OUT OF THE PAST

"I feel as if I had this moment arrived," said Muriel Smith, as she looked down into the garden from a balcony which jutted out upon one side of the wide flight of marble steps that led upwards to the loggia of the palace. "Yet I know I've been here for hours. I wonder when the sheer beauty will cease to--to take my breath away. You understand, don't you?"

"Yes!" assented Vincent Dering, half grudgingly. He would rather not have understood more than others. But he did; that was the worst of it.

He was looking his best in the old cavalry uniform of grey, and silver, and cherry colour, all laced, embroidered, and glittering with epaulettes, sabretasche, and high stock,--the uniform of a hundred years ago, when adventurers ruled half India, and Englishmen were demi-gods. It seemed to have brought something of their pride and recklessness, something of the dreams they dreamt into his whole bearing, as he stood leaning over the balustrade gazing fixedly at the scene before him. It was beautiful indeed! Beautiful with that unearthly stillness which only comes to illuminations in a windless Indian night. The lines on lines, the curves on curves of tiny lights which outlined each pillar and arch, each buttress and recess of the palace, the battlemented wall of the garden, and the turreted town rising above it, were steady as the stars. The fine fret of the acacia trees, showing white against the purple of the sky, was still as if carved in stone. There was no flicker in the soft radiance, which made the solid marble seem translucent, illumined mysteriously from within.

The very shadows slept. Such scented shadows, clinging to the burnished orange trees, hidden in the wilderness of roses, dreaming on the perfumed cushions of the quaint balconies and cupolas which overhung the river.

But it did not sleep. It moved, sliding on and on ceaselessly.

So did the water which dimpled and tinkled--after Heaven only knew how many sad years of silence and decorum--over the fretted marble water-slides.

How it laughed and babbled to the cunning coloured lights placed behind it! And the fountains below, rising out of the water-maze,--where there was but room for the flying feet of a laughing girl on the marble ledges between the lotus-leaves,--laughed and tinkled, also, as they sent showers of diamonds back on the pale blossoms.

The "jewel in the lotus" indeed!

There was no colour to be seen anywhere. Only that soft, steady, white radiance, those soft, sleeping, black shadows. Except in the drifting water-maze, and the drifting men and women around it.

Restless, both of them; going on and on. Whither, and wherefore? It was an idle question, Vincent told himself, if the move brought, as it did here, fresh laughter, fresh colour.

"On such a night did young Lorenzo," quoted the Commissioner's brogue from the flight of steps where, in the guise of a French cook, he was fanning Laila Bonaventura, with whom he had been dancing; the latter sitting still and silent as the shadow in which she was half hidden. A crackling laugh betrayed Dr. Dillon's whereabouts. He was perched on a balustrade above, his legs dangling, his trousers, as usual, displaying his thin ankles; for he was dressed in his ordinary evening suit.

"And old Lorenzo also," he scoffed. "The disease is nonprotective, contagious, and marked by extraordinary vitality in the virus, which after long years may spring to fresh life from a dress, a bit of ribbon, a lock of hair."

"Oh! have done with such blasphemy!" interrupted the Commissioner, joyously, "and me racking me brains which of all the beauties of this hareem I'd better fall in love with! Dering, you're a steward, I believe. Turn that man out for obtruding the exigencies of everyday life--including a swallow-tail coat--into Paradise."

"I've objected already, sir," said Vincent Dering, laughing; "but he declares he is a malarial bacillus."

"A what?" remonstrated the brogue.

"A malarial bacillus, sir," explained the doctor; "as I have failed hitherto--like everybody else--to recognize the gentleman, even through a microscope, I am naturally at sea as to the proper costume. And you will, of course, admit the universal rule: 'When in doubt, play a dress suit.'"

"By Jove!" ejaculated Lance Carlyon, who, mopping his face, had joined the group, "what a ripping idea. Wish I'd thought of it instead of this kit." He looked regretfully at his mailed limbs; for he was dressed as Lancelot-du-Lac, a costume which had been chosen for him two years before, at Simla, by a grass widow who had aspired to the part of Guinevere; but who, retiring before the young fellow's absolute unconsciousness of her intention, had left him saddled with an expensive fancy dress which he felt bound to wear out; for all his spare cash was kept for guns and polo ponies.

