"I am not going to take anything. The money--"

"Money, what money? I was not thinking of money. Ah, I remember now! Of course it is yours, all yours."

Then silence fell between them again; but it was a silence eloquent of explanation. So eloquent that Philip Marsden had to turn aside and look out on the red bars of the sunset before he could beat down the mad desire to take instant advantage of her self-betrayal. But he was a man who above all things claimed the control of his own life, and the knowledge that he too had been caught unawares helped him. "It is all my fault, Mrs. Raby," he said, coming back to her, with a great deference in voice and look. "This has startled you terribly, and you have been ill, I think."

"Yes, I have been ill, very ill. The baby died, and then--oh, Philip, Philip! I thought you were dead; I did indeed."

That was the end. Every atom of chivalry the man possessed, every scrap of good in his nature responded to the pitiful appeal. "I do not wonder," he answered, and though he spoke lightly there was a new tone in his voice which always remained in it afterwards when he addressed her. "I thought I was dead myself. Come, let us sit down, and I will tell you how it all happened. Yes, I thought I was dead; at least so Afzul KhÂn declares--"

"Afzul KhÂn! That was the name of the sepoy you arrested at Faizapore."

Did she remember that? It was so long ago; long before the day he had seen her last, when he had tried to comfort her, and she had sobbed out her sorrow as to a brother, in just such another bare shadowy room as this. Ah, poor Belle, poor Belle! Had it all been a mistake from beginning to end? The only refuge from bewildering thought seemed speech, and so he plunged into it, explaining, at far greater length than he would otherwise have done, how he came to be sitting beside her, instead of lying with whitening bones in some deep pool in the mountains. He must, he said, have become unconscious from loss of blood, and slipped into the river after he was wounded, for Afzul KhÂn from his place of concealment on the water's edge had seen him drifting down and dragged him to safety. They were a queer lot, the Afghans, and Afzul believed he owed the Major a life. After that it was a week ere he could be taken to decent shelter, because Afzul was also wounded; but of all this he himself knew nothing. His unconsciousness passing into delirium it was six weeks ere he awoke to find himself in a sort of cave with snow shining like sunlight beyond the opening, and Afzul cooking marmot-flesh over a smoky fire. Even after that there was a rough time what with cold and hunger, for it was an enemy's country, and the people about were at blood-feud with Afzul's clan. At last it became a toss-up for death one way or the other, seeing he was too weak to attempt escape. So he had given himself up to the tribe, trusting that to their avarice an English prisoner might be worth a ransom, while Afzul had gone east promising to return with the swallows.

Then months had passed bringing threats of death more and more constant as the promised ambassador never returned, until towards autumn, being stronger, he managed to escape, and after running the gauntlet of danger and starvation succeeded in reaching Afzul's tribe, only to find him slowly recovering from rheumatic fever brought on by exposure and privation. The poor fellow had been at death's door, and long ere he was strong enough to act as pilot eastwards winter had set her seal on the passes. So there they had remained, fairly comfortable, until spring melted the snows. "And," he added with a smile, for Belle's face had resumed its calm, "I grew quite fat, in comparison! Yet they all took me for a ghost when I walked in to the mess-room at KohÂt one evening after dinner,--just as I walked in here."

But her truthful eyes looked into his and declined the excuse. "No! I did not take you for a ghost, except for an instant. I knew it was you, and that you had come back to claim--everything."

"Then you knew wrong. I have come to claim nothing. Perhaps I have no right to claim anything; so it need make no difference--"

"It must make a difference to John," she interrupted coldly. "I was thinking of him. It is hard on him at all events."

"Hard! Of course it is hard," he answered with a sudden pain at his heart. "Yet it is not my fault. I meant no harm."

"You have done no harm as far as I know," was the still colder reply. But in her turn she rose and looked out to that low bar of red still lingering in the horizon. "It is all very unfortunate, but we shall manage,--somehow." There was a pause, then she added in quite her ordinary tone, "I don't think John can be coming to-night, so we need not wait dinner for him. They have taken your things to the end room. I see a light there."

"But I have no right--" he began, crossing to where she stood.

She turned to him with a sudden gracious smile. "Right! you have every right to everything. You have given me,--what have you not given me?"

A tall figure crouching in the verandah rose as they passed through the open French window.

"Who is that?" she asked, half startled.

"Afzul KhÂn. I can't take him back to the regiment, of course, but he came so far with me. He has business, he says, in Faizapore."

"Afzul KhÂn! Call him here, please."

It was a curious group: those two bound to each other by such a tissue of misunderstanding and mistake, and the Pathan responsible for part of those mistakes. He stood by salaaming stolidly; for all that taking in the scene with a quick eye.

"You have brought me back the best friend I ever had," said Belle with a ring in her voice, and all instinctively her hand sought her companion's and found it.

