Read CHAPTER XXVI of Leonie of the Jungle, free online book, by Joan Conquest, on ReadCentral.com.

“But when the desire cometh,
it is a tree of life.-The Bible.

The first-class passengers, leastways the passengers travelling first class, lay stretched out side by side, one sex to starboard, t’other to port, divided, however, more by the fear of the eyes of the other sex, than by any hatch piled with chairs, or ship rule pinned upon the notice-board, and signed by the chief.

Surely the hours of the tropical nights passed in sleep on deck are those in which we should return thanks for lacking the gift of seeing ourselves as the officer going on, or coming off watch, the fugitive apprentice, or some stray passenger see us.

Human chrysalis, wrapt in the cocoon of sheet or unsightly night attire, with starboard boudoir cap awry, exposing the steel cracker or the lanky lock; unsightly pedal extremities peeping from the unfeminine pyjama; ruby lips, uncarmined, ajar; whilst to port like rocks from the ocean, unshaven chins rise unrebuked from blanket billows, and pyjama button and buttonhole play touch across the unseemly, unrestrained and unconfined masculine torso.

It was one of those insufferably hot nights you get sometimes as you turn into the Hoogli, when the smell of the land comes in sickening wafts, and the enchantment of the East is considerably lessened in your opinion by the oppression of the atmosphere.

You are going up the Hoogli! you are passing the Sunderbunds! you can almost see the tigers squatting in rows at the water’s edge! it is the East! it is India!-also it is infernally hot, and having retired to your cabin to disrobe, you anathemise your stable companion who has been likewise inspired; curse your overworked cabin steward who has heaved your bedding on to the wrong site; re-arrange everything and bed down.

Everyone was asleep when the light of the full moon caused a subdued lustre under the awnings, and a greenish light in Leonie’s wide-open, staring eyes, as she suddenly swung herself over the side of her bunk and slid unhurt to the floor.

She made an arresting picture as she stood listening intently, her flimsy garment falling away from her shoulders, leaving the slender white back bare to the waist, while she held handfuls of the transparent stuff crushed against her breast, upon which lay a jewel hung from a gold chain.

Her feet were bare, her arms were bare, and her tawny mass of hair hung in two thick scented plaits to her dimpled knees; and she repeated some words over and over again like one insane or delirious.

Ham abhi ate hai-ham abhi ate hai.”

Which being translated means “I come-I come.”

Without the slightest hesitation she opened the door of N state-room, which she had had to herself after Port Said, and which, as anyone who has travelled on this particular boat will know, gives on to the dining saloon; passed swiftly along the narrow passage past the notice board and the head steward’s cabin, and stood among the human cocoons on deck.

For a moment she paused irresolute, turned, and swiftly mounted the companion-way to the bridge deck, her bare feet making no sound, her beautiful body shining like ivory through the flimsy garment she held gathered to her breast.

Oh! well for her was it that the ship slept, and that the awnings made it almost impossible for those on the bridge to see what took place on the deck.

Though a report of sleep-walking on board would only have served to broaden the lines of laughter in the chief officer’s mercurial soul, and deepen the lines of cynicism around the second officer’s cynical mouth when the one relieved the other on the bridge at the matutinal hour of four a.m.

And very well for Leonie was it that the captain had forbidden sleeping on his deck, and that the high caste native who had come aboard at Colombo was sitting on the port side as she approached.

Owing to his high caste, and the purity of his habits, the young native had passed the days apart from his fellow-passengers since he had come aboard; and the days left were too few for the white folk to show any curiosity concerning the handsome man.

You don’t feel curious about anything after almost five weeks seafaring; you feel kind of stunned.

Leonie, therefore, had not noticed him particularly as he sat apart with his delicate oval face behind a book when she approached, or passed his chair; neither had she felt the gentle luminous eyes resting upon her from the nape of her sunkissed neck to her slim ankle.

Nor did he now, long after midnight, make any sign when, without touching the rails, she came swiftly up the companion-ladder, bending her bronze head to miss the edge of the awning; and he made no movement as she sped past him, crossed the deck to the starboard rail, and putting both hands upon it, swung her body back as you do when you are going to vault clear.

No movement of his body, but he gave a jerk of his will-power which brought the veins out like whipcord upon his forehead, and drove the nails deep into the palms of his hands.

And in response, Leonie’s arms slackened. She stood quite still, staring out to where the Sunderbunds lay hidden under mist; then she put one bare foot upon the lower rail, and swinging herself up, sat sideways, leaning far over; in such a position that the slightest lurch of the ship would have sent her headlong into the water.

