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.dt His Honour, and a Lady, by Mrs. Everard Cotes
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Transcriber’s Note:
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This version of the text cannot represent certain typographical
effects. Italics are delimited with the ‘_’ character as _italic_.
The few instances of blackletter font in the front matter use
the ‘~’ as a delimiter.
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Please consult the #note:endnote# at the end of this text for
a discussion of any textual issues encountered in its preparation.
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HIS HONOUR, AND A LADY
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.bn 002.png
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BOOKS BY MRS. EVERARD COTES
(SARA JEANNETTE DUNCAN).
.nf-
.hr 15%
His Honour, and a Lady.
.ti 4
Illustrated. 12mo. Cloth, $1.50.
.sp 1
The Story of Sonny Sahib.
.ti 4
Illustrated. 12mo. Cloth, $1.00.
.sp 1
Vernon’s Aunt.
.ti 4
With many Illustrations. 12mo. Cloth, $1.25.
.sp 1
A Daughter of To-Day.
.ti 4
A Novel. 12mo. Cloth, $1.50.
.sp 1
A Social Departure.
.in 4
How Orthodocia and I Went Round the
World by Ourselves. With 111 Illustrations
by F. H. Townsend. 12mo. Paper, 75 cents;
cloth, $1.75.
.in
.sp 1
An American Girl in London.
.in 4
With 80 Illustrations by F. H. Townsend. 12mo.
Paper, 75 cents; cloth, $1.50.
.in
.sp 1
The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib.
.in 4
With 37 Illustrations by F. H. Townsend. 12mo.
Cloth, $1.50.
.in
.hr 25%
.ce
New York: D. APPLETON & CO., 72 Fifth Avenue.
.dv-
.bn 003.png
.bn 004.png
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The situation made its voiceless demand.
(See page #33#.)
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.bn 005.png
.sp 4
.h1
HIS HONOUR, AND | A LADY
.nf c
BY
MRS. EVERARD COTES
(SARA JEANNETTE DUNCAN)
AUTHOR OF A SOCIAL DEPARTURE, AN AMERICAN GIRL IN LONDON,
A DAUGHTER OF TO-DAY, VERNON’S AUNT,
THE STORY OF SONNY SAHIB, ETC.
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NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1896
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.sp 8
.nf c
Copyright, 1895, 1896,
By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.
.nf-
.sp 8
.bn 007.png
.pn v
.sp 4
.h2
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
.hr 20%
.sp 2
.ta l:48 r:14
| FACING
PAGE
The situation made its voiceless demand | Frontispiece
“She seems to be sufficiently entertained” | #21:i020a#
There was a moment’s pause | #83:i082a#
Notwithstanding, it was gay enough | #150:i150a#
“What do I know about the speech”! | #215:i214a#
She drove back | #305:i304a#
.ta-
.bn 008.png
.bn 009.png
.pn 1
.pi
.sp 4
.ce
HIS HONOUR, AND A LADY.
.sp 4
.h2
CHAPTER I.
.sp 2
“The Sahib walks!” said Ram Prasannad,
who dusted the office books and papers, to
Bundal Singh the messenger, who wore a long
red coat with a badge of office, and went about
the business of the Queen-Empress on his two
lean brown legs.
“What talk is that?” Bundal Singh shifted
his betel quid to the other cheek and lunged
upon his feet. This in itself was something.
When one sits habitually upon one’s heels the
process of getting up is not undertaken lightly.
The men looked out together between the
whitewashed stucco pillars of the long verandah
that interposed between the Commissioner’s
clerks and the glare and publicity of the
outer world of Hassimabad. Overhead, in a
.bn 010.png
.pn +1
pipal tree that threw sharp-cut patterns of its
heart-shaped leaves about their feet, a crow
stretched its grey-black throat in strenuous
caws, since it was ten o’clock in the morning
and there was no reason to keep silence.
Farther away a chorus of other crows smote
the sunlight, and from the direction of the
bazar came a murmur of the life there, borne
higher now and then in the wailing voice of
some hawker of sweetmeats. Nevertheless there
was a boundless stillness, a stillness that might
have been commanded. The prodigal sun intensified
it, and the trees stood in it, a red and dusty
road wound through it, and the figure of a man,
walking quickly down the road, seemed to be a
concentration of it.
“That signifies,” continued Ram Prasannad,
without emotion, “news that is either very good
or very bad. The Government lât had but
arrived, the sahib opened one letter only—which
is now with him—and in a breath he was gone,
walking, though the horse was still fast between
the shafts. Myself, I think the news is good, for
my cousin—he is a writing baboo in the Home
.bn 011.png
.pn +1
Office, dost thou understand, thou, runner of
errands!—has sent word to me that the sahib is
much in favour with the Burra Lat, and that it
would be well to be faithful to him.”
“I will go swiftly after with an umbrella, and
from his countenance it will appear,” remarked
Bundal Singh; “and look thou, worthy one, if
that son of mud, Lal Beg, the grain dealer, comes
again in my absence to try to make petition to
the sahib, and brings a pice less than one rupee
to me, do thou refuse him admission.”
Bundal Singh ran after his master, as he said.
As John Church walked rapidly, and the habitual
pace of a Queen’s messenger in red and gold is
a dignified walk, the umbrella was tendered with
a devoted loss of wind.
“It may be that your honour will take harm
from the sun,” Bundal Singh suggested, with
the privilege all the Commissioner’s people felt
permitted to use. The Commissioner liked it—could
be depended upon to appreciate any little
savour of personal devotion to him, even if it
took the form of a liberty. He had not a servant
who was unaware of this or failed to presume
.bn 012.png
.pn +1
upon it, in his place and degree. This one got a
nod of acknowledgment as his master took the
opened umbrella, and observed, as he fell behind,
that the sahib was too much preoccupied to
carry it straight. He went meditatively back
to Ram Prasannad in the verandah, who said,
“Well?”
“Simply it does not appear. The sahib’s
forehead had twenty wrinkles, and his mind
was a thousand miles hence. Yet it was as
if he had lately smiled and would smile again.
What will be, will be. Lal Beg has not been
here?”
John Church walked steadily on, with his
near-sighted eyes fixed always upon the wide
space of sunlit road, its red dust thick-printed
with bare feet and hoofs, that lay in front of
him—seeing nothing, literally, but the way home.
He met no one who knew him except people
from the bazar, who regarded their vizier with
serious wonder as they salaamed, the men who
sat upon low bamboo carts and urged, hand upon
flank, the peaceful-eyed cattle yoked to them,
turning to stare as they jogged indolently past.
.bn 013.png
.pn +1
A brown pariah, curled up in the middle of the
road, lifted his long snout in lazy apology as
Church stepped round him, trusting the sense
that told him it would not be necessary to get
out of the way. As he passed the last low wall,
mossy and discoloured, that divided its brilliantly
tangled garden from the highway, and turned in
at its own gate, he caught himself out of his
abstraction and threw up his head. He entered
his wife’s drawing-room considerately, and a ray
of light, slipping through the curtains and past
the azaleas and across the cool duskness of the
place, fell on his spectacles and exaggerated the
triumph in his face.
The lady, who sat at the other end of the
room writing, rose as her husband came into it,
and stepped forward softly to meet him. If you
had known her you would have noticed a slight
elation in her step that was not usual, and made
it more graceful, if anything, than it commonly
was.
“I think I know what you have come to tell
me,” she said. Her voice matched her personality
so perfectly that it might have suggested
.bn 014.png
.pn +1
her, to a few people, in her darkened drawing-room,
as its perfume would betray some sweet-smelling
thing in the evening. Not to John
Church. “I think I know,” she said, as he
hesitated for words that would not show extravagant
or undignified gratification. “But tell
me yourself. It will be a pleasure.”
“That Sir Griffiths Spence goes on eighteen
months’ sick leave, and——”
“And that you are appointed to officiate for
him. Yes.”
“Somebody has written?”
“Yes—Mr. Ancram.”
His wife had come close to him, and he
noticed that she was holding out her hands in
her impulse of congratulation. He took one of
them—it was all he felt the occasion required—and
shook it lamely. She dropped the other
with a little quick turn of her head and a dash
of amusement at her own expense in the gentle
gravity of her expression. “Do sit down,” she
said, almost as if he had been a visitor, “and
tell me all about it.” She dragged a comfortable
chair forward out of its relation with a Burmese
.bn 015.png
.pn +1
carved table, some pots of ferns and a screen, and
sat down herself opposite, leaning forward in a
little pose of expectancy. Church placed himself
on the edge of it, grasping his hat with
both hands between his knees.
“I must apologise for my boots,” he said,
looking down: “I walked over. I am very
dusty.”
“What does it matter? You are King of
Bengal!”
“Acting King.”
“It is the same thing—or it will be. Sir
Griffiths retires altogether in two years—Lord
Scansleigh evidently intends you to succeed
him.” The lady spoke with obvious repression,
but her gray eyes and the warm whiteness of
her oval face seemed to have caught into themselves
all the light and shadow of the room.
