The Pool in the Desert [51]
in the most favourable physical condition to get rid of the other. Mrs. Prendergast wept a little over the installation, and assured Frederick that it was perfectly absurd; they were certain to get him out again; people always got people out again in America. She took him grapes and flowers once a week for about a month, and then she sailed for Europe. She put it about that her stay was to be as brief as was consistent with the transaction of certain necessary business in London; but she never came back, and Madeline Anderson had taken her place, in so far as the grapes and flowers were concerned, for many months, when the announcement of his wife's death reached Prendergast in an English paper published in Paris. About a year after that it began to be thought singular how he picked up in health, and Madeline's mother and sister occasionally romanced about the possibility of his recovering and marrying her after all--they had an enormous opinion of the artistic virtue of forgiveness--but it was not a contingency ever seriously contemplated by Miss Anderson herself. Her affection, pricked on by remorse, had long satisfied itself with the duties of her ministry. If she would not leave him until he died, it was because there was no one but herself to brighten the long day in the prison hospital for him, because she had thrown him into the arms of the woman who had deserted him, because he represented in her fancy her life's only budding towards the sun. Her patience lasted through six years, which was four years longer than any doctor had given Frederick Prendergast to live; but when one last morning she found an empty bed, and learned that Number 1596 had been discharged in his coffin, she rose from the shock with the sense of a task fully performed and a well-developed desire to see what else there might be in the world.
She announced her intention of travelling for a year or two with a maid, and her family expressed the usual acquiescence. It would help her, they said, to 'shake it off'; but they said that to one another. They were not aware--and it would have spoiled an ideal for them if they had been--that she had shaken it off, quite completely, into Prendergast's grave.
This was the curious reason why Miss Anderson's travels were so long postponed.
Chapter 3.II.
It was Madeline's fancy to enjoy the contrast between West and East in all its sharpness, so she and Brookes embarked at San Francisco for Yokohama. Their wanderings in Japan were ideal, in spite of Brookes's ungrateful statement that she could have done with fewer eggs and more bacon; and Madeline prolonged the appeal of the country to her sense of humour and fantasy, putting off her departure for India from week to week. She went at last in March; and found herself down with fever at Benares in the middle of one particularly hot April, two months after the last of her fellow travellers had sailed from Bombay, haunted on her baking pillow by pictorial views of the burning ghat and the vultures. The station doctor, using appalling language to her punkah-coolie, ordered her to the hills; and thus it was that she went to Simla, where she had no intention of going, and where this story really begins.
Brookes has always declared that Providence in sending Miss Anderson to Simla had it in mind to prevent a tragedy; but as to that there is room for a difference of opinion: besides I can not be anticipated by Brookes.
'It's the oddest place imaginable, and in many ways the most delightful,' Madeline wrote to her sister Adele, 'this microcosm of Indian official society withdrawn from all the world, and playing at being a municipality on three Himalayan mountaintops. You can't imagine its individuality, its airy, unsubstantial, superior poise. How can I explain to you elderly gentlemen, whose faces express daily electric communications with the Secretary of State, playing tennis violently every single afternoon in striped flannels--writing letters of admonition to the Amir all day long, and in the evening, with the assistance of
She announced her intention of travelling for a year or two with a maid, and her family expressed the usual acquiescence. It would help her, they said, to 'shake it off'; but they said that to one another. They were not aware--and it would have spoiled an ideal for them if they had been--that she had shaken it off, quite completely, into Prendergast's grave.
This was the curious reason why Miss Anderson's travels were so long postponed.
Chapter 3.II.
It was Madeline's fancy to enjoy the contrast between West and East in all its sharpness, so she and Brookes embarked at San Francisco for Yokohama. Their wanderings in Japan were ideal, in spite of Brookes's ungrateful statement that she could have done with fewer eggs and more bacon; and Madeline prolonged the appeal of the country to her sense of humour and fantasy, putting off her departure for India from week to week. She went at last in March; and found herself down with fever at Benares in the middle of one particularly hot April, two months after the last of her fellow travellers had sailed from Bombay, haunted on her baking pillow by pictorial views of the burning ghat and the vultures. The station doctor, using appalling language to her punkah-coolie, ordered her to the hills; and thus it was that she went to Simla, where she had no intention of going, and where this story really begins.
Brookes has always declared that Providence in sending Miss Anderson to Simla had it in mind to prevent a tragedy; but as to that there is room for a difference of opinion: besides I can not be anticipated by Brookes.
'It's the oddest place imaginable, and in many ways the most delightful,' Madeline wrote to her sister Adele, 'this microcosm of Indian official society withdrawn from all the world, and playing at being a municipality on three Himalayan mountaintops. You can't imagine its individuality, its airy, unsubstantial, superior poise. How can I explain to you elderly gentlemen, whose faces express daily electric communications with the Secretary of State, playing tennis violently every single afternoon in striped flannels--writing letters of admonition to the Amir all day long, and in the evening, with the assistance of