Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy by Rudyard Kipling Page A

papers on his writing table. His first words were not very encouraging; but I was too far spent to be much moved by them.
    ‘Here’s Miss Kitty has sent back your letters. You corresponded a good deal, you young people. Here’s a packet thatlooks like a ring, and a cheerful sort of a note from Mannering Papa, which I’ve taken the liberty of reading and burning. The old gentleman’s not pleased with you.’
    ‘And Kitty?’ I asked dully.
    ‘Rather more drawn than her father from what she says. By the same token you must have been letting out any number of queer reminiscences just before I met you. Says that a man who would have behaved to a woman as you did to Mrs Wessington ought to kill himself out of sheer pity for his kind. She’s a hot-headed little virago, your mash. Will have it too that you were suffering from D.T. when that row on the Jakko road turned up. Says she’ll die before she ever speaks to you again.’
    I groaned and turned over on the other side.
    ‘Now you’ve got your choice, my friend. This engagement has to be broken off; and the Mannerings don’t want to be too hard on you. Was it broken through D.T or epileptic fits? Sorry I can’t offer you a better exchange unless you’d prefer hereditary insanity. Say the Word and I’ll tell ’em it’s fits. All Simla knows about that scene on the Ladies’ Mile. Come! I’ll give you five minutes to think over it.’
    During those five minutes I believe that I explored thoroughly the lowest circles of the Inferno which it is permitted man to tread on earth. And at the same time I myself was watching myself faltering through the dark labyrinths of doubt, misery, and utter despair. I wondered, as Heatherlegh in his chair might have wondered, which dreadful alternative I should adopt. Presently I heard myself answering in a voice that I hardly recognised:
    ‘They’re confoundedly particular about morality in these parts. Give ’em fits, Heatherlegh, and my love. Now let me sleep a bit longer.’
    Then my two selves joined, and it was only I (half crazed, devil-driven I) that tossed in my bed, tracing step by step the history of the past month.
    ‘But I am in Simla,’ I kept repeating to myself. ‘I, Jack Pansay, am in Simla, and there are no ghosts here. It’s unreasonable of that woman to pretend there are. Whycouldn’t Agnes have left me alone? I never did her any harm. It might just as well have been me as Agnes. Only I’d never come back on purpose to kill her. Why can’t I be left alone – left alone and happy?’
    It was high noon when I first awoke: and the sun was low in the sky before I slept – slept as the tortured criminal sleeps on his rack, too worn to feel further pain.
    Next day I could not leave my bed. Heatherlegh told me in the morning that he had received an answer from Mr Mannering, and that, thanks to his (Heatherlegh’s) friendly offices, the story of my affliction had travelled through the length and breadth of Simla, where I was on all sides much pitied.
    ‘And that’s rather more than you deserve,’ he concluded pleasantly, ‘though the Lord knows you’ve been going through a pretty severe mill. Never mind; we’ll cure you yet, you perverse phenomenon.’
    I declined firmly to be cured. ‘You’ve been much too good to me already, old man,’ said I, ‘but I don’t think I need trouble you further.’
    In my heart I knew that nothing Heatherlegh could do would lighten the burden that had been laid upon me.
    With that knowledge came also a sense of hopeless, impotent rebellion against the unreasonableness of it all. There were scores of men no better than I whose punishments had at least been reserved for another world; and I felt that it was bitterly, cruelly unfair that I alone should have been singled out for so hideous a fate. This mood would in time give place to another where it seemed that the rickshaw and I were the only realities in a world of shadows; that Kitty was a ghost; that Mannering,