It was not until a day late in January
eight years afterwards that Thresk saw the face of
Stella Derrick again; and then it was only in a portrait.
He came upon it too in a most unlikely place.
About five o’clock upon that afternoon he drove
out of the town of Bombay up to one of the great houses
on Malabar Hill and asked for Mrs. Carruthers.
He was shown into a drawing-room which looked over
Back Bay to the great buildings of the city, and in
a moment Mrs. Carruthers came to him with her hands
outstretched.
“So you’ve won. My
husband telephoned to me. We do thank you!
Victory means so much to us.”
The Carruthers were a young couple
who, the moment after they had inherited the larger
share in the great firm of Templeton & Carruthers,
Bombay merchants, had found themselves involved in
a partnership suit due to one or two careless phrases
in a solicitor’s letter. The case had been
the great case of the year in Bombay. The issue
had been doubtful, the stake enormous and Thresk,
who three years before had taken silk, had been fetched
by young Carruthers from England to fight it.
“Yes, we’ve won,”
he said. “Judgment was given in our favor
this afternoon.”
“You are dining with us to-night, aren’t
you.”
“Thank you, yes,” said Thresk. “At
half-past eight.”
“Yes.”
Mrs. Carruthers gave him some tea
and chattered pleasantly while he drank it. She
was fair-haired and pretty, a lady of enthusiasms and
uplifted hands, quite without observation or knowledge,
yet with power to astonish. For every now and
then some little shrewd wise saying would gleam out
of the placid flow of her trivialities and make whoever
heard it wonder for a moment whether it was her own
or whether she had heard it from another. But
it was her own. For she gave no special importance
to it as she would have done had it been a remark
she had thought worth remembering. She just uttered
it and slipped on, noticing no difference in value
between what she now said and what she had said a second
ago. To her the whole world was a marvel and
all things in it equally amazing. Besides she
had no memory.
“I suppose that now you are
free,” she said, “you will go up into the
central Provinces and see something of India.”
“But I am not free,” replied
Thresk. “I must get immediately back to
England.”
“So soon!” exclaimed Mrs.
Carruthers. “Now isn’t that a pity!
You ought to see the Taj oh, you really
ought! by moonlight or in the morning.
I don’t know which is best, and the Ridge too! the
Ridge at Delhi. You really mustn’t leave
India without seeing the Ridge. Can’t things
wait in London?”
“Yes, things can, but people
won’t,” answered Thresk, and Mrs. Carruthers
was genuinely distressed that he should depart from
India without a single journey in a train.
“I can’t help it,”
he said, smiling back into her mournful eyes.
“Apart from my work, Parliament meets early
in February.”
“Oh, to be sure, you are in
Parliament,” she exclaimed. “I had
forgotten.” She shook her fair head in wonder
at the industry of her visitor. “I can’t
think how you manage it all. Oh, you must need
a holiday.”
Thresk laughed.
“I am thirty-six, so I have
a year or two still in front of me before I have the
right to break down. I’ll save up my holidays
for my old age.”
“But you are not married,”
cried Mrs. Carruthers. “You can’t
do that. You can’t grow comfortably old
unless you’re married. You will want to
work then to get through the time. You had better
take your holidays now.”
“Very well. I shall have
twelve days upon the steamer. When does it go?”
asked Thresk as he rose from his chair.
“On Friday, and this is Monday,”
said Mrs. Carruthers. “You certainly haven’t
much time to go anywhere, have you?”
“No,” replied Thresk,
and Mrs. Carruthers saw his face quicken suddenly
to surprise. He actually caught his breath; he
stared, no longer aware of her presence in the room.
He was looking over her head towards the grand piano
which stood behind her chair; and she began to run
over in her mind the various ornaments which encumbered
it. A piece of Indian drapery covered the top
and on the drapery stood a little group of Dresden
China figures, a crystal cigarette-box, some knick-knacks
and half-a-dozen photographs in silver frames.
It must be one of those photographs, she decided,
which had caught his eye, which had done more than
catch his eye. For she was looking up at Thresk’s
face all this while, and the surprise had gone from
it. It seemed to her that he was moved.
“You have the portrait of a
friend of mine there,” he said, and he crossed
the room to the piano.
Mrs. Carruthers turned round.
“Oh, Stella Ballantyne!” she cried.
“Do you know her, Mr. Thresk?”
“Ballantyne?” said Thresk.
For a moment or two he was silent. Then he asked:
“She is married then?”
“Yes, didn’t you know? She has been
married for a long time.”
“It’s a long time since
I have heard of her,” said Thresk. He looked
again at the photograph.
“When was this taken?”
“A few months ago. She
sent it to me in October. She is beautiful, don’t
you think?”
“Yes.”
