Black is White 14

Black is White 14

Her warmest friend and admirer--one might almost say slave--was Frederic

Brood. She had transformed him. He was no longer the silent, moody youth

of other days, but an eager, impetuous playmate, whose principal object

in life was to amuse her. If anyone had tried to convince him that

he could have regarded Mrs Desmond’s dethronement and departure with

equanimity he would have protested with all the force at his command.

But that would have been a month ago!

 

When the time came for his old friend to leave the house over which she

had presided for ten of the gentlest years of his life, his heart was

sore and his throat was tight with pain, but he accepted the inevitable

with a resignation that once would have been impossible.

 

From the outset he realised that Mrs Desmond would have to go. At first

he rebelled within himself against the unspoken edict. Afterward he was

surprised to find that he regarded himself as selfish in even wishing

that she might stay, when it was so palpably evident that the situation

could not long remain pleasant for either Mrs Desmond or Mrs Brood. He

saw Lydia and her mother leave without the slightest doubt in his mind

that it was all for the best.

 

The Desmonds took a small apartment just around the corner from Brood’s

home, in a side street, and in the same block. Their windows looked down

into the courtyard in the rear of Brood’s home. Frederic assisted them

in putting their new home in order. It was great fun for Lydia and him,

this building of what they were pleased to call “a nest.”

 

Lydia may have seen the cloud in their sky, but he did not. To him the

world was bright and gladsome, without a shadow to mar its new beauty.

He was enthusiastic, eager, excited. She fell in with his spirit, but

her pleasure was shorn of some of its keenness by the odd notion that it

was not to endure.

 

He even dragged Yvonne around to the little flat to expatiate upon its

cosiness with visual proof to support his somewhat exaggerated claims.

Her lazy eyes took in the apartment at a glance and she was done with

it.

 

“It is very charming,” she said with her soft drawl. “Have you no

cigarettes, Lydia?”

 

The girl flushed and looked to Frederic for relief. He promptly produced

his own cigarettes. Yvonne lighted one and then stretched herself in the

Morris chair.

 

“You should learn to smoke,” she went on.

 

“Mother wouldn’t like me to smoke,” said Lydia rather bluntly.

 

A faint frown appeared on Frederic’s brow, only to disappear with

Yvonne’s low, infectious laugh.

 

“And Freddy doesn’t like you to smoke either, _aïe?_” she said.

 

“He may have changed his mind recently, Mrs Brood,” said the girl,

smiling so frankly that the edge was taken off of a rather direct

implication.

 

“I don’t mind women smoking,” put in Frederic hastily. “In fact,

I rather like it, the way Yvonne does it. It’s a very graceful

accomplishment.”

 

“But I am too clumsy to----” began Lydia.

 

“My dear,” interrupted the Parisienne, carelessly flicking the ash into

a _jardinière_ at her elbow, “it is very naughty to smoke, and clumsy

women never should be naughty. If you really feel clumsy, don’t, for my

sake, ever try to do anything wicked. There is nothing so distressing as

an awkward woman trying to be devilish.”

 

“Oh, Lydia couldn’t be devilish if she tried!” cried Frederic, with a

quick glance at the girl’s half-averted face.

 

“Don’t say that, Frederic,” she cried. “That’s as much as to say that I

_am_ clumsy and awkward.”

 

“And you are not,” said Yvonne decisively. “You are very pretty and

graceful and adorable, and I am sure you could be very wicked if you set

about to do it.”

 

“Thank you,” said Lydia dryly.

 

“By the way, this window looks almost directly down into our courtyard,”

said Yvonne abruptly. She was leaning on her elbow, looking out upon the

housetops below. “There is my balcony, Freddy. And one can almost look

into your father’s lair from where I sit.”

 

She drew back from the window suddenly, a passing look of fear in her

eyes. It was gone in a second, and would have passed unnoticed but

for the fact that Frederic was, as usual, watching her face with rapt

interest. He caught the curious transition and involuntarily glanced

below.

 

The heavy curtains in the window of his father’s retreat were

drawn apart, and the dark face of Ranjab, the Hindu, was plainly

distinguishable.

