Outside the palace gates where the tall Sikh guards stood in scarlet uniforms, David got into his hired carriage and was driven back to the hotel. He was sad and troubled, and the dusty dry air that hung over the city seemed a miasma of ill omen. He wished that he had not brought Olivia and the child to Bombay with him, but in Poona it had seemed a good thing to do. She needed a change and there had seemed to be no good reason against it. So they had come with an entourage of the ayah and a manservant to hold an umbrella over the child whom the ayah carried, and the few days in Bombay had done Olivia good.
This evening when he entered their rooms she was in gay spirits, dressed for dinner in a soft white muslin frock and her cheeks were even a little pink. The rooms were quiet.
“Ted is asleep?” he inquired.
She made a little face at him. “Theodore is asleep.”
They had named the baby Theodore, Gift of God, and she would not hear to a contraction.
“Wait until he gets into college on the football team,” he teased.
“I shall always call him Theodore,” she said decisively.
She put up her face for his kiss, but he warned her off. “Wait, dearest, until I have washed. We must always wash when we come in from the streets. Never forget, Olivia — promise me?”
“But I do,” she protested.
“That’s right.”
He soaped hands and face thoroughly at the china basin in the bathing room and then came back rubbing his face with a towel, She stood at the mirror, fastening a necklace about her neck.
“Pretty?” she inquired of his image in the mirror.
“Very pretty,” he replied. “What are they?”
“Crystals,” she said. “I got them today in the native city.”
He dropped the towel. “The native city, Olivia?”
“Yes, the clerk said the shops there were wonderful and they are.”
He checked the protest upon his lips. She should not have gone. He ought to have warned her. She was still new in India and she did not know the dangers of famine time. Then he decided not to frighten her. Epidemics came afterwards, and it was early in the season.
“Don’t go any more, Olivia,” he bade her, nevertheless. “It is better to stay away from crowds in famine time.”
“Very well, David. Certainly I will do as you say.”
“That’s right.”
He went to her then and gave her his usual kiss, and was glad that he had not frightened her. Her dark eyes were bright, and he saw as he had never seen before that she was more beautiful now than she had ever been.
“The crystals are very becoming,” he said. “Let’s go down to dinner.”
The plague crept into the great city of Bombay, unseen by the white men, for in the native quarters people bid the deaths of their own people. The city seemed as beautiful as ever, for the white men had learned long ago to look beyond the dying and the hungry whom they could not save. They looked to the mountain and the palm groves, to the many ships in the splendid harbor, to the great shops where the rich of every nation and people came and went. They looked to the past and to the future for they did not want to see the present. Hundreds of years before when a few English traders pushed into the harbor, Bombay had been a handful of islands with the sea racing between them, a small port, a cluster of houses and fishermen drying their half-decaying fish, but Englishmen had clung to it because the sands had silted into the harbor of Tapti, Surat had declined, and only the great natural harbor of Bombay remained. And during the hundreds of years between the day when the few Englishmen had come ashore and the day when the Governor-general sat in his palace on Malabar Point, the town grew into a place of mansions and towers, colleges and temples, a city of magnificence.
Yet India possessed it, in spite of the English, and in that year when the monsoons failed and famine fell, plague crept into the streets where no white men lived, and servants in the vast hotel who slept at night in the plague-ridden hovels of the native city came in by day to serve the white men, and they told no white men of the night.
When they had returned to Poona, Olivia one morning felt a headache, an intolerable pain and dizziness. She woke out of sleep and was surprised by an amazing weakness. David had already left his bed, and she tried to get up to go and see whether the baby was awake in the nest room. She could not lift the curtain of the mosquito netting and she fell back upon the pillows.
In his study upon his knees, David was suddenly aware of an urgent command within himself, wordless and yet too strong for refusal. He rose, compelled and unwilling, and found himself walking along the wide hall, still cool from the night, and into the room where an hour before he had left his wife sleeping. She was not sleeping now. Through the mist of the white netting she lay upon the pillows, her dark eyes wide and listless.
“Olivia,” he cried. “What is the matter?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I’m suddenly — weak. My head — it hurts terribly.”
He dashed aside the net and reached for her hands. They were hot and limp.
“I’ll get the doctor immediately — lie still, dearest.” She tried to smile, it was quite plain that she could do nothing but lie still. The lids drooped over her eyes and her face was white. He strode down the hall again to his study, jerked the bell rope for a servant and scribbled a note for the British doctor resident in the English hospital. “Take this chit,” he commanded the servant already waiting. “Take it to the hospital and fetch the doctor now.”
The man slipped out of the room like a swift shadow and was gone, and in less than an hour the doctor was there. David sat at Olivia’s side, waiting. She could not drink her tea, nor could she lift her head to swallow even water.
“Let me alone,” she begged in a gasping whisper.
So he sat there, holding her lifeless burning hand and when the doctor came in David beckoned, his lips pressed together.
The tall lean Englishman in his fresh white linen suit came to the bedside and made his examination. Olivia did not speak. When he asked her a question, she nodded, very slightly, the effort immense. Yes, the pain was unbearable, very hard to breathe because of this weakness, the giddiness so severe that she could not see his face.
The doctor straightened at last and drew the sheet over her, and she was too indifferent to care what he thought. He motioned to David to come into the hall.
“Have you been recently in Bombay?” he asked in his gravest voice.
“Last week,” David said.
“Was she in the native city?” the doctor demanded.
“Once,” David said.
“I fear it is bubonic plague. I heard only yesterday that it has broken out in Bombay — hundreds dying every day.”
David could not speak. Plague, the dreadful companion of famine, almost certain death, to reach for his beloved!
“What shall I do?” he cried.
“There is nothing to do, alas,” the doctor said. “We can only wait. I will send an English nurse. We shall know within forty-eight hours.”
Within forty-eight hours, while David neither slept nor ate, the chills of death descended. In Olivia’s slender body the inguinal buboes swelled. The doctor, feeling her soft groins, knew the fearful signs.
“You must prepare yourself,” he told David sternly.
David stood waiting by the bedside, where Olivia lay unconscious.
“She will not live through tomorrow,” the doctor said. “Nothing can save her.”
“I shall pray all night,” David said with dry lips.
“Do so, by all means,” the doctor said. He was too kind to tell the Christian that prayer might comfort the soul of the living but he did not believe that it could save the one doomed to die. He gave a few directions to the faithful middle-aged English nurse. The younger nurses would not take a case of plague but good Mrs. Fortescue went where she was sent.