"I'm glad you didn't, Mr. Carlyon," protested Muriel Smith, consolingly. "You look very nice in it. Only those things on your legs--I forget the proper name--must be difficult to dance in."

"Greaves--the well-greaved Greeks, me dear madam," put in the Commissioner. "Plural of grief. Ah! ye should have seen him come to it just now with the general's wife. Your chance of promotion's gone, me dear boy--the marble floor resounded."

"Well, it isn't half so inconvenient as my husband's dress, anyhow," continued Mrs. Smith, persisting in her mission of sympathy, when the laugh at Lance's expense had subsided.

"That's all you know, my dear," remonstrated Mr. Smith, sleepily, from a quiet nook in one corner. "I never said Robinson Crusoe was a good dancing dress, but I claim it isn't bad to sleep in, especially out of doors. Soft and furry--and--"

His voice sank into dreamful ease.

"And it can claim solitude, anyhow," added the doctor, mournfully. "Think of the disgust of an old established microbe, like myself, when his swept and garnished home is invaded by a party of seven strange devils."

"How rude you are!" exclaimed Mrs. Smith. "Besides, we aren't seven, and I believe Robinson Crusoe discovered this island before you did!"

"I think the French cook takes the cake, though," said poor Lance, who had been following up his own grievance. "Shirt sleeves must be an awful pull when you are dancing with a burra mem."^[8]

"True for you!" assented the Commissioner, sympathetically. "That's the very reason I took to it, me dear boy, when me own merits and me advancing years doomed me to all the stout ladies in India. Besides, me paper cap rids me of two of me reports anyhow. Ye see I always have to wear two caps; one before, and one after supper. Otherwise I find the contints get mixed, and make me statements unreliable; and then me enemies say it's the champagne. I feel it coming on me now, but--" he sprang to his feet, light as a boy--"by a merciful providence there's the band at the 'Roast Beef.' Now, are ye coming in to supper with me, Mrs. Smith, or are you one of those who have to change their identity?"

"Not I," she declared, taking his arm, "I'm quite content with myself, thank you!"

She might well be, since her costume of water-nymph could not have been improved upon. It enabled her to show off her long, rippling, pale gold hair, and the filmy green and white, the feathery weeds, the iridescent shells, matched her delicate face, which seemed almost overweighted by her water-lily crown.

"Besides, Undine can always do quick-change artist, and assume a soul," suggested the Commissioner, as he led her off; adding, in mock alarm: "Me dear madam! I apologize profoundly. Miss Bonaventura, Captain Dering's waiting for you, I'm sure."

Laila, who had risen also, stood silent, looking taller and slimmer than usual in her guise of Beatrice. It seemed to have brought out the fact that she had some of the best blood of Italy in her veins. Vincent Dering had recognized this fact--which Father Ninian had taken care to communicate to him as soon as the latter had found out that, nominally at any rate, the former was a Roman Catholic, and therefore a possible lover--when he had gone up to apologize to the girl for having missed that second dance, owing to his duties as steward. The recognition had him vaguely sorry for the girl; sorry also for the old man who, evidently, dreamt such idle dreams. He did not mean to marry a Begum!

He crossed over to her now, offering his arm, but she refused it, saying she did not want supper.

"But you are enjoying yourself, surely?" he said.

"Oh, yes! thank you," she answered; "only it isn't real, of course. It doesn't mean anything."

Dr. Dillon, who was within hearing, looked down at her sharply. "Perhaps, my dear young lady, it is as well it doesn't. So let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die!"

She looked up at him quite shocked. "Oh! I didn't mean that, of course; that is wrong. I only meant that things don't match--the place and the people, I mean. Except one or two--those for instance." She pointed out Roshan KhÂn who, dressed as himself, was taking advantage of the emptiness of the garden during supper time, to go round it with old Akbar KhÂn as guide, the latter in the wildest antics of alacrity.

"Did you ever see such a funny figure?" continued the girl, with an odd little laugh. "He is quite crazy with joy. He told me to-day this was the first time for forty years that he had been himself! That he has been bewitched."