But it was not the beauty of the girl
who had ridden along the South Downs with him eight
years ago. There was more of character in the
face now, less, much less, of youth and none of the
old gaiety. The open frankness had gone.
The big dark eyes which looked out straight at Thresk
as he stood before them had, even in that likeness,
something of aloofness and reserve. And underneath,
in a contrast which seemed to him startling, there
was her name signed in the firm running hand in which
she had written the few notes which passed between
them during that month in Sussex. Thresk looked
back again at the photograph and then resumed his
seat.
“Tell me about her, Mrs. Carruthers,”
he said. “You hear from her often?”
“Oh no! Stella doesn’t
write many letters, and I don’t know her very
well.”
“But you have her photograph,” said Thresk,
“and signed by her.”
“Oh yes. She stayed with
me last Christmas, and I simply made her get her portrait
taken. Just think! She hadn’t been
taken for years. Can you understand it?
She declared she was bored with it. Isn’t
that curious? However, I persuaded her and she
gave me one. But I had to force her to write
on it.”
“Then she was in Bombay last winter?”
said Thresk slowly.
“Yes.” And then Mrs. Carruthers had
an idea.
“Oh,” she exclaimed, “if
you are really interested in Stella I’ll put
Mrs. Repton next to you to-night.”
“Thank you very much,” said Thresk.
“But who is Mrs. Repton?”
Mrs. Carruthers sat forward in her chair.
“Well, she’s Stella’s
great friend very likely her only real friend
in India. Stella’s so reserved. I
simply adore her, but she quite prettily and politely
keeps me always at arm’s length. If she
has ever opened out to anybody it’s to Jane
Repton. You see Charlie Repton was Collector at
Agra before he came into the Bombay Presidency, and
so they went up to Mussoorie for the hot weather.
The Ballantynes happened actually to have the very
next bungalow now wasn’t that strange? so
naturally they became acquainted. I mean the
Ballantynes and the Reptons did...”
“But one moment, Mrs. Carruthers,”
said Thresk, breaking in upon the torrent of words.
“Am I right in guessing that Mrs. Ballantyne
lives in India?”
“But of course!” cried Mrs. Carruthers.
“She is actually in India now?”
“To be sure she is!”
Thresk was quite taken aback by the news.
“I had no idea of it,”
he said slowly, and Mrs. Carruthers replied sweetly:
“But lots of people live in
India, Mr. Thresk. Didn’t you know that?
We are not the uttermost ends of the earth.”
Thresk set to work to make his peace.
He had not heard of Mrs. Ballantyne for so long.
It seemed strange to him to find himself suddenly near
to her now that is if he was near.
He just avoided that other exasperating trick of treating
India as if it was a provincial town and all its inhabitants
neighbours. But he only just avoided it.
Mrs. Carruthers, however, was easily appeased.
“Yes,” she said.
“Stella has lived in India for the best part
of eight years. She came out with some friends
in the winter, made Captain Ballantyne’s acquaintance
and married him almost at once in January,
I think it was. Of course I only know from what
I’ve been told. I was a schoolgirl in England
at the time.”
“Of course,” Thresk agreed.
He was conscious of a sharp little stab of resentment.
So very quickly Stella had forgotten that morning on
the Downs! It must have been in the autumn of
that same year that she had gone out to India, and
by February she was married. The resentment was
quite unjustified, as no one knew better than himself.
But he was a man; and men cannot easily endure so
swift an obliteration of their images from the thoughts
and the hearts of the ladies who have admitted that
they loved them. None the less he pressed for
details. Who was Ballantyne? What was his
position? After all he was obviously not the
millionaire to whom in a more generous moment he had
given Stella. He caught himself on a descent
to the meanness of rejoicing upon that. Meanwhile
Mrs. Carruthers rippled on.
“Captain Ballantyne? Oh,
he’s a most remarkable man! Older than
Stella, certainly, but a man of great knowledge and
insight. People think most highly of him.
Languages come as easily to him as crochet-work to
a woman.”
This paragon had been Resident in
the Principality of Bakuta to the north of Bombay
when Stella had first arrived. But he had been
moved now to Chitipur in Rajputana. It was supposed
that he was writing in his leisure moments a work
which would be the very last word upon the native
Principalities of Central India. Oh, Stella was
to be congratulated! And Mrs. Carruthers, in
her fine mansion on Malabar Hill, breathed a sigh of
envy at the position of the wife of a high official
of the British Raj.
Thresk looked over again to the portrait on the piano.
“I am very glad,” he said cordially as
once more he rose.
“But you shall sit next to Mrs.
Repton to-night,” said Mrs. Carruthers.
“And she will tell you more.”
“Thank you,” answered
Thresk. “I only wished to know that things
are going well with Mrs. Ballantyne that
was all.”