The Flag of the Adventurer

CHAPTER II. THE RIFT IN THE LUTE.-1

CHAPTER II.

THE RIFT IN THE LUTE.But if a difference about money was the immediate cause of the strained relations between Major Ambrose and his wife, no one would have denied more vehemently than Eveleen herself that it was the beginning of their estrangement. That had happened long ago—even, so she sometimes thought, before their marriage. This might seem an Irish way of putting it, but at times she would tell herself that she must have been blind not to see there was something wrong with Richard then, though again the idea would look absolutely absurd. For why should he have married her unless he wanted her as she did him? She would never have lifted a finger to hold him had he wished to be free! She raged against him a little now as she stood solitary in the middle of the absent Mrs Bayard’s drawing-room, seeing nothing of her surroundings. If he must be sarcastic and cross, why try to humiliate her in the presence of a stranger, instead of keeping his horrid remarks till they were alone together, and she could answer them as they deserved? There was little of the patient Griselda about Eveleen Ambrose.

“Such an English room!” Her wrath was suddenly diverted—though rather to the general atmosphere of bleak tidiness than to poor Mrs Bayard’s treasured “Europe” furniture—and she shuddered. “Sure I’ll choke here!” She fled to the verandah. “Ah, now!” and she stood spellbound by the wonderful moonlight shining on a limitless sea that washed the very hill-top on which the house stood. A moment’s reflection assured her that the sea was a thick mist enshrouding the town and the low-lying land about it, and hiding the mud and dust and crudeness which had been so painfully evident by day, and she dropped into a chair to watch it, for there were little eddies which looked exactly like moving water. She had not meant to stay in the drawing-room; her intention had been to slip away to bed, leaving an excuse with the servants for her host’s benefit, but it was so peaceful here, and she needed a little mental refreshment before coping once more with Ketty. But her meditations hardly brought her the peace she desired, for almost at once she was involved again in the perpetual quest of When? and How? and Why?

It was twenty years since Richard Ambrose and Eveleen Delany had first met in the hunting-field—and parted almost as soon. She was a pretty girl riding as daringly as the conventions of the time and a fierce old uncle would allow her, he one of the junior officers of the regiment quartered in the neighbourhood. Two or three days’ hunting, a scrambled meal or two taken in common, sandwiches shared in the shelter of a deep lane—Richard’s fingers had actually trembled so that he could scarcely untie the string, she remembered,—such a brief and broken acquaintance to change the whole course of one life, if not two! He had nothing but his pay and his debts, she was an orphan adopted into an already overflowing and impoverished household in a spirit of mingled improvidence and charity. To do him justice, Richard had no hope of being allowed to marry her then, but he would pay his debts with the sale of his commission, and transfer to the Indian Service, and come or send for her as soon as he could see his way clear. Had he been an Irishman the engagement might have been allowed, but old General Delany discerned a calculating and parsimonious spirit in his anxious planning, and sent him about his business with slight sympathy. To this day Eveleen could not think calmly of their parting. Something of the old agony shook her again as she heard her own voice—hoarse with the strain of trying to speak bravely for her lover’s sake—assuring him again and again that she would wait any length of time, five years, a hundred years, for ever, for him to return and claim her. He had sworn to come back, sworn that her image would be ever before his eyes until that blessed moment arrived; had sobbed—Richard Ambrose sobbing!—as he tore him self away when they kissed for the last time. Thus they parted—the boy setting his face resolutely eastwards, with the safeguard of a high purpose in his soul, the girl taking up the harder task of doing nothing in particular.

Those many, many years of waiting! Eveleen could not look back on them dispassionately even now. She was again the girl who watched feverishly for the ramshackle “ass’s cart” which conveyed the rural post-woman on her rounds, who manœuvred for the privilege of asking for letters at the post-office when the family drove into town. And there never were any letters. Deeply in love as he was, Richard Ambrose had been cut to the quick by General Delany’s contemptuous dismissal, and registered a vow that he would never return until he could confront the old man with abundant proof that he could keep Eveleen in proper comfort. That time did not come. Things were bitterly hard for the Company’s Army in time of peace. Its officers were the unfailing victims of the constant demands from home for economy and retrenchment, until no man remained with his regiment who had influence to obtain civil employ. Richard Ambrose was uniformly unfortunate. He had no influence, and a malign fate seemed to shut him out of the little wars of the period—often lucrative enough. Once he had been mauled out tiger shooting, and was in hospital; once, after several unusually obstinate bouts of fever, he was an invalid in Australia. But his was not one of the crack regiments, and the greater part of his time was spent in one dull station or another, doing the work of two or three seconded men as well as his own. Faithful alike to his self-imposed vow and to General Delany’s commands, he never wrote to Eveleen.