"I believe I've been bewitched too," said Vincent, suddenly. "Let us all go back forty years."

Dr. Dillon swung his feet further over, and dropped to the ground almost between them.

"That would effectually annihilate two of the company, and reduce me to cutting my teeth; and I want the use of them at supper. Come along and have something solid, Miss Bonaventura; there is nothing so indigestible as fancy sweets."

But she was firm, and moved away to where a small staircase led from the balcony to the upper storey. She did not care for supper, she repeated, and she had to mend her dress; someone had trodden on it, and she would not be able to dance till it was mended.

"Don't forget ours--the first extra," called Vincent after her. She turned where the narrow stair, after climbing the outside wall, against which it clung like a swallow's nest, ended in the shadow of an archway. "I shall be back in plenty of time," she said. Vincent thought he had never seen her look so nice, so young, so fresh, so smiling.

"That's a queer girl," remarked the doctor, as he lounged off, "not half bad. That is just it, in fact; she is a clear case of atavism, and as her ancestors seem to have been either saints or sinners, there you are! For it's the same tissue absolutely; indeed, there's precious little difference between the two when you come to analyze."

"I never do," interrupted Vincent, shortly. The doctor's cynicism bored him, especially here, where a man might at least be allowed to escape the brutal realities. Here, where even the houses in the bazaar beyond the garden wall--those houses that were by the common light of day so squalid, so unsavoury, so full of mean, miserable detail--showed like star-palaces against the sky!

A sudden comprehension came to him. How blind of the girl to say all this meant nothing! How crassly idiotic of himself to think of going back forty years to enjoy this! This was the same yesterday, to-day, for ever! It was the love of physical pleasure, the desire to appropriate, to have and to hold, which had civilized the world, and made man out of a monkey.

"'The Cradle of the Gods,' did you say, my dear lady?" said a courteous old voice from the stairs, breaking in on his solitude. "Just so--the pilgrims go there every year. It lies--let me see--I think I can point it out to you. Ah! Captain Dering!" continued Father Ninian, finding the balcony into which he had stepped en passant, occupied. "We don't disturb you, I hope; but Mrs. Palmer was speaking about the 'Cradle of the Gods.' It must lie--don't you think so?--over there." He pointed beyond the star-palaces.

"I should fancy so, sir," replied Vincent, "that is about due north."

"Then I am wrong," smiled the old priest; "the cave is northwest, and the passage to it is difficult--almost incredibly difficult."

"Yet you have been there several times, haven't you?" said Mrs. Palmer.

Father Ninian shook his head. "Never to the cave itself, madam. I am not quite sure whether I ever really meant to go so far,--and bow in the House of Rimmon! It would have been interesting no doubt--but--" he glanced down almost boyishly at his black soutane--"my cloth, my dear lady, has to be considered. As a matter of fact, something always hindered me. I went as a medicine man, you see; and so many fall by the wayside. I wonder, indeed, how any reach it." He paused, and a wistful smile made his face look dreamy. "Some say none do. A jogi--Gorakh-nÂth, Captain Dering,--he whom you turned out of the gun--claims to be the only man who has ever seen the real cave; the rest have seen--illusion!" He paused again, and his smile changed. "'Tis a claim, madam, made by more than Gorakh-nÂth; who, by the way, promises to defy you, Captain Dering. Padlock or no padlock, he is to get in and out of the gun as he chooses while the pilgrims are here."

Vincent laughed contemptuously. "I don't think miracles go down, even in India, nowadays, sir."

The old priest's face grew grave. "I cannot give my assent to that; I who have seen the blood of a saint turn crimson and flow. Faith, Captain Dering,--that is, the belief of man in a power beyond his own,--is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever!"

Vincent Dering bowed politely, and kept his shrug of the shoulders for the old man's back, as he followed him upstairs to the supper room.

The same yesterday, to-day, for ever! True, in a way. There were two stabilities amid the chances and changes of this mortal life. The Garden of the Palace. The Cradle of the Gods. Faith and Love--for it came to that in the end.