“Perhaps—perhaps. You always invest in
the future at a premium, Judith. I don’t intend
to think about that.”
Such an anticipation, based on his own worth,
seemed to him unwarrantable, almost indecent.
“I do,” she said, wilfully ignoring the clouding
.bn 016.png
.pn +1
of his face. “There is so much to think
about. First the pay—almost ten thousand
rupees a month—and we are poor. It may be
a material consideration, but I don’t mind confessing
that the prospect of never having to cut
the khansamah appeals to me. We shall have a
palace and a park to live in, with a guard at the
gates, and two outriders with swords to follow
our carriage. We shall live in Calcutta, where
there are trams and theatres and shops and
people. The place carries knighthood if you
are confirmed in it, and you will be Sir John
Church—that gratifies the snob that is latent in
me because I am a woman, John.” (She paused
and glanced at his face, which had grown almost
morose.) “Best of all,” she added lightly,
“as Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal you will be
practically sole ruler of eighty millions of people.
You will be free to carry out your own theories,
and to undertake reforms—any number of reforms!
Mr. Ancram says,” she went on, after a
moment’s hesitation, “that the man and the
opportunity have come together.”
John Church blushed, through his beard
.bn 017.png
.pn +1
which was gray, and over the top of his head
which was bald, but his look lightened.
“Ancram will be one of my secretaries,” he
said. “Does he speak at all—does he mention
the way it has been taken in Calcutta?”
Mrs. Church went to her writing-table and
came back with the letter. It was luxuriously
written, in a rapid hand as full of curves and
angles as a woman’s, and covered, from “Dear
Lady” to “Always yours sincerely,” several
broad-margined sheets.
“I think he does,” she said, deliberately
searching the pages. “Yes: ‘Church was not
thought precisely in the running—you are so
remote in Hassimabad, and his work has always
been so unostentatious—and there was some
surprise when the news came, but no cavil. It
is known that the Viceroy has been looking
almost with tears for a man who would be strong
enough to redeem a few of Sir Griffiths’ mistakes
if possible while he is away—he has been,
as you know, ludicrously weak with the natives—and
Church’s handling of that religious uproar
you had a year ago has not been forgotten. I
.bn 018.png
.pn +1
need not expatiate upon the pleasure your friends
feel, but it may gratify you to know that the
official mob is less ready with criticism of His
Excellency’s choice than usual.’”
John Church listened with the look of putting
his satisfaction under constraint. He listened in
the official manner, as one who has many things
to hear, with his head bent forward and toward
his wife, and his eyes consideringly upon the
floor.
“I am glad of that,” he said nervously when
she had finished—“I am glad of that. There is
a great deal to be done in Bengal, and matters
will be simplified if they recognise it.“
“I think you would find a great deal to do
anywhere, John,” remarked Mrs. Church. It
could almost be said that she spoke kindly, and
a sensitive observer with a proper estimate of her
husband might have found this irritating. During
the little while that followed, however, as
they talked, in the warmth of this unexpected
gratification, of what his work had been as a
Commissioner, and what it might be as a Lieutenant-Governor,
it would have been evident
.bn 019.png
.pn +1
even to an observer who was not sensitive, that
here they touched a high-water mark of their
intercourse, a climax in the cordiality of their
mutual understanding.
“By the way,” said John Church, getting
up to go, “when is Ancram to be married?”
“I don’t know!” Mrs. Church threw some
interest into the words. Her inflection said
that she was surprised that she didn’t know.
“He only mentions Miss Daye to call her a
‘study in femininity,’ which looks as if he might
be submitting to a protracted process of education
at her hands. Certainly not soon, I should
think.”
“Ancram must be close on forty, with good
pay, good position, good prospects. He
shouldn’t put it off any longer: a man has no
business to grow old alone in this country.
He deteriorates.”
Church pulled himself together with a shake—he
was a loose-hung creature—and put a nervous
hand up to his necktie. Then he pulled
down his cuffs, considered his hat with the
.bn 020.png
.pn +1
effect of making quite sure that there was nothing
more to say, and turned to go.
“You might send me over something,” he
said, glancing at his watch. “I won’t be able
to come back to breakfast. Already I’ve lost
three-quarters of an hour from work. Government
doesn’t pay me for that. You are pleased,
then?” he added, looking round at her in a
half shamefaced way from the door.
Mrs. Church had returned to the writing-table,
and had again taken up her pen. She
leaned back in her chair and lifted her delicate
chin with a smile that had custom and patience
in it.
“Very pleased indeed,” she said; and he
went away. The intelligent observer, again,
would have wondered how he refrained from
going back and kissing her. Perhaps the custom
and the patience in her smile would have
lent themselves to the explanation. At all
events, he went away.
He was forty-two, exactly double her age,
when he married Judith Strange, eight years
before, in Stoneborough, a small manufacturing
.bn 021.png
.pn +1
town in the north of England, where her father
was a Nonconformist minister. He was her
opportunity, and she had taken him, with private
congratulation that she could respect him
and private qualms as to whether her respect
was her crucial test of him—considered in the
light of an opportunity. Not in any sordid
sense; she would be more inclined perhaps to
apologise for herself than I am to apologise for
her. But with an inordinately hungry capacity
for life she had the narrowest conditions to live
in. She knew by intuition that the world was
full of colour and passion, and when one is tormented
with this sort of knowledge it becomes
more than ever grievous to inhabit one of its
small, dull, grimy blind alleys, with the single
anticipation of enduring to a smoke-blackened
old age, like one of Stoneborough’s lesser chimneys.
There was nothing ideal about John
Church except his honesty,—already he stooped,
already he was grey, sallow and serious, with
the slenderest interest in questions that could
not express their utility in unquestionable facts,—but
when he asked her to marry him, the
.bn 022.png
.pn +1
wall at the end of the alley fell down, and a
breeze stole in from the far East, with a vision
of palms and pomegranates. She accepted him
for the sake of her imagination, wishing profoundly
that he was not so much like her father,
with what her mother thought almost improper
promptitude; and for a long time, although he
still stood outside it, her imagination loyally rewarded
her. She felt the East to her fingertips,
and her mere physical life there became
a thing of vivid experience, to be valued for
itself. If her husband confounded this joy in
her expansion with the orthodox happiness of a
devoted wife, it cannot be said that he was
particularly to blame for his mistake, for numbers
of other people made it also. And when,
after eight years of his companionship, and that
of the sunburned policeman, the anæmic magistrate,
the agreeable doctor, their wives, the odd
colonel, and the stray subalterns that constituted
society in the stations they lived in, she began
to show a little lassitude of spirit, he put it
down not unnaturally to the climate, and wished
he could conscientiously take a few months’
.bn 023.png
.pn +1
leave, since nothing would induce her to go to
England without him. By this time India had
become a resource, India that lay all about her,
glowing, profuse, mysterious, fascinating, a place
in which she felt that she had no part, could
never have any part, but that of a spectator.
The gesture of a fakir, the red masses of the
gold-mohur trees against the blue intensity of
the sky, the heavy sweetness of the evening
wind, the soft colour and curves of the homeward
driven cattle, the little naked babies with
their jingling anklets in the bazar—she had begun
to turn to these things seeking their gift
of pleasure jealously, consciously thankful that,
in spite of the Amusement Club, she could
never be altogether bored.
John Church went back to work with his
satisfaction sweetened by the fact that his wife
had told him that she was very pleased indeed,
while Mrs. Church answered the Honourable
Mr. Lewis Ancram’s letter.
“I have been making my own acquaintance
this morning,” she said among other things,
“as an ambitious woman. It is intoxicating,
.bn 024.png
.pn +1
after this idle, sun-filled, wondering life, with the
single supreme care that John does not wear
ragged collars to church—as a Commissioner
he ought to be extravagant in collars—to be
confronted with something to assume and carry
out, a part to play, with all India looking on.
Don’t imagine a lofty intention on my part to
inspire my husband’s Resolutions. I assure you
I see myself differently. Perhaps, after all, it
is the foolish anticipation of my state and splendour
that has excited my vain imagination as
much as anything. Already, prospectively, I
murmur lame nothings into the ear of the
Viceroy as he takes me down to dinner! But
I am preposterously delighted. To-morrow is
Sunday—I have an irreverent desire for the
prayers of all the churches.”
.bn 025.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
CHAPTER II.
.sp 2
“Here you are at last!” remarked Mrs.
Daye with vivacity, taking the three long, pronounced
and rustling steps which she took so
very well, toward the last comer to her dinner
party, who made his leisurely entrance between
the portières, pocketing his handkerchief. “Don’t
say you have been to church,” she went on,
holding out a condoning hand, “for none of us
will believe you.”
Although Mr. Ancram’s lips curved back
over his rather prominent teeth in a narrow
smile as he put up his eyeglass and looked
down at his hostess, Mrs. Daye felt the levity
fade out of her expression: she had to put compulsion
on herself to keep it in her face. It
was as if she, his prospective mother-in-law, had
taken the least of liberties with Mr. Ancram.
