Plain Tales from the Hills Page 5

  YOKED WITH AN UNBELIEVER.

  I am dying for you, and you are dying for another.

  Punjabi Proverb.

  When the Gravesend tender left the P. & O. steamer for Bombay and wentback to catch the train to Town, there were many people in it crying.But the one who wept most, and most openly was Miss Agnes Laiter. Shehad reason to cry, because the only man she ever loved--or ever couldlove, so she said--was going out to India; and India, as every oneknows, is divided equally between jungle, tigers, cobras, cholera, andsepoys.

  Phil Garron, leaning over the side of the steamer in the rain, felt veryunhappy too; but he did not cry. He was sent out to "tea." What "tea"meant he had not the vaguest idea, but fancied that he would have toride on a prancing horse over hills covered with tea-vines, and draw asumptuous salary for doing so; and he was very grateful to his unclefor getting him the berth. He was really going to reform all his slack,shiftless ways, save a large proportion of his magnificent salaryyearly, and, in a very short time, return to marry Agnes Laiter. PhilGarron had been lying loose on his friends' hands for three years, and,as he had nothing to do, he naturally fell in love. He was very nice;but he was not strong in his views and opinions and principles, andthough he never came to actual grief his friends were thankful whenhe said good-bye, and went out to this mysterious "tea" business nearDarjiling. They said:--"God bless you, dear boy! Let us never see yourface again,"--or at least that was what Phil was given to understand.

  When he sailed, he was very full of a great plan to prove himselfseveral hundred times better than any one had given him credit for--towork like a horse, and triumphantly marry Agnes Laiter. He had many goodpoints besides his good looks; his only fault being that he was weak,the least little bit in the world weak. He had as much notion of economyas the Morning Sun; and yet you could not lay your hand on any one item,and say: "Herein Phil Garron is extravagant or reckless." Nor couldyou point out any particular vice in his character; but he was"unsatisfactory" and as workable as putty.

  Agnes Laiter went about her duties at home--her family objected to theengagement--with red eyes, while Phil was sailing to Darjiling--"a porton the Bengal Ocean," as his mother used to tell her friends. He waspopular enough on board ship, made many acquaintances and a moderatelylarge liquor bill, and sent off huge letters to Agnes Laiter at eachport. Then he fell to work on this plantation, somewhere betweenDarjiling and Kangra, and, though the salary and the horse and the workwere not quite all he had fancied, he succeeded fairly well, and gavehimself much unnecessary credit for his perseverance.

  In the course of time, as he settled more into collar, and his work grewfixed before him, the face of Agnes Laiter went out of his mind and onlycame when he was at leisure, which was not often. He would forgetall about her for a fortnight, and remember her with a start, like aschool-boy who has forgotten to learn his lesson. She did not forgetPhil, because she was of the kind that never forgets. Only, anotherman--a really desirable young man--presented himself before Mrs. Laiter;and the chance of a marriage with Phil was as far off as ever; andhis letters were so unsatisfactory; and there was a certain amount ofdomestic pressure brought to bear on the girl; and the young man reallywas an eligible person as incomes go; and the end of all things was thatAgnes married him, and wrote a tempestuous whirlwind of a letter to Philin the wilds of Darjiling, and said she should never know a happy momentall the rest of her life. Which was a true prophecy.

  Phil got that letter, and held himself ill-treated. This was two yearsafter he had come out; but by dint of thinking fixedly of Agnes Laiter,and looking at her photograph, and patting himself on the back for beingone of the most constant lovers in history, and warming to the work ashe went on, he really fancied that he had been very hardly used. He satdown and wrote one final letter--a really pathetic "world without end,amen," epistle; explaining how he would be true to Eternity, and thatall women were very much alike, and he would hide his broken heart,etc., etc.; but if, at any future time, etc., etc., he could afford towait, etc., etc., unchanged affections, etc., etc., return to her oldlove, etc., etc., for eight closely-written pages. From an artisticpoint of view, it was very neat work, but an ordinary Philistine, whoknew the state of Phil's real feelings--not the ones he rose to as hewent on writing--would have called it the thoroughly mean and selfishwork of a thoroughly mean and selfish, weak man. But this verdict wouldhave been incorrect. Phil paid for the postage, and felt every word hehad written for at least two days and a half. It was the last flickerbefore the light went out.

  That letter made Agnes Laiter very unhappy, and she cried and put itaway in her desk, and became Mrs. Somebody Else for the good of herfamily. Which is the first duty of every Christian maid.

  Phil went his ways, and thought no more of his letter, except as anartist thinks of a neatly touched-in sketch. His ways were not bad, butthey were not altogether good until they brought him across Dunmaya, thedaughter of a Rajput ex-Subadar-Major of our Native Army. The girl had astrain of Hill blood in her, and, like the Hill women, was not a purdahnashin. Where Phil met her, or how he heard of her, does not matter. Shewas a good girl and handsome, and, in her way, very clever and shrewd;though, of course, a little hard. It is to be remembered that Phil wasliving very comfortably, denying himself no small luxury, never puttingby an anna, very satisfied with himself and his good intentions, wasdropping all his English correspondents one by one, and beginning moreand more to look upon this land as his home. Some men fall this way; andthey are of no use afterwards. The climate where he was stationed wasgood, and it really did not seem to him that there was anything to goHome for.

  He did what many planters have done before him--that is to say, hemade up his mind to marry a Hill girl and settle down. He was seven andtwenty then, with a long life before him, but no spirit to go throughwith it. So he married Dunmaya by the forms of the English Church, andsome fellow-planters said he was a fool, and some said he was awise man. Dunmaya was a thoroughly honest girl, and, in spite of herreverence for an Englishman, had a reasonable estimate of her husband'sweaknesses. She managed him tenderly, and became, in less than a year, avery passable imitation of an English lady in dress and carriage. [Itis curious to think that a Hill man, after a lifetime's education, isa Hill man still; but a Hill woman can in six months master most of theways of her English sisters. There was a coolie woman once. But that isanother story.] Dunmaya dressed by preference in black and yellow, andlooked well.

  Meantime the letter lay in Agnes's desk, and now and again she wouldthink of poor resolute hard-working Phil among the cobras and tigers ofDarjiling, toiling in the vain hope that she might come back to him. Herhusband was worth ten Phils, except that he had rheumatism of theheart. Three years after he was married--and after he had tried Niceand Algeria for his complaint--he went to Bombay, where he died, and setAgnes free. Being a devout woman, she looked on his death and theplace of it, as a direct interposition of Providence, and when she hadrecovered from the shock, she took out and reread Phil's letter with the"etc., etc.," and the big dashes, and the little dashes, and kissed itseveral times. No one knew her in Bombay; she had her husband's income,which was a large one, and Phil was close at hand. It was wrong andimproper, of course, but she decided, as heroines do in novels, to findher old lover, to offer him her hand and her gold, and with him spendthe rest of her life in some spot far from unsympathetic souls. She satfor two months, alone in Watson's Hotel, elaborating this decision, andthe picture was a pretty one. Then she set out in search of Phil Garron,Assistant on a tea plantation with a more than usually unpronounceablename.

  . . . . . . . . .

  She found him. She spent a month over it, for his plantation was not inthe Darjiling district at all, but nearer Kangra. Phil was very littlealtered, and Dunmaya was very nice to her.

  Now the particular sin and shame of the whole business is that Phil, whoreally is not worth thinking of twice, was and is loved by Dunmaya,and mo
re than loved by Agnes, the whole of whose life he seems to havespoilt.

  Worst of all, Dunmaya is making a decent man of him; and he will beultimately saved from perdition through her training.

  Which is manifestly unfair.