Venus in India by Charles Devereaux Read Free Book Online Page A

succeed and get his greens! Poor chap!'
    'Oh! Do you! Well! We were all saying that it was a dammed shame, because we had made up our minds that you were surely in her good graces yourself, and we thought it mean of Searle to try and cut in whilst you were out! ha! ha! ha!'
    'Oh!' I said quietly, 'but I am a married man, major, and have just left my wife, and do not go in for that sort of thing! So, as far as I am concerned, Major Searle is welcome to the lady if he can persuade her to grant him her favours.'
    'Well! But Searle is a married man himself, Devereaux!'
    'Oh! I dare say! I don't mean to imply that a married man is impervious to the charms of other women because he is married. I am not straitlaced, and I dare say should be quite as liable as anybody else to have a woman who was not my wife, but you know I have not been married long enough to be tired of my wife, and I have not been long enough away from her to feel any inclination to commit adultery yet!'
    'Well! Searle is married - but he's a brute! Yet I somehow pity the poor devil too! I don't know how it is, but he and his wife, a devilish fine woman, a perfect Venus in her way, don't get on altogether well; in fact she has left him!'
    'Oh! my! do you say so?'
    'Yes! Now mind you, Devereaux, you must not give me as your authority, but I can tell you that he treated that poor woman like hell, half killing her with a blow from the side of his hairbrush; devilish nearly smashed her skull, you know, and after that she left him, and went and set up on her own account at Ramsket.'
    I am sure my dear readers are amused at my assuming the air of a thoroughly moral young husband still contented with the breasts of his spouse, as Solomon, I think it is, tells us we ought to be, but of course I was not going to amuse my new friend, or indeed any others, with tales which somehow spread so wonderfully quickly, and in rapidly widening circles, until they reach the ears of those we would least wish to hear them. Really and truly, my heart and conscious pricked me when this conversation brought to mind my beloved little Louie, and I thought of her in her lovely bed, perhaps weeping in sad silence as she prayed for the safety, welfare and quick return home of one whom she loved so dearly, who made her joyous by day and gave her rapturous fun at night, her husband, and the darling father of her angel baby girl. But alas! the spirit is willing and the flesh weak, as I have remarked before, and the weakness of the flesh exceeds the strength of the spirit all too often.
    But the conversation was bearing directly on a subject which was becoming interesting to me since I had seen Searle and heard Lizzie's indignant remark that his wife was a regular whore, whose price for her charms was, however, uncommonly high. I did not mind what my fat major said about Searle's designs on Lizzie that evening, because Lizzie would have to have been a most unaccountably stupid deceiver if she had merely expressed abhorrence of him to blind me! No, I felt certain the abhorrence was real and true, and I had no fear that I should find that she had afforded him a retreat, either hospitable or the reverse, in her sweet cunt when I got home to her again.
    'How do you mean "set up on her own account", major?' said I.
    'Oh! hum! well! look here, bend your head a little nearer to me! I don't want to talk too loudly! Well! she is - that is, any fellow almost, who cares to give her a cool five hundred rupees, can have her.'
    'What!' said I in well-affected incredulous tones, 'you want to persuade me that an officer's wife, a lady like Mrs Searle must be, has actually done such a monstrous, not to say such an idiotic thing, as not only to leave her husband, a thing I cannot understand, but to set up as a whore, and in such a place as Ramsket? Surely, major, you are mistaken! Remember! we are told to believe nothing we hear and only half of what we see!'
    'I know! I know!' said he, still as calmly as if he were