“Does the only road to forgiveness lie
.bn 026.png
.pn +1
through the church gate?” he asked. His voice
was high and agreeable; it expressed discrimination;
his tone implied that, if the occasion had
required it, he could have said something much
cleverer easily—an implication no one who
knew him would have found unwarrantable.
“The padres say it does, as a rule, Ancram,”
put in Colonel Daye. “In this case it lies
through the dining-room door. Will you take
my wife in?”
In a corner of the room, which she might
have chosen for its warm obscurity, Rhoda Daye
watched with curious scrutiny the lightest detail
of Mr. Lewis Ancram’s behaviour. An elderly
gentleman, with pulpy red cheeks and an amplitude
of white waistcoat, stood beside her chair,
swaying out of the perpendicular with well-bred
rigidity now and then, in tentative efforts at conversation;
to which she replied, “Really?” and
“Yes, I know,” while her eyes fixed themselves
upon Ancram’s face, and her little white features
gleamed immobile under the halo which the tall
lamp behind her made with her fuzz of light-brown
hair. “Mother’s respect for him is simply
.bn 027.png
.pn +1
outrageous,” she reflected, as she assured the
elderly gentleman that even for Calcutta the heat
was really extraordinary, considering that they
were in December. “I wonder—supposing he
had not made love to me—if I could have had
as much!” She did not answer herself definitely—not
from any lack of candour, but because
the question presented difficulties. She slipped
past him presently on the arm of the elderly
gentleman, as Ancram still stood with bent head
talking to her mother. His eyes sought hers
with a significance that flattered her—there was
no time for further greeting—and the bow with
which he returned her enigmatic little nod singled
her out for consideration. As she went in
to dinner the nape of Mr. Lewis Ancram’s neck
and the parting of his hair remained with her as
pictorial facts.
Mrs. Daye always gave composite dinner-parties,
and this was one of them. “If you ask
nobody but military people to meet each other,”
she was in the habit of saying, “you hear nothing
but the price of chargers and the prospects
of the Staff Corps. If you make your list up of
.bn 028.png
.pn +1
civilians, the conversation consists of abuse of
their official superiors and the infamous conduct
of the Secretary of State about the rupee.” On
this occasion Mrs. Daye had reason to anticipate
that the price of chargers would be varied by
the grievances of the Civil Service, and that a
touring Member of Parliament would participate
in the discussion who knew nothing about either;
and she felt that her blend would be successful.
She could give herself up to the somewhat fearful
enjoyment she experienced in Mr. Ancram’s
society. Mrs. Daye was convinced that nobody
appreciated Mr. Ancram more subtly than she
did. She saw a great deal of jealousy of him in
Calcutta society, whereas she was wont to declare
that, for her part, she found nothing extraordinary
in the way he had got in—a man of
his brains, you know! And if Calcutta resented
this imputation upon its own brains in ever so
slight a degree, Mrs. Daye saw therein more
jealousy of the fact that her family circle was
about to receive him. When it had once
opened for that purpose and closed again, Mrs.
Daye hoped vaguely that she would be sustained
.bn 029.png
.bn 030.png
.bn 031.png
.pn +1
for the new and exacting duty of living
up to Mr. Ancram.
.il id=i020a fn=i_020a.jpg w=550px ew=90%
.ca “She seems to be sufficiently entertained.”
“Please look at Rhoda,” she begged, in a conversational
buzz that her blend had induced.
Mr. Ancram looked, deliberately, but with
appreciation. “She seems to be sufficiently
entertained,” he said.
“Oh, she is! She’s got a globe-trotter.
Haven’t you found out that Rhoda simply loves
globe-trotters? She declares that she renews
her youth in them.”
“Her first impressions, I suppose she means?”
“Oh, as to what she means——”
Mrs. Daye broke off irresolutely, and thoughtfully
conveyed a minute piece of roll to her lips.
The minute piece of roll was Mr. Ancram’s
opportunity to complete Mrs. Daye’s suggestion
of a certain interesting ambiguity in her
daughter; but he did not take it. He continued
to look attentively at Miss Daye, who appeared,
as he said, to be sufficiently entertained, under
circumstances which seemed to him inadequate.
Her traveller was talking emphatically, with
gestures of elderly dogmatism, and she was
.bn 032.png
.pn +1
deferentially listening, an amusement behind her
eyes with which the Chief Secretary to the Government
at Bengal was not altogether unfamiliar.
He had seen it there before, on occasions when
there was apparently nothing to explain it.
“It would be satisfactory to see her eating
her dinner,” he remarked, with what Mrs. Daye
felt to be too slight a degree of solicitude. She
was obliged to remind herself that at thirty-seven
a man was apt to take these things more
as matters of fact, especially—and there was a
double comfort in this reflection—a man already
well up in the Secretariat and known to be
ambitious. “Is it possible,” Mr. Ancram went
on, somewhat absently, “that these are Calcutta
roses? You must have a very clever gardener.”
“No”—and Mrs. Daye pitched her voice
with a gentle definiteness that made what she
was saying interesting all round the table—“they
came from the Viceroy’s place at Barrackpore.
Lady Emily sent them to me: so sweet of
her, I thought! I always think it particularly
kind when people in that position trouble themselves
.bn 033.png
.pn +1
about one; they must have so many demands
upon their time.”
The effect could not have been better.
Everybody looked at the roses with an interest
that might almost be described as respectful;
and Mrs. Delaine, whose husband was Captain
Delaine of the Durham Rifles, said that she
would have known them for Their Excellencies’
roses anywhere—they always did the table with
that kind for the Thursday dinners at Government
House—she had never known them to
use any other.
Mrs. St. George, whose husband was the
Presidency Magistrate, found this interesting.
“Do they really?” she exclaimed. “I’ve often
wondered what those big Thursday affairs were
like. Fancy—we’ve been in Calcutta through
three cold weathers now, and have never been
asked to anything but little private dinners at
Government House—not more than eight or ten,
you know!”
“Don’t you prefer that?” asked Mrs. Delaine,
taking her quenching with noble equanimity.
.bn 034.png
.pn +1
“Well, of course one sees more of them,”
Mrs. St. George admitted. “The last time we
were there, about a fortnight ago, I had a long
chat with Lady Emily. She is a sweet thing,
and perfectly wild at being out of the school-room!”
Mrs. St. George added that it was a
charming family, so well brought up; and this
seemed to be a matter of special congratulation
as affecting the domestic arrangements of a
Viceroy. There was a warmth and an emphasis
in the corroboration that arose which almost
established relations of intimacy between Their
Excellencies and Mrs. Daye’s dinner-party. Mrs.
Daye’s daughter listened in her absorbed, noting
manner; and when the elderly gentleman
remarked with a certain solemnity that they
were talking of the Scansleighs, he supposed,
the smile with which she said “Evidently”
was more pronounced than he could have had
any right to expect.
“They seem to be delightful people,” continued
the elderly gentleman, earnestly.
“I daresay,” Miss Daye replied, with grave
deliberation. “They’re very decorative,” she
.bn 035.png
.pn +1
added absently. “That’s a purely Indian vegetable,
Mr. Pond. Rather sticky, and without the
ghost of a flavour; but you ought to try it, as
an experience, don’t you think?”
It occurred to Mrs. Daye sometimes that Mr.
Ancram was unreasonably difficult to entertain,
even for a Chief Secretary. It occurred to her
more forcibly than usual on this particular evening,
and it was almost with trepidation that she
produced the trump card on which she had
been relying to provoke a lively suit of amiabilities.
She produced it awkwardly too; there
was always a slight awkwardness, irritating to so
habile a lady, in her manner of addressing Mr.
Ancram, owing to her confessed and painful inability
to call him “Lewis”—yet. “Oh,” she
said finally, “I haven’t congratulated you on
your ‘Modern Influence of the Vedic Books.’
I assure you, in spite of its being in blue paper
covers and printed by Government I went
through it with the greatest interest. And there
were no pictures either,” Mrs. Daye added, with
the ingenuousness which often clings to Anglo-Indian
ladies somewhat late in life.
.bn 036.png
.pn +1
Mr. Ancram was occupied for the moment in
scrutinising the contents of a dish which a servant
patiently presented to his left elbow. It
was an ornate and mottled conception visible
through a mass of brown jelly, and the man
looked disappointed when so important a guest,
after perceptible deliberation, decisively removed
his eyeglass and shook his head. Mrs. Daye was
in the act of reminding herself of the probably
impaired digestion of a Chief Secretary, when
he seemed suddenly recalled to the fact that she
had spoken.
“Really?” he said, looking fully at her, with
a smile that had many qualities of compensation.
“My dear Mrs. Daye, that was doing a good
deal for friendship, wasn’t it?”
His eyes were certainly blue and expressive
when he allowed them to be, his hostess thought,
and he had the straight, thin, well-indicated nose
which she liked, and a sensitive mouth for a
man. His work as part of the great intelligent
managing machine of the Government of India
overimpressed itself upon the stamp of scholarship
Oxford had left on his face, which had the
.bn 037.png
.pn +1
pallor of Bengal, with fatigued lines about the
eyes, lines that suggested to Mr. Ancram’s
friends the constant reproach of over-exertion.
