FullReads

She sprang like a child to meet him at his entrance, declaring the entertainment at an end; and the crowd soon melted away.

Then, somewhat grimly, Merryon took his wife to task.

She sat on the arm of his chair with her arms round his neck, swinging one leg while she listened. She was very docile, punctuating his remarks with soft kisses dropped inconsequently on the top of his head. When he ended, she slipped cosily down upon his knee and promised to be good.

It was not a very serious promise, and it was plainly proffered in a spirit of propitiation. Merryon pursued the matter no further, but he was vaguely dissatisfied. He had a feeling that she regarded his objections as the outcome of eccentric prudishness, or at the best an unreasonable fit of jealousy. She smoothed him down as though he had been a spoilt child, her own attitude supremely unabashed; and though he could not be angry with her, an uneasy sense of doubt pressed upon him. Utterly his own as he knew her to be, yet dimly, intangibly, he began to wonder what her outlook on life could be, how she regarded the tie that bound them. It was impossible to reason seriously with her. She floated out of his reach at the first touch.

So that curious honeymoon of theirs continued, love and passion crudely mingled, union without knowledge, flaming worship and blind possession.

“You are happy?” Merryon asked her once.

To which she made ardent answer, “Always happy in your arms, O king.”

And Merryon was happy also, though, looking back later, it seemed to him that he snatched his happiness on the very edge of the pit, and that even at the time he must have been half-aware of it.

When, a month after her coming, the scourge of the Plains caught her, as was inevitable, he felt as if his new-found kingdom had begun already to depart from him.

For a few days Puck was seriously ill with malaria. She came through it with marvellous resolution, nursed by Merryon and his bearer, the general factotum of the establishment.

But it left her painfully weak and thin, and the colonel became again furiously insistent that she should leave the Plains till the rains were over.

Merryon, curiously enough, did not insist. Only one evening he took the little wasted body into his arms and begged her–actually begged her–to consent to go.

“I shall be with you for the first fortnight,” he said. “It won’t be more than a six-weeks’ separation.”

“Six weeks!” she protested, piteously.

“Perhaps less,” he said. “I may be able to come to you for a day or two in the middle. Say you will go–and stay, sweetheart! Set my mind at rest!”

“But, darling, you may be ill. A thousand things may happen. And I couldn’t go back to Shamkura. I couldn’t!” said Puck, almost crying, clinging fast around his neck.

“But why not?” he questioned, gently. “Weren’t they kind to you there? Weren’t you happy?”

She clung faster. “Happy, Billikins! With that hateful Captain Silvester lying in wait to–to make love to me! I didn’t tell you before. But that–that was why I left.”

He frowned above her head. “You ought to have told me before, Puck.”

She trembled in his arms. “It didn’t seem to matter when once I’d got away; and I knew it would only make you cross.”

“How did he make love to you?” demanded Merryon.

He tried to see her face, but she hid it resolutely against him. “Don’t, Billikins! It doesn’t matter now.”

“It does matter,” he said, sternly.

Puck was silent.

Merryon continued inexorably. “I suppose it was your own fault. You led him on.”

She gave a little nervous laugh against his breast. “I never meant to, Billikins. I–I don’t much like men–as a rule.”

“You manage to conceal that fact very successfully,” he said.

She laughed again rather piteously. “You don’t know me,” she whispered. “I’m not–like that–all through.”

“I hope not,” said Merryon, severely.

She turned her face slightly upwards and snuggled it into his neck. “You used not to mind,” she said.