Here the familiar sight of a ball supper in full swing ended his rare reflections, and he slipped into a place beside a lively vivandiÈre, who welcomed him with entreaties to join in a comic opera she was going to get up at Simla. The last new rage in London; she had written home for the rights.

He was in a new atmosphere in a moment, and straightway forgot the garden; forgot everything but that the supper was excellent, his companion gay. Even the Commissioner's high voice, as he talked nonsense, seemed far from the gravity even of conferring titles, and it seemed incredible that the small man who sat surrounded by a host of departmental heads was really representing a whole Empire.

When the band downstairs, by beginning on Strauss's "Lovelong livelong day," warned him of his engagement to Laila, he passed to it half reluctantly. She would be sure to dance badly: that make of girl always did. So he was relieved to find the ball room, and the wide loggia into which it opened, almost empty. Only a couple or two were spinning slowly, idly, in and out of the resounding arches.

He went on, therefore, to the balcony beside the stairs. If the girl was there it would be an excuse for sitting out. If not, he could always say he had waited for her. Either way, he would have time for a cigarette.

As he went down towards it he met Lance Carlyon coming up, and called to him: "Supper's A1; so's the wine. It's going awfully well, isn't it?"

"Suppose so," replied Lance, "but I'm going to cut. These togs are awful; but if I go now I'll have time to change and have a shoot down the river. Am-ma says the ducks sit like stones before dawn. They won't miss me, as a bachelor, I suppose?"

Vincent looked at him compassionately. "A bachelor," he echoed. "It's about your last chance, I take it. However, if you want to kill something--it's a common symptom--go! I shall stop till the bitter--or sweet--end! One doesn't get into a streak like this once in a blue moon! I feel fit for anything."

As he sat down for a smoke in the corner vacated by Robinson Crusoe, this feeling was strong upon him, and sent the blood tingling to his finger-tips.

The band had by this time ceased piping to unwilling dancers, so the still, warm, scented air was left to the tinkling ripple of the water, the rippling tinkle of distant voices; for supper had almost emptied the garden also. The better for its picturesque effect. Now the imagination could people it--as Laila Bonaventura (the girl had sense) had phrased it--with figures that matched; real figures.

A chiming silvery clash above him made him turn to look upwards to the archway where Laila Bonaventura had disappeared. It would be a bore if she were returning to interrupt his cigarette; though, in truth, she had been, he remembered, almost attractive.

Almost--

He gave an exclamation, and rose to his feet. She was coming, indeed, but not as she had gone.

There is no dress in the world which is at once so dainty and so sensuous, as the court dress of a Mahomedan lady, and Laila Bonaventura was wearing one as she came slowly down the stairs towards him, a radiant white figure against the radiant white marble.

The folds of her long silver-gauze skirt--so cunningly fashioned that it trailed in rolling shimmer-crested billows behind her, yet left no beauty of her round limbs hidden--clipped her about the waist like a serpent's skin. So hiding, yet revealing, was the soft film of fine muslin over the scented, ivory-tinted corselet, which fitted close to the full curves of her figure. So was it with the silver-streaked veil, through which the jewels in her dusky hair, the bracelets on her fair arms, shone undimmed. So was it even with the chiming fringes of her silver anklets, as they slid merrily to cover and uncover the small feet, tucked so carelessly into the little silver-tipped slippers.

To hide and to reveal, that was the note of all!

As she came nearer, too, he saw that her lips were reddened, her dark eyes darkened artificially. And yet her face did not correspond to all this. It was curiously grave, dignified, almost anxious.

"Do you like it?" she asked, suddenly pausing a pace or two from him to stand still, heaped round by those shimmer-crested billows, and so, with one hand, gather the straight folds of her veil to curves over her arm. As she did so, he saw, with a curious throb at his heart, that her wrists were fettered to each other by long trailing chains of scented jasmine flowers.

A dainty prisoning indeed! The suggestion of it set his head whirling.

Like it!--His very admiration kept him silent.

"It makes it feel more real," she went on, "don't you think it does?"

Real, or a dream? He did not know which. He felt a fool to stand so silent; yet no words--as she would phrase it--came to match. None, at least, that he dare use to her unconscious dignity.