A light moustache, sufficiently well-curled and
worldly, effectually prevented any tinge of asceticism
which might otherwise have been
characteristic, and placed Mr. Ancram among
those who discussed Meredith, had an expensive
taste in handicrafts, and subscribed to the Figaro
Salon. His secretary’s stoop was not a pronounced
and local curve, rather a general thrusting
forward of his personality which was fitting
enough in a scientific investigator; and his long,
nervous, white hands spoke of a multitude of
well-phrased Resolutions. It was ridiculous,
Mrs. Daye thought, that with so agreeable a
manner he should still convey the impression
that one’s interest in the Vedic Books was not
of the least importance. It must be that she
was over-sensitive. But she would be piqued
notwithstanding. Pique, when one is plump and
knows how to hold oneself, is more effective than
almost any other attitude.
“You are exactly like all the rest! You
.bn 038.png
.pn +1
think that no woman can possibly care to read
anything but novels! Now, as a matter of fact
I am devoted to things like Vedic Books. If I
had nothing else to do I should dig and delve
in the archaic from morning till night.”
“The implication being,” returned Mr. Ancram
sweetly, “that I have nothing else to
do.”
Mrs. Daye compressed her lips in the manner
of one whose patience is at an end. “It
would serve you perfectly right,” she exclaimed,
“if I didn’t tell you what a long review of
it I saw the other day in one of the home
papers.”
Ancram looked up with an almost imperceptible
accession of interest.
“How nice!” he said lightly. “A fellow out
here always feels himself in luck when his odds
and ends get taken up at home. You don’t happen
to remember the paper—or the date?”
“I’m almost sure it was the Times,” Mrs.
Daye replied, with rather an accentuation of rejoiceful
zeal; “but Richard can tell you. It was
he who drew my attention to the notice.”
.bn 039.png
.pn +1
Mr. Ancram’s eyebrows underwent a slight
contraction. “Notice” did not seem to be a
felicitous word.
“Oh, thanks,” he said. “Never mind; one
generally comes across those things sooner or
later.”
“I say, Ancram,” put in Mr. St. George, who
had been listening on Mrs. Daye’s left, “you
Asiatic Society fellows won’t get as much out
of Church for your investigations as you did out
of Spence.”
Ancram looked fixedly at a porcelain cherub
that moored a boatful of pink-and-white confectionery
to the nearest bank of the Viceregal
roses. “Sir Griffiths was certainly generous,”
he said. “He gave Pierson a quarter of a lakh,
for instance, to get his ethnological statistics
together. It was easy to persuade him to recognise
the value of these things.”
“It won’t be easy to get this man to recognise
it,” persisted St. George. “He’s the sort of
fellow who likes sanitation better than Sanscrit.
He’s got a great scheme on for improving the
village water-supply for Bengal, and I hear he
.bn 040.png
.pn +1
wants to reorganise the vaccination business.
Great man for the people!”
“Wants to spend every blessed pice on the
bloomin’ ryot,” remarked Captain Delaine, with
humorous resentment.
“Let us hope the people will be grateful,” said
Ancram vaguely.
“They won’t, you know,” remarked Rhoda
Daye to Mr. Pond. “They’ll never know. They
are like the cattle—they plough and eat and
sleep; and if a tenth of them die of cholera from
bad water, they say it was written upon their
foreheads; and if Government cleans the tanks
and the tenth are spared, they say it is a good
year and the gods are favourable.”
“Dear me!” said Mr. Pond: “that’s very
interesting.”
“Isn’t it? And there’s lots more of it—all in
the Calcutta newspapers, Mr. Pond: you should
read them if you wish to be informed.” And
Mr. Pond thought that an excellent idea.
When a Lieutenant-Governor drops into the
conversational vortex of a Calcutta dinner-party
he circles on indefinitely. The measure of his
.bn 041.png
.pn +1
hospitality, the nature of his tastes, the direction
of his policy, his quality as a master, and the
measure of his popularity, are only a few of the
heads under which he is discussed; while his
wife is made the most of separately, with equal
thoroughness and precision. Just before Mrs.
Daye looked smilingly at Mrs. St. George, and
the ladies flocked away, some one asked who
Mrs. Church’s friends were in Calcutta, anyway:
she seemed to know hardly any one person more
than another—a delightful impartiality, the lady
added, of course, after Lady Spence’s favouritism.
The remark fell lightly enough upon the
air, but Lewis Ancram did not let it pass. He
looked at nobody in particular, but into space:
it was a way he had when he let fall anything
definite.
“Well,” he said, “I hope I may claim to be
one. My pretension dates back five years—I
used to know them in Kaligurh. I fancy Mrs.
Church will be appreciated in Calcutta. She is
that combination which is so much less rare than
it used to be—a woman who is as fine as she is
clever, and as clever as she is charming.”
.bn 042.png
.pn +1
“With all due deference to Mr. Ancram’s
opinion,” remarked Mrs. Daye publicly, with
one hand upon the banister, as the ladies went
up to the drawing-room, “I should not call Mrs.
Church a fine woman. She’s much too slender—really
almost thin!”
“My dear mummie,” exclaimed Rhoda, as
Mrs. St. George expressed her entire concurrence,
“don’t be stupid! He didn’t mean that.”
Later Ancram stepped out of one of the open
French windows and found her alone on the
broad verandah, where orchids hung from the
roof and big plants in pots made a spiky gloom
in the corners. A tank in the garden glistened
motionless below; the heavy fronds of a clump
of sago palms waved up and down uncertainly
in the moonlight. Now and then in the moist,
soft air the scent of some hidden temple tree
made itself felt. A cluster of huts to the right
in the street they looked down upon stood half-concealed
in a hanging blue cloud of smoke and
fog. Far away in the suburbs the wailing cry
of the jackals rose and fell and recommenced;
nearer the drub-drubbing of a tom-tom announced
.bn 043.png
.pn +1
that somewhere in the bazar they kept
a marriage festival. But for themselves and the
moonlight and the shadow of the creeper round
the pillars, the verandah was quite empty, and
through the windows came a song of Mrs.
Delaine’s about love’s little hour. The situation
made its voiceless demand, and neither of them
were unconscious of it. Nevertheless he, lighting
a cigarette, asked her if she would not come
in and hear the music; and she said no—she
liked it better there; whereat they both kept
the silence that was necessary for the appreciation
of Mrs. Delaine’s song. When it was over,
Rhoda’s terrier, Buzz, came out with inquiring
cordiality, and they talked of the growth of his
accomplishments since Ancram had given him
to her; and then, as if it were a development of
the subject, Rhoda said:
“Mrs. Church has a very interesting face,
don’t you think?”
“Very,” Ancram replied unhesitatingly.
“She looks as if she cared for beautiful things.
Not only pictures and things, but beautiful conceptions—ideas,
characteristics.”
.bn 044.png
.pn +1
“I understand,” Ancram returned: “she
does.”
There was a pause, while they listened to the
wail of the jackals, which had grown wild and
high and tumultuous. As it died away, Rhoda
looked up with a little smile.
“I like that,” she said; “it is about the only
thing out here that is quite irrepressible. And—you
knew her well at Kaligurh?”
“I think I may say I did,” Ancram replied,
tossing the end of his cigarette down among
the hibiscus bushes. “My dear girl, you must
come in. There is nothing like a seductive
moonlight night in India to give one fever.”
“I congratulate you,” said Miss Daye—and
her tone had a defiance which she did not intend,
though one could not say that she was unaware
of its cynicism—“I congratulate you upon knowing
her well. It is always an advantage to
know the wife of the Lieutenant-Governor well.
The most delightful things come of it—Commissionerships,
and all sorts of things. I hope
you will make her understand the importance
.bn 045.png
.pn +1
of the Vedic Books in their bearing upon the
modern problems of government.”
“You are always asking me to make acknowledgments—you
want almost too many; but since
it amuses you, I don’t mind.” Rhoda noted the
little gleam in his eyes that contradicted this.
“Sanscrit is to me now exactly what Greek
was at Oxford—a stepping-stone, and nothing
more. One must do something to distinguish
oneself from the herd; and in India, thank
fortune, it’s easy enough. There’s an enormous
field, and next to nobody to beat. Bless you,
a Commissariat Colonel can give himself an
aureole of scientific discovery out here if he
cares to try! If I hadn’t taken up Sanscrit
and Hinduism, I should have gone in for palæontology,
or conchology, or folk-lore, or ferns.
Anything does: only the less other people know
about it the better; so I took Sanscrit.” A
combined suggestion of humour and candour
gradually accumulated in Mr. Ancram’s sentences,
which came to a climax when he added,
“You don’t think it very original to discover
that!”
.bn 046.png
.pn +1
“And the result of being distinguished from
the herd?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Well, they
don’t send one to administer the Andamans or
Lower Burmah,” he said. “They conserve
one’s intellectual achievements to adorn social
centres of some importance, which is more
agreeable. And then, if a valuable post falls
vacant, one is not considered disqualified for
it by being a little wiser than other people.
