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The Safety Curtain
by
But when the end of the fortnight came, and with it the first break in the rains, little Mrs. Merryon went smiling forth and returned his call.
“Are you still being cross with Billikins?” she asked him, while her hand lay engagingly in his. “Because it’s really not his fault, you know. If he sent me to Kamchatka, I should still come back.”
“You wouldn’t if you belonged to me,” said Colonel Davenant, with a grudging smile.
She laughed and shook her head. “Perhaps I shouldn’t–not unless I loved you as dearly as I love Billikins. But I think you needn’t be cross about it. I’m quite well. If you don’t believe me, you can look at my tongue.”
She shot it out impudently, still laughing. And the colonel suddenly and paternally patted her cheek.
“You’re a very naughty girl,” he said. “But I suppose we shall have to make the best of you. Only, for Heaven’s sake, don’t go and get ill on the quiet! If you begin to feel queer, send for the doctor at the outset!”
He abandoned his attitude of disapproval towards Merryon after that interview, realizing possibly its injustice. He even declared in a letter to his wife that Mrs. Merryon was an engaging chit, with a will of her own that threatened to rule them all! Mrs. Davenant pursed her lips somewhat over the assertion, and remarked that Major Merryon’s wife was plainly more at home with men than women. Captain Silvester was so openly out of temper over her absence that it was evident she had been “leading him on with utter heartlessness,” and now, it seemed, she meant to have the whole mess at her beck and call.
As a matter of fact, Puck saw much more of the mess than she desired. It became the fashion among the younger officers to drop into the Merryons’ bungalow at the end of the evening. Amusements were scarce, and Puck was a vigorous antidote to boredom. She always sparkled in society, and she was too sweet-natured to snub “the boys,” as she called them. The smile of welcome was ever ready on her little, thin white face, the quick jest on her nimble tongue.
“We mustn’t be piggy just because we are happy,” she said to her husband once. “How are they to know we are having our honeymoon?” And then she nestled close to him, whispering, “It’s quite the best honeymoon any woman ever had.”
To which he could make but the one reply, pressing her to his heart and kissing the red lips that mocked so merrily when the world was looking on.
She had become the hub of his existence, and day by day he watched her anxiously, grasping his happiness with a feeling that it was too great to last.
The rains set in in earnest, and the reek of the Plains rose like an evil miasma to the turbid heavens. The atmosphere was as the interior of a steaming cauldron. Great toadstools spread like a loathsome disease over the compound. Fever was rife in the camp. Mosquitoes buzzed incessantly everywhere, and rats began to take refuge in the bungalow. Puck was privately terrified at rats, but she smothered her terror in her husband’s presence and maintained a smiling front. They laid down poison for the rats, who died horribly in inaccessible places, making her wonder if they were not almost preferable alive. And then one night she discovered a small snake coiled in a corner of her bedroom.
She fled to Merryon in horror, and he and the khitmutgar slew the creature. But Puck’s nerves were on edge from that day forward. She went through agonies of cold fear whenever she was left alone, and she feverishly encouraged the subalterns to visit her during her husband’s absence on duty.
He raised no objection till he one day returned unexpectedly to find her dancing a hornpipe for the benefit of a small, admiring crowd to whom she had been administering tea.