A Soldier and a Gentleman/Chapter 7

OW, Captain Fitzherbert Cholmondeley Boileau was something of a devil of a man. There was no mistake about that, and nobody doubted it, least of all himself. He deliberately cultivated the impression. There was nothing really vicious, of course, in his whole makeup or he could neither have come by a commission in the Tail-Twisters, nor, once in the Regiment, have retained it. But he liked to be considered daring, and he was always on the lookout for an opportunity.

The blood that ran in his veins was the same sort that makes a brave and efficient officer of ordinary clay in any country; but in his case it ran rather more racily than usual, and the thought of danger to be courted, and above all of a dangerous woman to be courted, was like ozone to his nostrils.

Yasmini was dangerous. He had been warned against her by more than one native, by his brother officers on various occasions, and by his Colonel. And Yasmini had snubbed him and laughed at him. Therefore—the corollary was obvious—he and Yasmini were destined to cross foils at least once again.

The clerical work of the Regiment grew no less irksome to him as the sultry days wore on, and now that the Colonel had come back, and there was little chance of his getting a ride with the Regiment in any case, his ambition to get the red tape business over and done with died down in him. And he recalled most distinctly how the Colonel had been careful to advise, and not to order, him with reference to Yasmini.

It took him next to no time to make up his mind. On the third afternoon following his evening adventure at the Panch Mahal he got into civilian clothes and set off to Yasmini’s strange jungle nest, this time unaccompanied.

She received him on this occasion without keeping him waiting, and with no exhibition of surprise. She seemed almost to have expected him. Evidently he had been seen approaching, for he had not stood for one minute before the little iron-studded door before the same maid that had admitted him the last time swung it open for him again, and smiled a welcome.

Yasmini came as before to the head of the narrow stair to meet him, and bowed again low to him as if he were the lord of all the East and she his handmaiden. But wonder of wonders in the East!—she provided a European chair, on which he could sit, and even cross his knees, with dignity.

When he came before, she had deliberately tried to make him ill at ease by studied mockery. Now, though, she did exactly the opposite. Without asking him, she sent for sherbet, took the scented, colored stuff from the maid who brought it, and gave it to him with her own little jeweled hands. He drank it from pure politeness and wished immediately that he hadn’t; but she betrayed no amusement at his efforts to straighten out his face and seem appreciative.

She was neither amused, nor yet suppliant. Her raiment was the same—as gorgeous and as wonderful—though slightly modified in color in artful regard to the altered light. It was she who had changed. She wore a look and manner of artless, ingenuous camaraderie.

“I want you to come here often,” she smiled at him, standing before him for a minute, then subsiding with amazing grace among the billowy cushions by the window. He saw no waiting maids in evidence; but he did see that a curtain to her right moved gently, and he guessed that they were neither unseen nor unheard.

“That’s awfully good of you, I’m sure.” He would have liked to kick himself the moment he had said it; but with her eyes on him, even when in her present mood, he could voice nothing but mechanically ready platitudes. Yet he was the Tail-Twisters’ one expert in the game of flirting, just as he was their only Adonis, and the only white-skinned wrestler in the Regiment.

He was no one-sided, overbalanced ladies’ man, but an all around soldier, with sporting instincts, ready wit, and steel wire nerve. But Yasmini—perhaps a hundred pounds of her—could hold him at her mercy! He did not understand the circumstance. On his way to her he had walked with the gait and buoyancy of youth in search of fresh adventure. In her presence he could only sit and let his ears grow red and finger his mustache.

“Are there no other officers whom you could bring with you?” she purred.

That, for the moment, brought him to his senses.

“No. Thank goodness, there are not. I’m full of the idea of enjoying your acquaintance all to myself for the next day or two.”

She smiled, and drooped her eyelids. Suddenly she clapped her hands and called for cigarettes. When the maid brought them she lit one, and ordered the rest set down between herself and Boileau.

“Are you then all alone?” she asked.

“No. There’s the Colonel sahib.”

“And he? Could he not come?”

“He could. He might. But why? Why ask him? Won’t I do?”

“You? You are only one—and young and—”

She blew great rings of cigarette smoke and if she finished the sentence Boileau, at all events did not catch the words.

“And the Colonel sahib,” he answered, “is old—and stiff mannered—and pompous—and—”

“The others?”

“Won’t be back for days, most likely. There’s no knowing when. They’re after Gopi Lall.”

She reminded him of a snake the second he said that, though he could not have told why. There was nothing snake-like in her attitude, nor in her eyes; they glowed. He thought it must be something passing in her mind that reached him telepathically. After a few years in the East even the most materialistic, incredulous of men come to believe implicitly in things that savants of the West call foolishness.