Eveleen gave no sign of resenting his silence. When she refused one or two good matches, her relatives were loud in scorn of her folly, but by-and-by they arrived at the comfortable conviction that all was for the best. Her cousins were marrying off or setting up homes of their own, and the General was becoming increasingly difficult to live with. It was really providential that the niece who owed him so much should be available to ride with him, to keep house for him in the scrambling style from which neither of them dreamed of departing, and in the long evenings to take a hand at whist if other players were available, join him in chess or backgammon if they were not, and at all times turn away his wrath with cheerful—if not invariably soft—answers. If her recompense seemed inadequate, there was Brian to be thought of—the young brother for whose sake Eveleen would sometimes even attempt that hardest of all tasks, saving money. “I would rob the mail for Brian!” she declared once defiantly to her uncle, and thanks to her unceasing efforts, Brian was given—and, urged tearfully by her, submitted to receive—some sort of education, sufficient at any rate to enable him to take advantage of the offer of an old comrade of the General’s to attach him to his staff as a Volunteer, until he could obtain a commission. It was a difficult business to supply the young gentleman’s needs while he was expected to live as an officer on the pay of a private, and the habits he picked up on the staff were not exactly such as would conduce to his efficiency in a marching regiment, but the day she first saw her boy in the uniform of the 990th Foot, Eveleen felt she could die happy.

Perhaps the attainment of this ardent desire made her feel more like Brian’s mother or aunt than his sister, but it was about this time that Eveleen became aware she was growing old. Not in mind—she was one of those who, far from growing old, never even really grow up—nor in body, for she could last out a long day with the hounds as well as most men, and skin and hair and eyes showed slight trace of the process of time, but in the estimation of her little world. Nowadays she would have been considered a girl still, but in her day to pass the thirtieth birthday unmarried was to be stamped irrevocably as an old maid, and she had done this five years ago. Other girls were coming forward—real girls—and she found herself confronted with the choice of ceding her place to them or holding it by mingled assurance and main force, becoming in course of time “Old Miss Evie”—one of those determined middle aged sportswomen whom English people regarded as an eccentric and scandalous feature of Irish hunts. Eveleen laughed and withdrew. Her choice was made easier by the complication of diseases and old wounds which incapacitated the General, for ladies did not hunt without male escort, and she would not tack herself to any of his friends; but it was a bitter moment. Nor was it made easier by the discovery that she was becoming an object of suspicion—or at least mistrust—to her cousins and her cousins’ wives. To them, as to all their class, money as money was nothing, but family possessions were something to be clutched and held by fair means or foul. The idea that Eveleen might be providing for herself—or her uncle providing for her—at their future expense worked like poison in their brains, leading them to lay ingenious conversational traps in the hope of surprising the admission that the General had added a codicil to his will, and to conduct furtive searches for household treasures which they imagined to have disappeared. It was inevitable that when Eveleen realised what was in their minds, she should resent it violently, and for a whole day such a battle-royal raged as was spoken of with respect among the servants ever after. Alone against the cousinhood, she held her ground victoriously, swearing to leave the house there and then unless all imputations were withdrawn and an ample apology offered. Where she could have gone she knew no more than her cousins, but she would have done it; and they realised the fact, and having no desire to take up her burden, listened to the moderating counsels of brothers and husbands, hovering in the background with insistent murmurs of “Ah, well, then——” and “Sure, the creature——” But her future was still a cause for anxiety, if not for suspicion. “Sure I see ‘What’ll we do with poor Evie?’ in every eye that looks at me!” she said once.

And then Richard Ambrose came back. He had found his opportunity at last. The Ethiopian adventure, which was the grave of so many reputations, made his. He went into it an undistinguished captain, and he came out a major and a C.B., whose resolute defence early in the war of an all-important post on the line of communications had even been heard of at home. He was wounded—but the present generation would have hailed his wound as a “Blighty one”; it was just sufficiently severe to induce the surgeons to advise a voyage home and back before he took up the new post of Assistant Resident in Khemistan which Colonel Bayard promised to keep open for him. Eveleen could never quite decide whether she had been expecting him to return or not. So many years had passed, and he had never sent her word or sign. But one morning, as she sat in her saddle at the covert-side, a little removed from the throng of cheery riders, watching the meet in which she no longer took part, one figure detached itself from the rest. A gentleman dismounted, and throwing the bridle to his servant, approached her—a tall bronzed man, wearing the frogged blue coat which was the recognised dress of officers in mufti, or as they called it, “coloured clothes.” He raised his hat, and the years fell from Eveleen. She was the girl of seventeen again, glowing with youth.

“You have waited for me, Eveleen?” he asked, without any conventional greeting, and she dropped the reins on her horse’s neck and held out both hands to him.

“All these years. Ah, but I knew you’d come!” she answered. For that moment, at least, she had no doubt. Richard had justified himself, had come back, famous and successful, to the woman whose welcome would have been no less warm had he been broken and penniless, and to that woman earth was heaven from henceforth. That the Richard who had come back would not be the Richard who had gone forth was unlikely to occur to her at that moment, or to commend itself to her belief when it did occur. She had not changed; why should he?