"It is God's will, not mine," was the reply. Not an atom of sentiment in the words, not a scrap of sanctimoniousness; simply a statement of fact. God's will! And stowed away in the folds of his fur coat lay a long blue envelope, ominously stained with blood, and addressed in a free bold hand to Miss Belle Stuart, favoured by Major Marsden of the 101st Sikhs. That was poor Dick's will at any rate. Even in their ignorance those two looked at each other and wondered. God's will! It was strange, if true.

"We dine in the garden now, it is cooler. I shall be ready in ten minutes," said Belle.

She was waiting for him under the stars when he came out from his room, and the slender figure against its setting of barren plain and over-arching sky seemed all too slight for its surroundings.

"You must be very lonely here," he said abruptly.

Her light laugh startled him. "Not to-night at any rate! To-night is high holiday, and I only hope the khÂnsÂmah will give us a good dinner. Come! you must be hungry."

Thinking over it afterwards the rest of the evening seemed like a dream to Philip Marsden. A halo of light round a table set with flowers; a man and a woman talking and laughing, the man with a deep unreasoning content in the present preventing all thought for the future. How gay she was, how brilliant! How little need there was for words with those clear sympathetic eyes lighting up into comprehension at the first hint; and with some people it was necessary to have Johnson's dictionary on the table ready for reference! Afterwards again, as he sat in the moonlight smoking his cigar, and the cool night wind stirred the lace ruffle on the delicate white arm stretched on the lounge chair, how pleasant silence was; silence with the consciousness of comprehension. Then when her hand lay in his as they said good-night how dear her words were once more. "I want you to understand that I am glad. Why not? You thought I meant the money, but it was not that. I don't know what I meant, but it was not that. I used to cry because I couldn't thank you; and now you have come, I do not want to."

"Thank me for what?" he asked, with a catch in his voice.

But there was no answering tremble in hers. "You are not so wise as your ghost; it knew. Supposing it was better to be dead after all? That would be a pity, would it not? Good-night. John will be home to-morrow."

He stood and stared at the lamp after she had gone, as if its feeble ray would illuminate the puzzle of a woman's face and words. He did not know that for the first time in her life Belle had turned on Fate. "I do not care," she had said, recklessly, as she walked up and down waiting for him amid the flowering oleanders. "One cannot be always thinking, thinking. He has come back and I am glad. Surely that is enough for to-night."

It was not much to claim, and yet it made the puzzle so much the harder for Philip Marsden. He sat on the edge of his bed, and swore to himself that he did not know what it all meant, that he did not even know his own feelings. To leave a girl with whom you fancied yourself in love and who apparently hated you; to die, and fall out of love, only to find when you came back to life, that she who had scorned you living had taken a fancy to your memory. Nay more, to find that something in you had survived death. What? Were the elements of a French novel born out of such materials? He had never thought over these questions, being one of those men who, from a certain physical fastidiousness, are not brought into contact with them. So he may have been said to be, in his way, quite as conventional in his morality as any woman; and the suggestion of such a situation offended him quite as much as it would have offended Belle. The pride and combativeness of the man rose up against the suggestion even while the very thought of her glad welcome thrilled him through and through. He wished no harm to her,--God forbid! And yet if one were to believe the world--bah! what was one to believe? He was too restless to sleep, and, with the curious instinct which drives most good men to be tempted of the devil in the wilderness, he put on a pair of thick boots, turned up his trousers methodically, and set out to seek peace in a moonlight walk. Bathos, no doubt; but if the sublime borders on the ridiculous, the commonplaces of life must touch on its tragedy. It was a broad white road down which he started at a rattling pace. Before, behind, it merged into a treeless horizon and it led--God knows where! For all he knew it might be the road leading to destruction; the ready-made conventional turnpike worn by the feet of thousands following some bell-wether who had tinkled down to death when the world was young. The moon shone garishly, eclipsing the stars. It seemed a pity, seeing they were at least further from this detestable world than she,--a mere satellite dancing attendance on a half-congealed cinder, and allowing it to come between her and the light at every critical moment! A pretty conceit, but not thought; and Philip was there with the firm intention of thinking out the position. Yet again and again he found himself basking in the remembrance of Belle's welcome. How glad, how unfeignedly, innocently glad she had been, till fear crept in. Fear of what? Of the French novel, of course. He had felt it himself; he had asked himself the same question, doubtless, as she had; and what in heaven's name was to be the answer? Must love always be handfast to something else? Or was it possible for it to exist, not in the self-denying penance of propriety and duty, but absolutely free and content in itself? Why not?