“And where do they look for Gopi Lall?”

“Everywhere.”

“How?”

“Oh, by quartering the country and asking questions, and keeping a bright lookout.”

“And, should they fail to find him—?”

“They won’t fail.”

Now, she really did seem amused, and made no effort to conceal it.

“Will they find him because the men who look for him are mostly Rajputs, or because their officers are English?”

“For both reasons, I expect. But, tell me, why do you want all the other officers to call on you?”

Her eyes changed again, and the momentary display of amusement left her. Now it was a look of almost business acumen that stole across her face; she was a partner all at once, exchanging confidences.

“Because—because people in these parts, strangers to me, who know nothing of me and of whom I know nothing, have been saying things that they have no right to say.”

“What sort of things?”

“Bad things. That I plot against the government.”

Boileau whistled.

“I hadn’t heard of it.”

“And if the officers of your famous Regiment should visit me from time to time, and see what passes here, and know what company I keep, whom I receive, of what they speak, then—then men will still talk, for no woman’s tongue is the equal of a man’s at slandering! But they will talk to little purpose.”

“What harm could that kind of gossip do to you in any case?”

“Much harm. I want to stay here. I choose to stay here. I like this place.”

She was almost vehement.

“But none can buy this house or the ground it stands on, since it has no owner. What, then, could I do were the police to come and order me away? Could I argue with them, or have I friends more powerful—yet? But if your officers should come, and come often, then the police would not dare interfere with an honored friend of theirs.”

“Well, since you put it that way—mind you, I think you’re needlessly alarmed—I’ll ask Colonel Stapleton sahib to call on you.”

“Will you? Please!”

“I suppose that means I sha’n’t get another opportunity of seeing you alone?”

He was recovering his nerve, now that she betrayed symptoms of not being quite at ease herself.

“We are not alone.”

He eyed the curtain, that still moved gently from time to time.

“No? But—the maids are yours—an order—”

She raised her eyebrows very slightly, but enough to warn Boileau that he was what he would have called “running wide.”

“Do your memsahibs receive our native gentlemen alone?” And that was an argument that was unanswerable.

“You’re the most beautiful woman I ever saw,” he said quite truthfully, but with a soldier’s motive. He had of course the cavalryman’s ingrained belief in flank tactics.

“Yes?”

She seemed scarcely interested.

“That is why you called a second time?”

“That is why I want to see you alone—why I don’t want to bring the Colonel sahib or the others.”

“You need not bring the others—”

He started almost to his feet.

“You could send them, one by one or two by two, whichever would be better, and come yourself some other time.”

“Some evening? I am busy in the daytime.”

“Some other time. You will be welcome. You will all be welcome.”

She was eying him very narrowly now, and he was conscious of it. He knew perfectly well, too, that she was fencing with some definite end in view, quite different from the one she had professed. It needed little knowledge of the East to divine that much. Nothing in the East is ever done directly, least of all love making. Boileau remembered, then, that he was a very handsome man; and next, he realized again that she was eying him through lowered lids. With a flash of intuition it occurred to him that one English officer on the calling list of a native lady would be likely to cause scandal, whereas the better part of a dozen, calling constantly, would silence it. The rest would be a most effective blind. The one would—

“I begin to understand,” he said, working away at his mustache.

She smiled at him bewitchingly, and he felt the blood go mounting to his temples. But he could not guess whether she was laughing at him, or was in love with him, or was approving his ready recognition of her subtlety.

“Then bring the Colonel sahib as a beginning,” she said, nodding sagely. “Later, when the others come from seeking Gopi Lall, send them here also.”

“Send the Colonel sahib now, you mean to-day?”

“Why not to-day? Will the sudden summons disconcert him?”

Boileau laughed aloud at the idea of anything—of even a woman, however lovely—disconcerting Colonel Stapleton; he knew his Colonel from experience as being a man with a polite speech and a precept and a plan for every possible occasion.

“Is he very fierce? Is he unmannerly? I have seen him from a distance; his mustaches go like this.”

She imitated, very prettily, the motions of a military gentleman attending to the dressing of his upper lip.

“You’ll find him courtlier than even your own native Princes when they come to ask favors of our Viceroy.”

“Then bring him. Send him.”

“Very well. But, Yasmini—”

“My lord?”

“Don’t, for the love of goodness, make eyes at him. He’d get young again! We all want him to grow old; he’s standing in the way of promotion.”

“I? I make eyes at him?”

She bowed him out with a dignity that somewhat undermined his growing sense of intimacy. But she smiled at him again as he started down the stairs.