Come now—there’s a very big confession for
you! But you mustn’t tell. We scientists
must take ourselves with awful seriousness if
we want to be impressive. That’s the part that
bores one.”
Mr. Ancram smiled down at his betrothed
with distinct good-humour. He was under the
impression that he had spontaneously given his
soul an airing—an impression he was fond of.
She listened, amused that she could evoke so
much, and returned to the thing he had
evaded.
“Between the Vedic Books and Mrs. Church,”
she said, “our future seems assured.”
.bn 047.png
.pn +1
Ancram’s soul retired again, and shut the
door with a click.
“That is quite a false note,” he said coolly:
“Mrs. Church will have nothing to do with
it.”
.bn 048.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
CHAPTER III.
.sp 2
It became evident very soon after Miss
Rhoda Daye’s appearance in Calcutta that she
was not precisely like the other young ladies in
sailor hats and cambric blouses who arrived at
the same time. For one superficial thing, anybody
could see that she had less colour; and
this her mother mourned openly—a girl depended
so entirely for the first season on her
colour. As other differences became obvious
Mrs. Daye had other regrets, one of them being
that Rhoda had been permitted so absolutely to
fashion her own education. Mrs. Daye had not
foreseen one trivial result of this, which was
that her daughter, believing herself devoid of
any special talent, refused to ornament herself
with any special accomplishment. This, in Mrs.
Daye’s opinion, was carrying self-depreciation
and reverence for achievement and all that sort
.bn 049.png
.pn +1
of thing a great deal too far: a girl had no right
to expect her parents to present her to the
world in a state of artistic nudity. It was not
in the nature of compensation that she understood
the situation with the Amir and the ambitions
of the National Congress; such things
were almost unmentionable in Calcutta society.
And it was certainly in the nature of aggravation
that she showed, after the first month of it, an
inexplicable indifference to every social opportunity
but that of looking on. Miss Daye had an
undoubted talent for looking on; and she would
often exercise it—mutely, motionlessly, half hidden
behind a pillar at a ball, or abandoned in a
corner after dinner—until her mother was mortified
enough to take her home. Presently it
appeared that she had looked on sufficiently to
know her ground. She made her valuation of
society; she picked out the half-dozen Anglo-Indian
types; it may be presumed that she
classified her parents. She still looked on, but
with less concentration: she began to talk. She
developed a liking for the society of elderly
gentlemen of eminence, and an abhorrence for
.bn 050.png
.pn +1
that of their wives, which was considered of
doubtful propriety, until the Head of the Foreign
Office once congratulated himself openly
upon sitting next her at dinner. After which
she was regarded with indulgence, it was said
in corners that she must be clever, subalterns
avoided her, and her mother, taking her cue
unerringly, figuratively threw up her hands and
asked Heaven why she of all people should be
given a fin-de-siècle daughter.
Privately Mrs. Daye tried to make herself
believe, in the manner of the Parisian playwright,
that a succès d’estime was infinitely to be preferred
to the plaudits of the mob. I need hardly
say that she was wholly successful in doing so,
when Mr. Lewis Ancram contributed to the
balance in favour of this opinion. Mr. Ancram
was observing too: he observed in this case
from shorter and shorter distances, and finally
allowed himself to be charmed by what he saw.
Perhaps that is not putting it quite strongly
enough. He really encouraged himself to be
thus charmed. He was of those who find in the
automatic monotony of the Indian social machine,
.bn 051.png
.pn +1
with its unvarying individual—a machine,
he was fond of saying, the wheels of which are
kept oiled with the essence of British Philistinism—a
burden and a complaint. In London he
would have lived with one foot in Mayfair and
the other in the Strand; and there had been
times when he talked of the necessity of chaining
his ambition before his eyes to prevent his
making the choice of a career over again,
though it must be said that this violent proceeding
was carried out rather as a solace to
his defrauded capacity for culture than in view
of any real danger. He had been accustomed
to take the annually fresh young ladies in straw
hats and cambric blouses who appeared in the
cold weather much as he took the inevitable
functions at Government House—to be politely
avoided, if possible; if not, to be submitted to
with the grace which might be expected from
a person holding his office and drawing his
emoluments. When he found that Rhoda Daye
was likely to break up the surface of his blank
indifference to evening parties he fostered the
probability. Among all the young ladies in
.bn 052.png
.pn +1
sailor hats and cambric blouses he saw his single
chance for experience, interest, sensation;
and he availed himself of it with an accumulated
energy which Miss Daye found stimulating
enough to induce her to exert herself, to a
certain extent, reciprocally. She was not interested
in the Hon. Mr. Lewis Ancram because of
his reputation: other men had reputations—reputations
almost as big as their paybills—who did
not excite her imagination in the smallest degree.
It would be easy to multiply accounts upon
which Mr. Ancram did not interest Miss Daye,
but it is not clear that any result would be arrived
at that way, and the fact remains that
she was interested. From this quiet point—she
was entirely aware of its advantage—she contemplated
Mr. Ancram’s gradual advance along
the lines of attraction with a feeling very like
satisfaction. She had only to contemplate it.
Ancram contributed his own impetus, and
reached the point where he believed his affections
involved with an artistic shock which he
had anticipated for weeks as quite divinely enjoyable.
She behaved amusingly when they
.bn 053.png
.pn +1
were engaged: she made a little comedy of it,
would be coaxed to no confessions and only
one vow—that, as they were to go through life
together, she would try always to be agreeable.
If she had private questionings and secret alarms,
she hid them with intrepidity; and if it seemed
to her to be anything ridiculous that the wayward
god should present himself behind the
careful countenance and the well-starched shirt-front
of early middle-age, holding an eyeglass
in attenuated fingers, and mutely implying that
he had been bored for years, she did not betray
her impression. The thrall of their engagement
made no change in her; she continued to be
the same demure, slender creature, who said
unexpected things, that she had been before.
That he had covetable new privileges did not
seem to make much difference; her chief value
was still that of a clever acquaintance. She
would grow more expensive in time, he thought
vaguely; but several months had passed, as we
have seen, without this result. On the other
hand, there had been occasions when he fancied
that she deliberately disassociated herself
.bn 054.png
.pn +1
from him in that favourite pursuit of observation,
in order to obtain a point of view which
should command certain intellectual privacies
of his. He wondered whether she would take
this liberty with greater freedom when they were
one and indivisible; and, while he felt it absurd
to object, he wished she would be a little more
communicative about what she saw.
They were to be married in March, when
Ancram would take a year’s furlough, and she
would help him to lave his stiffened powers of
artistic enjoyment in the beauties of the Parthenon
and the inspirations of the Viennese
galleries and the charms of Como and Maggiore.
They talked a great deal of the satisfaction they
expected to realise in this way. They went over
it in detail, realising again and again that it
must represent to him compensation for years of
aridity and to her a store against the future
likely to be drawn upon largely. Besides, it
was a topic upon which they were quite sure of
finding mutual understanding, even mutual congratulation—an
excellent topic.
Meanwhile Ancram lived with Philip Doyle
.bn 055.png
.pn +1
in Hungerford Street under the ordinary circumstances
which govern Calcutta bachelors.
Doyle was a barrister. He stood, in Calcutta,
upon his ability and his individuality, and as
these had been observed to place him in familiar
relations with Heads of Departments, it may be
gathered that they gave him a sufficient elevation.
People called him a “strong” man because
he refused their invitations to dinner, but the
statement might have had a more intelligent
basis and been equally true. It would have
surprised him immensely if he could have
weighed the value of his own opinions, or observed
the trouble which men who appropriated
them took to give them a tinge of originality.
He was a survival of an older school, certainly—people
were right in saying that. He had
preserved a courtliness of manner and a sincerity
of behaviour which suggested an Anglo-India
that is mostly lying under pillars and pyramids
in rank Calcutta cemeteries now. He was hospitable
and select—so much of both that he
often experienced ridiculous annoyance at having
asked men to dinner who were essentially unpalatable
.bn 056.png
.pn +1
to him. His sensitiveness to qualities
in personal contact was so great as to be a
conspicuous indication, to the discerning eye, of
Lewis Ancram’s unbounded tact.
Circumstances had thrown the men under one
roof, and even if the younger of them had not
made himself so thoroughly agreeable, it
would have been difficult to alter the arrangement.
It could never be said of Lewis Ancram that
he did not choose his friends with taste, and in
this case his discrimination had a foundation of
respect which he was in the habit of freely
mentioning. His admiration of Doyle was
generous and frank, so generous and frank that
one might have suspected a virtue in the expression
of it. Notwithstanding this implication, it
was entirely sincere, though he would occasionally
qualify it.
“I often tell Doyle,” he said once to Rhoda,
“that his independence is purely a matter of circumstance.
If he had the official yoke upon his
neck he would kow-tow like the rest of us.”
“I don’t believe that,” she answered quickly.
