"That's a cruel thing to say, dearest!" he cried kissing her unresponsive lips at last, in the hopes of melting her hardness. "It is only that you are in a mood to be unjust, that you say so. You know I am happiest with you."
"This is a cruel country which I shall hate to the end of my days," she returned miserably. "It is trying at every turn to rob me of my little baby."
Meredith winced almost as though he had been struck. It was not the first time that she had expressed disgust for her life in India, which gave them their living, and every time her words gained in feeling. Early in the summer he had sent her to the hills because of an episode with a snake that had unnerved her and imperilled her condition as an expectant mother. He had not forgotten that her first arrival at the Station had synchronised with an outbreak of cholera, so virulent, that half the community of Europeans among whom she was to live were demoralised. It was a crying shame that Life should be so perverse. He yearned for her to settle down and take kindly to Station ways and doings, but fate eternally intervened. Muktiarbad was a merry little station, full of friendly souls eager to accept the youthful bride as a social leader for her husband's sake, he being the most popular of men.
Meredith was aware of his own popularity and enjoyed it as a healthy-minded individual usually does when success has crowned his efforts to govern a large District with sympathy and tact. But already the young wife and mother was pining for "home," and was declaring that the India he loved was a "cruel country," which she would hate to the end of her days. How should he be able to pin her down to his side in a land she detested and feared? She was too young and uninformed to appreciate his position in the Government and her possibilities as a Bara Memsahib; and too delicately nurtured to endure the rough and tumble of life far from towns and cities, where money could not buy immunity from inconvenience and climatic ills.
He had expected, as many another husband of a very young wife, to mould her ideas to fit his own; instead, his peace of mind was being steadily whittled away.
"There is not even any ice to be had in this God-forsaken spot!" his wife's voice was saying helplessly.
"Damnation!" he swore under his breath, enraged that the servants should have supplied him at the cost of the child; for he recalled the very acceptable iced beer he had drunk in the jungles after a dangerous exploit that had exhausted his energies and reduced him to a perspiring rag of humanity, even though it was autumn.
The urgent need to find a scapegoat to suffer for this miserable muddle sent him outside with a stride and malignant intentions at heart. Never again while he toured with his family would he drink iced stimulants, however damnably hot it was in the sun.
"What can I say?" whined the bearer in indignant sympathy, cleverly averting the storm he saw ready to descend on the head of the guilty. "Such unusual heat for this time of the year, and that swine, the carter, who is now many miles distant, left the ice-box on the sunny side of the tent! Without sense is he, and possessed of a mind equal only to that of a sheep. So much shade to be had, yet of a perversity must he commit this brainless act! What can I do? Had this pair of hands not been incessantly occupied in performing urgent tasks for the comfort of the Memsahib, I might have cast eyes on the packing-case earlier, and myself have removed it to safety. But alas! how much can one poor servant do among so many who are idle and indifferent? So there it lay out of sight and the water running freely through the joins till there was one tank, and my bedding beside it, floating! Tonight I am without bedding, but what of that? With the child ill, will any one care to sleep?" He cast a triumphant eye around on a semicircle of admiring fellow-servants who were envying him his resourcefulness and powers of invention.
"Who sent ice with me into the jungles?" Meredith asked fiercely.