"Only I can't dance, you see," she continued, bending to look at the billows about her feet. "Besides,"--she looked up suddenly, her whole expression changed, she flung her fettered hands forward almost into his face. The strings on strings of scented flowers looping themselves in ever widening curves, hung like a screen between him and her laughter.

"I'm a prisoner--yours, I suppose." He fell back for half a second, then caught the hand in his.

And then, in an instant, it came back to him--the measureless glad content of that mistake in the dark! He had told himself ever since that it had come, then, by mistake--incomprehensible, it is true, horrible to a certain extent, but still in error. But this was no mistake!

"Yes!--my prisoner," he said. "Come, and sit down, and let us talk." He wanted time to think.

She shook her head. "Not here, please! No one is to see me but you, only you. That is why I waited till I saw you were alone. I only put it on for you to see."

A sudden remembrance of something she had said to him--"When it is real, and you give yourself--everything, and ask nothing." The certainty that she was doing this now made him say quickly:--

"Don't be afraid--they shall not see. Come, let us go into the garden--those balconies by the river--"

She shook her head again.

"They are not safe, and my guardian would be so angry. Though it isn't really wrong"--she added, with her odd vein of piety; "but when somebody sent me the dress, I thought it would be fun, and I wanted you to see."

"Sent you the dress?" he echoed hotly. "Who?"

She looked at him vastly amused. "Are you jealous? But I'm not going to tell you. That is just like the novels, isn't it; but what is the use of making people angry?"

"How do you know I should be angry," he asked coldly.

She smiled like a Sphinx might smile. "I'm certain. Come! Perhaps I'll tell you when we get to a safe place. There's one close by. My guardian wouldn't have it lit up because--he always has the same reason for everything, you know, and it is so dull--because something happened there long ago. As if it mattered!"

As she spoke, they had been passing down the marble steps, her silver anklets chiming; and now, as they paused an instant on the edge of the water-maze, they chimed still. But to a new, curiously provocative measure, and her face, her figure, her very voice, changed as if to keep time with it.

"I used to run all over it, in and out, when I was little," she chattered mischievously, "and old Akbar used to run after me and tumble in! I could do it now, and you could chase me, if I hadn't all this-" she gave a little mutinous kick at her sweeping skirt. Then suddenly she laughed. "Poor old Akbar! I'd like him to see me, but I don't see how it could be managed. And nobody else must--but you. So come--come quick!"

She drew him after her by one hand, like a child at play. Across the marble plinth, right to the wide arched passage in the lower storey; and when, having gained in the race, he would from habit have gone straight on towards the courtyard, she pulled him back with a peal of laughter.

"Not that way, stupid! Here--it's a dear little balcony all by itself with steps down to the river and a boat."

"Perfect!" he exclaimed with an answering laugh, as he disappeared after her.

But in that instant's pause two figures had passed into the other end of the long passage from the chapel. Two figures, one of which, half-disdainfully, half-regretfully, had been going round the beauties of the palace; the other, gambolling sideways by reason of its curbing deference its urging servility, engaged in garrulous tales of past glory.

"Yea! Ger-eeb-pun-wÂz," it was saying, "Bun-avatÂr used to meet AnÂri Begum here. She liked him best in uniform, and she wore--"

It was then that, framed in the distant archway, seen clear against the radiance of the garden, that vision of a laughing girl, a flashing uniform appeared.

Old Akbar KhÂn gave a faint mumbling petition to be preserved, and fell back, his teeth chattering.

"AnÂr--AnÂr--herself," he muttered. "And he--God help us all! Why did they light up the garden?"

But Roshan KhÂn knew better. His eyes were younger. And he had the key--the key of that shimmering silver dress.

"Fool!" he said sharply. "They are no ghosts. 'Twas Dering-sahib and--and--" he gave a bitter laugh--"one of his mems. They do such things often."

But as he walked on, his hands clenched themselves to the tune of the words which sang in his brain, "God smite his soul to hell! God smite his soul to hell!"

The two great stabilities, Love of God and Love of woman, had joined hands, as they always do.

A formidable combination.