.bn 057.png
.pn +1
“Ah well, now that I think of it I don’t
particularly believe it myself. Doyle’s the salt
of the earth anyhow. He makes it just possible
for officials like myself to swallow officialdom.”
“Did it ever occur to you,” she asked
slowly, “to wonder what he thinks of
you?”
“Oh, I daresay he likes me well enough.
Irishmen never go in for analysing their friends.
At all events we live together, and there are
no rows.”
They were driving, and the dogcart flew past
the ships along the Strand—Ancram liked a fast
horse—for a few minutes in silence. Then she
had another question.
“Have you succeeded in persuading Mr.
Doyle to—what do the newspapers say?—support
you at the altar, yet?”
“No, confound him. He says it would be
preposterous at his age—he’s not a year older
than I am! I wonder if he expects me to ask
Baby Bramble, or one of those little boys in the
Buffs! Anyway it won’t be Doyle, for he goes
.bn 058.png
.pn +1
to England, end of February—to get out of it, I
believe.”
“I’m not sorry,” Rhoda answered; but it
would have been difficult for her to explain, at
the moment, why she was not sorry.
.bn 059.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
CHAPTER IV.
.sp 2
“I don’t mind telling you,” said Philip
Doyle, knocking the ashes out of his pipe,
“that, personally, His Acting Honour represents
to me a number of objectionable things.
He is a Radical, and a Low Churchman, and
a Particularist. He’s that objectionable ethical
mixture, a compound of petty virtues. He believes
this earth was created to give him an
atmosphere to do his duty in; and he does it
with the invincible courage of short-sightedness
combined with the notion that the ultimate
court of appeal for eighty million Bengalis
should be his precious Methodist conscience.
But the brute’s honest, and if he insists on
putting this University foolishness of his
through, I’m sorry for him. He’s a dead man,
politically, the day it is announced.”
“He is,” replied Ancram, concentrating his
.bn 060.png
.pn +1
attention on a match and the end of his cigar.
“There’s—no doubt—about that.”
The two men were smoking after dinner,
with the table and a couple of decanters between
them. Roses drooped over the bowl
of Cutch silver that gleamed in the middle
of the empty cloth, and a lemon leaf or two
floated in the finger-glass at Ancram’s elbow.
He threw the match into it, and looked
across at Doyle with his cigar between his
teeth in the manner which invites further discussion.
“In point of political morality I suppose he’s
right enough——”
“He generally is,” Ancram interrupted.
“He’s got a scent for political morality keen
enough to upset every form of Government
known to the nineteenth century.”
“But they see political morality through another
pair of spectacles in England. To withdraw
State aid from education anywhere at this
end of the century is as impracticable as it
would be to deprive the British workman of
his vote. It’s retrogressive, and this is an age
.bn 061.png
.pn +1
which will admit anything except a mistake of
its own.”
“He doesn’t intend to withdraw State aid
from education. He means to spend the money
on technical schools.”
“A benevolent intention. But it won’t make
the case any better with the Secretary of State.
He will say that it ought to be done without
damaging the sacred cause of higher culture.”
“Damn the sacred cause of higher culture!”
replied Ancram, with an unruffled countenance.
“What has it done out here? Filled every
sweeper’s son of them with an ambition to sit
on an office stool and be a gentleman!—created
by thousands a starveling class that find nothing
to do but swell mass-meetings on the Maidan
and talk sedition that gets telegraphed from
Peshawur to Cape Comorin. I advertised for
a baboo the other day, and had four hundred
applications—fifteen rupees a month, poor
devils! But the Dayes were a fortnight in
getting a decent cook on twenty.”
“Bentinck should have thought of that; it’s
too late now. You can’t bestow a boon on the
.bn 062.png
.pn +1
masses in a spirit of progressiveness and take it
away sixty years later in a spirit of prudence.
It’s decent enough of Church to be willing to
bear the consequences of somebody else’s blunder;
but blunders of that kind have got to take
their place in the world’s formation and let the
ages retrieve them. It’s the only way.”
“Oh, I agree with you. Church is an ass:
he ought not to attempt it.”
“Why do you fellows let him?”
Ancram looked in Doyle’s direction as he
answered—looked near him, fixed his eyes, with
an effect of taking a view at the subject round a
corner, upon the other man’s tobacco-jar. The
trick annoyed Doyle; he often wished it were
the sort of thing one could speak about.
“Nobody is less amenable to reason,” he said,
“than the man who wants to hit his head
against a stone wall, especially if he thinks the
world will benefit by his inconvenience. And,
to make matters worse, Church has complicated
the thing with an idea of his duty toward the
people at home who send out the missionaries.
He doesn’t think it exactly according to modern
.bn 063.png
.pn +1
ethics that they should take up collections in
village churches to provide the salvation of the
higher mathematics for the sons of fat bunnias
in the bazar—who could very well afford to pay
for it themselves.”
“He can’t help that.”
Ancram finished his claret. “I believe he
has some notion of advertising it. And after
he has eliminated the missionary who teaches
the Georgics instead of the Gospels, and devoted
the educational grants to turning the
gentle Hindoo into a skilled artisan, he thinks
the cause of higher culture may be pretty much
left to take care of itself. He believes we
could bleed Linsettiah and Pattore and some
of those chaps for endowments, I fancy, though
he doesn’t say so.”
“Better try some of the smaller natives. A
maharajah won’t do much for a C. I. E. or an
extra gun nowadays: it isn’t good enough. He
knows that all Europe is ready to pay him the
honours of royalty whenever he chooses to tie
up his cooking-pots and go there. He’ll save
his money and buy hand-organs with it, or panoramas,
.bn 064.png
.pn +1
or sewing-machines. Presently, if this
adoration of the Eastern potentate goes on at
home, we shall have the maharajah whom we
propose to honour receiving our proposition
with his thumb applied to his nose and all his
fingers out!”
Ancram yawned. “Well, it won’t be a question
of negotiating for endowments: it will never
come off. Church will only smash himself over
the thing if he insists; and,” he added, as one
who makes an unprejudiced, impartial statement
on fatalistic grounds, “he will insist. I should
find the whole business rather amusing if, as
Secretary, I hadn’t to be the mouthpiece for it.”
He looked at his watch. “Half-past nine. I
suppose I ought to be off. You’re not coming?”
“Where?”
“To Belvedere. A ‘walk-round,’ I believe.”
“Thanks: I think not. It would be too much
bliss for a corpulent gentleman of my years. I
remember—the card came last week, and I gave
it to Mohammed to take care of. I believe
Mohammed keeps a special almirah for the purpose;
.bn 065.png
.pn +1
and in it,” Mr. Doyle continued gravely,
“are the accumulations of several seasons. He
regards them as a trust only second to that of
the Director of Records, and last year he made
them the basis of an application for more pay.”
“Which you gave him,” laughed Ancram,
getting into his light overcoat as the brougham
rolled up to the door. “I loathe going; but for
me there’s no alternative. There seems to be an
Act somewhere providing that a man in my
peculiar position must show himself in society.”
“So long as you hover on the brink of matrimony,”
said the other, “you must be a butterfly.
Console yourself: after you take the plunge you
can turn ascidian if you like.”
The twinkle went out of Philip Doyle’s eyes
as he heard the carriage door shut and the
wheels roll crunching toward the gate. He
filled his pipe again and took up the Saturday
Review. Half an hour later he was looking
steadily at the wall over the top of that journal,
considering neither its leading articles nor its
reviews nor its advertisements, but Mr. Lewis
Ancram’s peculiar position.
.bn 066.png
.pn +1
At that moment Ancram leaned against the
wall in a doorway of the drawing-room at Belvedere,
one leg lightly crossed over the other, his
right hand in his pocket, dangling his eyeglass
with his left. It was one of the many casual
attitudes in which the world was informed that
a Chief Secretary, in Mr. Ancram’s opinion, had
no prescriptive right to give himself airs. He
had a considering look: one might have said that
his mind was far from the occasion—perhaps
upon the advisability of a tobacco tax; but this
would not have been correct. He was really
thinking of the quantity and the quality of the
people who passed him, and whether as a function
the thing could be considered a success.
With the white gleam on the pillars, and the
palms everywhere, and the moving vista of well-dressed
women through long, richly-furnished
rooms arranged for a large reception, it was
certainly pretty enough; but there was still the
question of individuals, which had to be determined
by such inspection as he was bestowing
upon them. It would have been evident to anybody
that more people recognised Ancram than
.bn 067.png
.pn +1
Ancram recognised; he had by no means the air
of being on the look-out for acquaintances. But
occasionally some such person as the Head of
the Telegraph Department looked well at him
and said, “How do, Ancram?” with the effect of
adding “I defy you to forget who I am!” or a
lady of manner gave him a gracious and pronounced
inclination, which also said, “You are
the clever, the rising Mr. Ancram. You haven’t
called; but you are known to despise society. I
forgive you, and I bow.” One or two Members
of Council merely vouchsafed him a nod as
they passed; but it was noticeably only Members
of Council who nodded to Mr. Ancram.