The native’s eyes narrowed to slits, and his nostrils dilated strangely as he pitted his will against the force which was impelling her.

He dared not speak, he dared not touch her. For he knew that one moment of recognition, one breath of scandal touching himself and the woman he trailed, meant the crumbling of the altar he was building stone by stone to his god.

For that reason he had taken the mail instead of the slow boat she had chosen, and had thought long before deciding to come aboard, even at Colombo.

He was afraid because of the evening she had answered when he called her across London to his side, by the image of Kali the Terrible in a glass case; afraid that she might recognise him and be on her guard, undoing all that he had done in the last year in obedience to the mandate of the old priest.

Sleeping Leonie, having descended from her perilous seat, stood for a moment with outflung arms, looking across the waters; then turned and walked swiftly and softly like a cat, straight up to the man who rose. Sweetly she laughed up into his face as she laid one little hand upon the great white cloak which swung from his shoulders, unaware that in moving her hand her own garment had slipped, and that her beauty lay exposed like a lotus bud before his eyes.

She came so close that her bare shoulder touched the fine white linen, and the curves of her scarlet lips wet but a fraction of an inch from his own; and her whimpered words in the eastern tongue were as a flame to an oil well.

“This plant,” she murmured, with the light of unholiness in her gleaming eyes, “this plant is honey born-at the tip of my tongue honey-mayest thou come unto my intent!”

He answered softly in the same sonorous tongue and she swayed towards him like a flower.

“About thee with an encompassing sugar-cane have I gone, in order to absence of mutual hatred; that thou mayest be one loving me, that thou mayest be one not going away from me!”

Where is the dividing line?

What is it that causes the saint suddenly to fling aside his holiness and hurl himself headlong to perdition? or the sinner to hurl aside his evilness and fling himself headlong into a monastery?

The jogging of memory, mostly, I think.

For what resolutions can not be conceived, and accomplished, or broken by the scent of a flower, the touch of a hand, or the feel of a piece of stuff.

Love, sudden, overpowering oriental love consumed the man, passion scorched his soul, and desire shook him from his dark head to the slender feet.

He was awake and the girl was asleep, and craving to set his seal upon her in her unconsciousness, he bent towards her until the fierceness of his breath disturbed the lacey frill about her breast, bringing to view the jewel suspended from a golden chain.

Instantly his joined hands were raised towards his face mechanically in prayer, his eyes burned with the fanaticism of his creed, and his face became old in knowledge.

The dividing line? the lifted veil? Nay! nothing but a jewel with the form and the colouring of a cat’s-eye, which had cunningly winked up at him from the secret places of the girl’s bosom; so that she returned to her cabin with her body unscathed, and her soul on the edge of the precipice.

And the most razor-tongued, detested colonel mem-sahib of the line in India thanked her stars that the mosquitoes had roused her frantically, but just in time, to see the trailing edge of Leonie’s indecorous night attire disappear through the door.

Aloofness, allied to perfect shoes and silken hose, will find a woman more enemies on board than all the pretty faces and frocks in the world; and if, in addition, she can heap on such items as a seductive face and figure; and if gossip via the newspapers can and does supply information as to the contents of her pass-book, plus savoury rumours concerning mysterious incidents in her past; well! ’twere better for that woman to stop at home, bob her hair, and take to that field of literature which is not bound on any side by the hedge of convention.

So it came about that her friends, after stumbling up the gangway at the Kidderpore Docks, with handkerchiefs held against their noses to protect them from the effluvia wafted from Garden Reach, lifted their eyebrows slightly at the frostiness of the adieux between their guest and her fellow-passengers.

And no one in the scramble and flurry noticed the elderly pock-marked ayah who had been engaged as Leonie’s bodywoman as she lifted the hem of the mem-sahib’s skirt and laid it against her forehead, and touched the instep of the high caste native when he passed behind the girl and disappeared in the crowd of his countrymen which opened up a way before him.

An ayah, who, to the utter astonishment of her friends, had given up the high position of head body-woman to a Ranee of the North, in order to accept the humble post of ayah to a mem-sahib.

A post she had gained by the baffling methods of the East which bind each man’s work to that of his neighbour with an unbreakable, untraceable chain; and gained too, over the sleek heads of many of her sister ayahs, who, armed with countless and phenomenally laudatory chits, had squatted patiently for hours in the servants’ quarters of the bungalow at Alipore.