As he tramped along, stunning noises came from a neighbouring village; thrummings of tom-toms, and blares of inconceivable horns mingling in a wild, beast-like tumult. That meant a marriage in all its unglozed simplicity of purpose; a marriage, to use the jargon, unsanctified by love. But after all what had love to do with marriage? What could the most unselfish dream of humanity have to do with the most selfish, the most exacting, the most commonplace of all ties? Love, it is true, might exist side by side with marriage, but the perfection of the one was not bound up in the perfection of the other. Had not the attempt to find an unnecessary fig-leaf by uniting sentiment to passion, only ended in an apotheosis of animalism not much above that which found expression in those hideous yells and brayings? Above! nay below! for it degraded love and passion alike by false shame.

To escape the wedding party he struck away from the road, and felt relieved when he had got rid of its hard-and-fast lines, its arrogance of knowing the way. The clumps of tall tiger-grass shot arrowlike against the velvet sky, and every now and again a faint rustle at their roots told of something watching the intruder; a brooding partridge may be, perhaps a snake with unwinking eyes. And as he walked, his thoughts seemed to lead him on, till something of the truth, something naked yet not ashamed as it had been before mankind ate of the sorrowful tree, came home to him. It could not be true, that verdict of the world. He would defy it.

Suddenly he found himself confronted by a strange barrier, blocking his way. As far as eye could reach on either side rose a wall of shadow twenty feet high, a wall dense and dark below, filmy as cobwebs where the tasselled reeds of which it was composed touched the purple of the sky. The gossamer wings of a day could pass through those feathery tops; but below, even the buffalo had to seek an oozy track here and there. He had often heard of this reed wall, which, following the old river bed, divides village from village as effectually as when the stream ran fast and deep; but its curious aptness to his thoughts startled him. Impenetrable save for those who sought the mire, or those with the wings of a dove. Which was it to be? As he stood arrested by his own fancy a night-heron flitted past; its broad white wings whirred softly, and its plumed head, craning forward, with blood-red eyes searching the shadows, cleft the moonlight. By some strange jugglery of fancy it reminded him of a picture by Gustave DorÉ, and with the remembrance of Francesca da Rimini came that of the scared look in poor Belle's face.

He turned aside impatiently beset once more by the desire for escape and struck across the plain; coming, after a time, on a footpath which he followed mechanically through the tamarisk bushes, until he emerged on an open space where a hoar frost of salt crystals glittered on rows and rows of tiny mounds. So pure, so white, that the eye might have sworn to a winter's night even while the other senses told of more than summer's heat; a deception increasing the unreality with which Philip recognised that his wandering steps had led him to a village grave-yard. A far cry from the marriage feast! He sat down on the pile of disordered bricks and stucco which marked the resting-place of the saint round whose bones the faithful had gathered, and asked himself what chance there was of standing out against the opinion of the many in life, if even in death it was always follow my leader?

A quaint place it was; no enclosure, no token of hope or grief, no symbol of faith; nothing but the dead, clean forgotten and out of mind. Ah! but Belle had not forgotten him, and if he had remained dead she would have gone on giving him the best part of herself without reproach, without remorse. Was death then the only freedom from the body? He sat so long immersed in his own thoughts that the slow stars were wheeling to meet the dawn ere he rose, and threw out his arms cramped by long stillness. Dead, yet alive,--that was the old panacea. Was nothing else attainable? Must love be killed? Why?

A rustle in the tamarisks beyond the open made him turn sharply, and make his way towards the corner whence it proceeded. As he did so a group of men defiled from the bushes, set down the burden they carried, and, without looking round, began to dig a grave. The hour, the absence of wailing, gave Philip a momentary thought that he might be assisting at the concealment of some crime, but his knowledge of the people reassured him. Yet as he approached, all the party--save a very old man mumbling his beads--scurried into the jungle, and so he judged it wiser to stop and give the orthodox salutation. The patriarch rose in feeble haste. "Allah be praised! we thought you were the ghost already. Come back; come back!" he cried in louder quavering voice. "'Tis only a Presence, seeking sport, doubtless. Come back, and get her under earth ere dawn, or 'twill be the worse for all."

Then, as one by one his companions crept back to their task, he answered Philip's curious looks with waggling head. "Only a wanton woman, Huzoor. Seven months ago meek as a dove, playing about the village with maiden-plaited hair. But when the matrons unbound it for the bridegroom, as in due course of duty, the wickedness came out. It is so with some women; a fancy that hath not bit nor bridle; a wantonness of mind when God made them to be mothers. And she would have been one--ay, a happy one--for all her fancies, had she not wept herself into a wasting and died with her unborn child. Cursed creature, bringing evil on the whole village with her whims! Quick, quick, my sons! Hide her before dawn, with the irons round her thumbs, and the nails through her feet. Then will I sow the mustard-seed in her path homewards, so that cock-crow will ever send her back to the worms ere she hath done gathering. And all for a fancy when God made women to be mothers! A wanton mind! A wanton mind!"

The broken, quavering voice went on accusingly as Philip turned away sick at heart. Here was the other side of the shield; and which was the truth?

He went home feeling he had gained very little from the wilderness.