An aide-de-camp to the Viceroy, however—a
blue-eyed younger son with his mind seriously
upon his duty—saw Ancram in his path, and
hesitated. He had never quite decided to what
extent these fellows in the Bengal Secretariat,
and this one in particular, should be recognised
by an aide-de-camp; and he went round the
other way. Presently there was a little silken
stir and rustle, a parting of the ladies’ trains, and
a lull of observation along both sides of the lane
.bn 068.png
.pn +1
which suddenly formed itself among the people.
His Excellency the Viceroy had taken his early
leave and was making his departure. Lord
Scansleigh had an undisguised appreciation of
an able man, and there was some definiteness in
the way he stopped, though it was but for a
moment, and shook hands with Ancram, who
swung the eyeglass afterwards more casually
than he had done before. The aide-de-camp,
following after, was in no wise rebuked. What
the Viceroy chose to do threw no light on his
difficulty. He merely cast his eyes upon the
floor, and his fresh coloured countenance expressed
a respectfully sad admiration for the
noble manner in which his lord discharged every
obligation pertaining to the Viceregal office.
The most privileged hardly cares to make
demands upon his hostess as long as she has a
Viceroy to entertain, and Ancram waited until
their Excellencies were well on their way home,
their four turbaned Sikhs trotting after them,
before he made any serious attempt to find Mrs.
Church. A sudden and general easefulness was
observable at the same time. People began to
.bn 069.png
.pn +1
look about them and walk and talk with the consciousness
that it was no longer possible that
they should be suspected of arranging themselves
so that Lord Scansleigh must bow. The
Viceroy having departed, they thought about
other things. She was standing, when presently
he made his way to her, talking to Sir William
Scott of the Foreign Department, and at the
moment, to the Maharajah of Pattore. Ancram
paused and watched her unperceived. It was
like the pleasure of looking at a picture one
technically understands. He noted with satisfaction
the subtle difference in her manner toward
the two men, and how, in her confidence with
the one and her condescending recognition of the
other’s dignity, both were consciously receiving
their due. He noticed the colour of her heliotrope
velvet gown, and asked himself whether
any other woman in the room could possibly
wear that shade. Mentally he dared the other
women to say that its simplicity was over-dramatic,
or that by the charming arrangement of
her hair and her pearls and the yellowed lace,
that fell over her shoulders Judith Church had
.bn 070.png
.pn +1
made herself too literal a representation of a
great-grandmother who certainly wore none of
these things. He paused another second to catch
the curve of her white throat as she turned her
head with a little characteristic lifting of her
chin; and then he went up to her. The definite
purpose that appeared in his face was enough of
itself to assert their intimacy—to this end it was
not necessary that he should drop his eyeglass.
“Oh,” she said, with a step forward, “how
do you do! I began to think——Maharajah,
when you are invited to parties you always
come, don’t you? Well, this gentleman does not
always come, I understand. I beg you will ask
a question about it at the next meeting of the
Legislative Council. The Honourable the Chief
Secretary is requested to furnish an explanation
of his lamentable failure to perform his duties
toward society.”
The native smiled uncomfortably, puzzled at
her audacity. His membership of the Bengal
Legislative Council was a new toy, and he was
not sure that he liked any one else to play
with it.
.bn 071.png
.pn +1
“His Highness of Pattore,” said Ancram,
slipping a hand under the fat elbow in its pink-and-gold
brocade, “would be the very last fellow
to get me into a scrape. Wouldn’t you,
Maharaj!”
His Highness beamed affectionately upon
Ancram. There was, at all events, nothing but
flattery in being taken by the elbow by a Chief
Secretary. “Certainlie,” he replied—“the verrie
last”; and he laughed the unctuous, irresponsible
laugh of a maharajah, which is accompanied
by the twinkling of pendant emeralds and
the shaking of personal rotundities which cannot
be indicated.
Sir William Scott folded his arms and refolded
them, balanced himself once or twice on
the soles of his shoes, pushed out his under-lip,
and retreated in the gradual and surprised way
which would naturally be adopted by the
Foreign Department when it felt itself left out of
the conversation. The Maharajah stood about
uneasily on one leg for a moment, and then with
a hasty double salaam he too waddled away.
Mrs. Church glanced after his retreating figure—it
.bn 072.png
.pn +1
was almost a perfect oval—with lips prettily composed
to seemly gravity. Then, as her eyes
met Ancram’s, she laughed like a schoolgirl.
“Oh,” she said, “go away! I mustn’t talk to
you. I shall be forgetting my part.”
“You are doing it well. Lady Spence, at
this stage of the proceedings, was always surrounded
by bank-clerks and policemen. I do not
observe a member of either of those interesting
species,” he said, glancing round through his
eyeglass, “within twenty yards. On the contrary,
an expectant Member of Council on the
nearest sofa, the Commander-in-Chief hovering in
the middle distance, and a fringe of Departmental
Heads on the horizon.”
“I do not see any of them,” she laughed,
looking directly at Ancram. “We are going to
sit down, you and I, and talk for four or six
minutes, as the last baboo said who implored an
interview with my husband”; and Mrs. Church
sank, with just a perceptible turning of her
shoulder upon the world, into the nearest armchair.
It was a wide gilded arm-chair, cushioned
in deep yellow silk. Ancram thought, as she
.bn 073.png
.pn +1
crossed her feet and leaned her head against the
back of it, that the effect was delicious.
“And you really think I am doing it well!”
she said. “I have been dying to know. I really
dallied for a time with the idea of asking one of
the aides-de-camp. But as a matter of fact,” she
said confidentially, “though I order them about
most callously, I am still horribly afraid of the
aides-de-camp—in uniform, on duty.”
“And in flannels, off duty?”
“In flannels, off duty, I make them almond
toffee and they tell me their love affairs. I am
their sisterly mother and their cousinly aunt.
We even have games of ball.”
“They are nice boys,” he said, with a sigh
of resignation: “I daresay they deserve it.”
There was an instant’s silence of good fellowship,
and then she moved her foot a little, so
that a breadth of the heliotrope velvet took on
a paler light.
“Yes,” he nodded, “it is quite—regal.”
She laughed, flushing a little. “Really!
That’s not altogether correct. It ought to be
only officiating. But I can’t tell you how delicious
.bn 074.png
.pn +1
it is to be obliged to wear pretty
gowns.”
At that moment an Additional Member of
Council passed them so threateningly that Mrs.
Church was compelled to put out a staying
hand and inquire for Lady Bloomsbury, who
was in England, and satisfy herself that Sir
Peter had quite recovered from his bronchitis,
and warn Sir Peter against Calcutta’s cold-weather
fogs. Ancram kept his seat, but Sir
Peter stood with stout persistence, rooted in his
rights. It was only when Mrs. Church asked him
whether he had seen the new portrait, and told
him where it was, that he moved on, and then
he believed that he went of his own accord.
By the time an Indian official arrives at an Additional
Membership he is usually incapable of
perceiving anything which does not tend to
enhance that dignity.
“You have given two of my six minutes
to somebody else, remember,” Ancram said.
For an instant she did not answer him. She
was looking about her with a perceptible air
of having, for the moment, been oblivious of
.bn 075.png
.pn +1
something it was her business to remember.
Almost immediately her eye discovered John
Church. He was in conversation with the
Bishop, and apparently they were listening to
each other with deference, but sometimes
Church’s gaze wandered vaguely over the heads
of the people and sometimes he looked at the
floor. His hands were clasped in front of him,
his chin was so sunk in his chest that the most
conspicuous part of him seemed his polished
forehead and his heavy black eyebrows, his expression
was that of a man who submits to the
inevitable. Ancram saw him at the same moment,
and in the silence that asserted itself
between them there was a touch of embarrassment
which the man found sweet. He felt a
foolish impulse to devote himself to turning
John Church into an ornament to society.
“This sort of thing——” he suggested condoningly.
“Bores him. Intolerably. He grudges the
time and the energy. He says there is so much
to do.”
“He is quite right.”
.bn 076.png
.pn +1
“Oh, don’t encourage him! On the contrary—promise
me something.”
“Anything.”
“When you see him standing about alone—he
is really very absent-minded—go up and
make him talk to you. He will get your ideas—the
time, you see, will not be wasted. And
neither will the general public,” she added, “be
confronted with the spectacle of a Lieutenant-Governor
who looks as if he had a contempt
for his own hospitality.”
“I’ll try. But I hardly think my ideas upon
points of administration are calculated to enliven
a social evening. And don’t send me now.
The Bishop is doing very well.”
“The Bishop?” She turned to him again,
with laughter in the dark depths of her eyes.
“I realised the other day what one may attain
to in Calcutta. His Lordship asked me, with
some timidity, what I thought of the length of
his sermons! Tell me, please, who is this
madam bearing down upon me in pink and
grey?”
Ancram was on his feet. “It is Mrs. Daye,”
.bn 077.png
.pn +1
he said. “People who come so late ought not
to insist upon seeing you.”
“Mrs. Daye! Oh, of course; your——” But
Mrs. Daye was clasping her hostess’s hand.