 

He was looking up at the window in which Mrs Brood was sitting. Although

Frederic was far above, he could see the gleaming white of the man’s

eyes. The curtains fell quickly together and the gaunt, brown face was

gone.

 

An odd feeling of uneasiness came over the young man. It was the feeling

of one who suddenly realises that he is being spied upon. He could

not account for the faint chill that ran through his body, leaving him

strangely cold and drear.

 

What was the meaning of that intense scrutiny from his father’s window?

Was Ranjab alone in the room? How did he happen to expose himself at

the very instant Yvonne appeared in the window above? These and other

questions raced through Frederic’s puzzled brain. Out of them grew a

queer, almost uncanny feeling that the Hindu had called to her in the

still, mysterious voice of the East, and, although no sound had been

uttered, she had heard as plainly as if he actually had shouted to her

across the intervening space.

 

He recalled the tales of the old men, in which they spoke of the

unaccountable swiftness with which news leaped across the unpopulated

deserts, far in advance of any material means of transmission. Along the

reaches of the Nile and in the jungles of India, weird instances of the

astonishing projection of thought across vast spaces were constantly

being reported. There was magic in the air. News travelled faster than

the swiftest steed, even faster than the engines of man, into the most

remote places, and yet there was no visible, tangible force behind the

remarkable achievement.

 

His father had said more than once that the Hindu and the Egyptian

possessed the power to be in two distinct places at the same time. He

was wont to establish his theory by reciting the single instance of a

sick dragoman who had been left behind in a village on the edge of the

desert, with no means of crossing the vast stretch. And yet, when the

caravan reached its destination after a long but record-breaking

march, the man himself met them on the outskirts of the town with the

astonishing report that he was quite well and strong after a two weeks’

rest in his own house just inside of the city gates.

 

How he had passed them on the desert, and how he had reached his home a

fortnight ahead of them, was one of the greatest mysteries James Brood

had ever sought to unravel. The man’s presence there created no surprise

among the native members of the caravan. To them it was a most ordinary

thing.

 

Again, in the depths of an Indian jungle Brood expressed the wish that

he had brought with him a certain rifle he had left at home. Not a man

left the camp, and yet at the end of the week a strange Hindu appeared

with the rifle, having traversed several hundred miles of practically

unexplored country in the time that would have been required to get the

message to Lahore by horse alone.

 

James Brood, a sensible man, was a firm believer in magic.

 

This much Frederic knew of Ranjab: if James Brood needed him, no matter

what the hour or the conditions, the man appeared before him as if out

of nowhere and in response to no audible summons.

 

Was there, then, between these two, the beautiful Yvonne and the silent

Hindu, a voiceless pact that defied the will or understanding of either?

 

He had not failed to note a tendency on her part to avoid the Hindu as

much as possible. She even confessed to an uncanny dread of the man, but

could not explain the feeling. Once she requested her husband to dismiss

the faithful fellow. When he demanded the reason, however, she could

only reply that she did not like the man and would feel happier if he

were sent away. Brood refused, and from that hour her fear of the Hindu

increased.

 

Now she was speaking in a nervous hurried manner to Lydia, her back

toward the window. In the middle of a sentence she suddenly got up from

the chair and moved swiftly to the opposite side of the room, where she

sat down again as far as possible from the window.

 

Frederic found himself watching her face with curious interest. All the

time she was speaking her eyes were fixed on the window. It was as

if she expected something to appear there. There was no mistaking

the __EXPRESSION__. After studying her face in silence for a few minutes,

Frederic himself experienced an irresistible impulse to turn toward the

window. He half expected to see the Hindu’s face there, looking in upon

them, a perfectly absurd notion when he remembered that they were at

least one hundred feet above the ground.

 

Presently she arose to go. No, she could not wait for Mrs Desmond’s

return.

 

“It is charming here, Lydia,” she said, surveying the little

sitting-room with eyes that sought the window again and again in furtive

darts. “Frederic must bring me here often. We shall have cosy times

here, we three. It is so convenient, too, for you, my dear. You have

only to walk around the corner, and there you are--at your place of business, as the men would say.”