Maud Diver

“ And Roy's response to the appeal of beauty was abnormally quick and keen. It could hardly be otherwise with the son of these two. He loved, with a fervour beyond his years, the clear pale oval of his mother's face; the coils of her dark hair, seen always through a film of softest muslin—moon-yellow or apple-blossom pink, or deep dark blue like the sky out of his window at night spangled with stars. He loved the glimmer of her jewels, the sheen and feel of her wonderful Indian silks, that seemed to smell like the big sandalwood box in the drawing-room. ”

“ Blest with vivacity, courage, and an ardent zest for Frontier soldiering, Desmond had rarely found life other than very good; but he had only proven the full measure of its goodness since his marriage with Honor Meredith. And the mouths brought increasing reliance on her comradeship; increasing insight into the depths and delicacies of a passion that was almost genius. His need of her was deeper now than it had been two years ago, when he had believed himself at the summit of desire. For a great love is like a great mountain-range. Each height scaled reveals farther heights beyond. ”

“ Tragedy on tragedy—loss of the Boy, dread of blindness, the shock of his own discovery of Evelyn's defection, and the awful fashion of her death—had so unsteadied and overwrought his strong brain that, even now, he could neither see nor think clearly in respect of those most terrible weeks of his life. Obsessed by an exaggerated sense of his own disloyalty to the wife who should never have been transplanted to such stony soil, he saw himself virtually her murderer, in the eyes of that God who was, for him, no vague abstraction but the most commanding reality of his consciousness. ”

“ And nowadays Beauty had become almost suspect. Cleverness, cynicism, sex and sensation—all had their votaries and their vogue. Mere Beauty, like Cinderella, was left sitting among the ashes of the past; and Roy—prince or no—was her devout lover.
To the son of Nevil and Lilámani, her clear call could never seem either a puritanical snare of the flesh or a delusion of the senses; but rather, a grace of the spirit, the joy of things seen detached from self-interest: the visible proof that love, not power, is the last word of Creation. ”

“ A Himalayan dawn is brief, as it is beautiful. One after one, the snow-peaks passed from the pallor of death to the glow of life. Then, sudden as an inspiration, the full splendour of morning broke, sublime as the eternity from which it came. Rapier-like shafts of light pierced the purple lengths of shadows that engulfed the valley. Threading their way through fir and deodar and pine, they flung all their radiant length across a rock-studded carpet of fir-needles and moss, and rested, like a caress, upon Quita's face and figure. ”

“ But with all his fine qualities of head and heart, Theo Desmond was little given to cool deliberation in the critical moments of life. This chance-met girl, fragile as a flower and delicately tinted as a piece of porcelain, full of enthusiasm for her new surroundings and of a delight half shy, half spontaneous in the companionship of a man so unlike the blasé, self-centred youths of her limited experience, had, for the time being, swept him off his feet. ”

“ The only instant realities were himself and Suráj and Chitor, and the silence of the sleeping earth, watched over by unsleeping stars. Within, and about him, hovered a stirring consciousness of ancient, unchanging India; utterly impervious to mere birds of passage from the West; veiled, elusive, yet almost hideously real. So real, just then, to Roy, that—for a few amazing moments—he was unaware that he rode through a city forsaken by man. Ghosts of houses and temples slid by on either side of him, as he spurred Suráj to a canter and made unerringly for the main palace. ”

“ As Lenox stood feasting his soul upon the splendour of it all, he knew that this was one of the great days of his life: that only Quita's inspiring presence was needed to crown the triumph of it. Even in the first glow of achievement, his heart turned instinctively to hers for sympathy and approval: and, could she have known it, her haunting fear that the mountains would prove too strong for her had crumbled into nothingness there and then. For if 'many waters cannot quench love,' neither can many mountains dwarf it. ”

“ For the first six weeks of the new year life flowed serenely enough in the bungalow on the mound.
Relieved of the greater part of her burden, and re-established in her husband's heart, Evelyn Desmond blossomed like a flower under the quickening influences of spring. Light natures develop best in sunshine: and so long as life asked no hard things of her, Evelyn could be admirably sweet-tempered and self-forgetful—even to the extent of curbing her weakness for superfluous hats and gloves and shoes. ”

“ For Roy's heart also knew the chill of secret disillusion. The ardour and thrill of his courtship seemed fatally to have suffered eclipse. When they were together, the lure of her was potent still. It was in the gaps between that he felt irked, more and more, by incipient criticism. In the course of that first talk, she had unwittingly stripped herself of the glamour that was more than half her charm; and at bottom his Eastern subconsciousness was jarred by her casual attitude to the sanctities of the man and woman relation, as instilled into him by his mother. ”

“ With a sigh that ended in a smile, he took up his pen again: wishing her back the moment she was out of reach. For beneath his surface equanimity, the man in him was still thrilling under the emotion and astonishment of absolute possession; under the hallowing sense of permanence that at once calmed and exalted the fever heat of passion.
But Quita returned to her studio feeling more out of tune than ever. It was her own foolish fault, of course, for interrupting him: a form of knowledge that has never yet made for consolation. ”

“ The measure of a man's worth is not to be found in a heroic impulse or a fine idea, but in the steadfast working out of either through weeks and months—when the glow has faded from the heights, when the inspiration of an illumined moment has passed into the unrecognised chivalry of daily life; and the three months following upon that crucial August evening put no light tax upon Desmond's staying power,—the power that is the corner-stone of all achievement. ”

“ For Lilámani Sinclair, with her Eastern mother-genius, had forged between herself and her first-born a link woven of the tenderest, most subtle fibres of heart and spirit; a link so vital, yet so unassertive, that it bid fair to stand the strain of absence, the test of time. So close a link with any human heart, while it makes for beauty, makes also for pain and perplexity,—as Roy was just realising to his dismay. ”

“ It has been well said that "an Englishman's house in India is not his castle, but a thousand better things—a casual ward, a convalescent home, a rest-house for the strayed traveller; and he himself is the steward of it merely." That this is no exaggeration but simple fact, Quita had already seen; and now, when she herself was called upon to obey the unwritten law of her husband's country and service, Lenox noted, with a throb of pride, that for all her artist's tendency to shrink from pain and suffering, she rose to the situation like a high-mettled horse to a fence. ”

“ Just to have him about the place again—his music, his big laugh, his radiant certainty that, in any and every circumstance, it was a splendid thing to be alive—would banish worries and lift her spirits sky-high. After the still, deep waters of her beloved Vinx—whose strain of remoteness had not been quite dispelled by marriage—and the starlit mysteries of Arúna and the intriguing complexities of Roy, a breath of Lance would be tonic as a breeze from the Hills. ”

“ One habit alone seriously hindered her. Her spirit of candour—which was less a habit than an elemental essence—chafed against the barrier between her and those she loved. For she now found herself constrained to avoid the too discerning eyes of Paul and Mrs Conolly, and, above all, of Theo himself. Men and women whose spirit hibernates more or less permanently in its temple of flesh have small knowledge of the joy of such wordless intercourse; such flashes of direct speech between soul and soul; but Honor felt the lack of it keenly. ”