“And Miss Daye, I think,” said Mrs. Church,
looking frankly into the face of the girl behind,
“whom I have somehow been defrauded of
meeting before. I have a great many congratulations
to—divide,” she went on prettily, glancing
at Ancram. “Mr. Ancram is an old friend
of ours.”
“Thank you,” replied Miss Daye. Her manner
suggested that at school such acknowledgments
had been very carefully taught her.
“My dear, you should make a pretty curtsey,”
her mother said jocularly, and then looked at
Rhoda with astonishment as the girl, with an
unmoved countenance, made it.
Ancram looked uncomfortable, but Mrs.
Church cried out with vivacity that it was
charming—she was so glad to find that Miss
Daye could unbend to a stranger; and Mrs.
Daye immediately stated that she must hear
whether the good news was true that Mrs.
.bn 078.png
.pn +1
Church had accepted the presidency—presidentship
(what should one say?)—of the Lady Dufferin
Society. Ah! that was delightful—now
everything would go smoothly. Poor dear Lady
Spence found it far too much for her! Mrs.
Daye touched upon a variety of other matters
as the four stood together, and the gaslights
shone down upon the diamond stars in the
women’s hair, and the band played on the verandah
behind the palms. Among them was the
difficulty of getting seats in the Cathedral in
the cold weather, and the fascinating prospect
of having a German man-of-war in port for the
season, and that dreadful frontier expedition
against the Nagapis; and they ran, in the end,
into an allusion to Mrs. Church’s delightful
Thursday tennises.
“Ah, yes,” Mrs. Church replied, as the lady
gave utterance to this, with her dimpled chin
thrust over her shoulder, in the act of departure:
“you must not forget my Thursdays.
And you,” she said to Rhoda, with a directness
which she often made very engaging—“you
will come too, I hope?”
.bn 079.png
.pn +1
“Oh, yes, thank you,” the girl answered,
with her neat smile: “I will come too—with
pleasure.”
“Why didn’t you go with them?” Mrs.
Church exclaimed a moment later.
Ancram looked meditatively at the chandelier.
“We are not exactly a demonstrative
couple,” he said. “She likes a decent reticence,
I believe—in public. I’ll find them presently.”
They were half a mile on their way home
when he began to look for them; and Mrs.
Daye had so far forgotten herself as to comment
unfavourably upon his behaviour.
“My dear mummie,” her daughter responded,
“you don’t suppose I want to interfere with his
amusements!”
.bn 080.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
CHAPTER V.
.sp 2
A bazar had been opened in aid of a Cause.
The philanthropic heart of Calcutta, laid bare,
discloses many Causes, and during the cold
weather their commercial hold upon the community
is as briskly maintained as it may be
consistently with the modern doctrine of the
liberty of the subject. The purpose of this
bazar was to bring the advantages of the
piano and feather-stitch and Marie Bashkirtseff
to young native ladies of rank. It had been for
some time obvious that young native ladies of
rank were painfully behind the van of modern
progress. It was known that they were not in
the habit of spending the golden Oriental hours
in the search for wisdom as the bee obtains
honey from the flowers: they much preferred
sucking their own fingers, cloyed with sweetmeats
from the bazar. Yet a few of them had
.bn 081.png
.pn +1
tasted emancipation. Their husbands allowed
them to show their faces to the world. Of
one, who had been educated in London, it was
whispered that she wore stays, and read books
in three languages besides Sanscrit, and ate of
the pig! These the memsahibs fastened upon
and infected with the idea of elevating their
sisters by annual appeals to the public based
on fancy articles. Future generations of Aryan
lady-voters, hardly as yet visible in the effulgence
of all that is to come, will probably fail to
understand that their privileges were founded,
towards the end of the nineteenth century, on
an antimacassar; but thus it will have been.
The wife of the Lieutenant-Governor had
opened the bazar. She had done it in black
lace and jet, which became her exceedingly,
with a pretty little speech, which took due account
of the piano and feather-stitch and Marie
Bashkirtseff under more impressive names. She
had driven there with Lady Scott. The way
was very long and very dusty and very native,
which includes several other undesirable characteristics;
and Lady Scott had beguiled it with
.bn 082.png
.pn +1
details of an operation she had insisted on witnessing
at the Dufferin Hospital for Women.
Lady Scott declared that, holding the position
she did on the Board, she really felt the responsibility
of seeing that things were properly
done, but that henceforth the lady-doctor in
charge should have her entire confidence. “I
only wonder,” said Mrs. Church, “that, holding
the position you do on the Board, you didn’t
insist on performing the operation yourself”;
and her face was so grave that Lady Scott felt
flattered and deprecated the idea.
Then they had arrived and walked with circumstance
through the little desultory crowd of
street natives up the strip of red cloth to the
door, and there been welcomed by three or
four of the very most emancipated, with two
beautiful, flat, perfumed bouquets of pink-and-white
roses and many suffused smiles. And
then the little speech, which gave Mrs. Gasper
of the High Court the most poignant grief, in
that men, on account of the unemancipated,
were excluded from the occasion; she would
simply have given anything to have had her
.bn 083.png
.pn +1
husband hear it. After which Mrs. Church had
gone from counter to counter, with her duty
before her eyes. She bought daintily, choosing
Dacca muslins and false gods, brass plaques from
Persia and embroidered cloths from Kashmir.
A dozen or two of the unemancipated pressed
softly upon her, chewing betel, and appraising
the value of her investments, and little Mrs.
Gasper noted them too from the other side of
the room. Lady Scott was most kind in showing
dear Mrs. Church desirable purchases, and
made, herself, conspicuously more than the wife
of the Lieutenant-Governor. On every hand a
native lady said, “Buy something!” with an
accent less expressive of entreaty than of resentful
expectation. One of the emancipated
went behind a door and made up the total of
Mrs. Church’s expenditure. She came out again
looking discontented: Lady Spence the year before
had spent half as much again.
Mrs. Church felt as she drove away that she
had left behind her an injury which might
properly find redress under a Regulation.
She was alone, Lady Scott having to go on to
.bn 084.png
.pn +1
a meeting of the “Board” with Mrs. Gasper.
The disc of pink-and-white roses rolled about
with the easy motion of the barouche, on the
opposite seat. It was only half-past four, and the
sun was still making strong lines with the tawdry
flat-roofed yellow shops that huddled along the
crowded interminable streets. She looked out
and saw a hundred gold-bellied wasps hovering
over a tray of glistening sweetmeats. Next door
a woman with her red cloth pulled over her
head, and her naked brown baby on her hip,
paused and bought a measure of parched corn
from a bunnia, who lolled among his grain heaps
a fat invitation to hunger. Then came the
square dark hole of Abdul Rahman, where he sat
in his spectacles and sewed, with his long lean
legs crossed in front of him, and half a dozen red-beaked
love-birds in a wicker cage to keep him
company. And then the establishment of Saddanath
Mookerjee, announcing in a dazzling
fringe of black letters:
.dv class='box70'
.nf c
―――――――――――――――
PAINS FEVERANDISEASES CURED
――――――――
WHILE YOU WAIT
.nf-
.dv-
.sp 1
.bn 085.png
.pn +1
She looked at it all as she rolled by with a little
tender smile of reconnaissance. The old fascination
never failed her; the people and their
doings never became common facts. Nevertheless
she was very tired. The crowd seethed
along in the full glare of the afternoon, hawking,
disputing, gesticulating. The burden of their
talk—the naked coolies, the shrill-jabbering
women with loads of bricks upon their heads, the
sleek baboos in those European shirts the nether
hem of which no canon of propriety has ever
taught them to confine—the burden of their talk
reached her where she sat, and it was all of
paisa[A] and rupia, the eternal dominant note of
the bazar. She closed her eyes and tried to put
herself into relation with a life bounded by the
rim of a copper coin. She was certainly very
tired. When she looked again a woman stooped
over one of the city standpipes and made a cup
with her hand and gave her little son to drink.
He was a very beautiful little son, with a string
of blue beads round his neck and a silver anklet
.bn 086.png
.pn +1
on each of his fat brown legs, and as he caught
her hand with his baby fingers the mother smiled
over him in her pride.
.fm
.fn A
Halfpence.
.fn-
.fm
Judith Church suddenly leaned back among
her cushions very close to tears. “It would
have been better,” she said to herself—“so much
better,” as she opened her eyes widely and tried
to think about something else. There was her
weekly dinner-party of forty that night, and she
was to go down with the Bishop. Oh, well!
that was better than Sir Peter Bloomsbury. She
hoped Captain Thrush had not forgotten to ask
some people who could sing—and not Miss
Nellie Vansittart. She smiled a little as she
thought how Captain Thrush had made Nellie
Vansittart’s pretty voice an excuse for asking her
and her people twice already this month. She
must see that Captain Thrush was not on duty
the afternoon of Mrs. Vansittart’s musicale. She
felt indulgent towards Captain Thrush and
Nellie Vansittart; she that young lady
plenary absolution for the monopoly of her
lieutenant on the Belvedere Thursdays; she
thought of them by their Christian names.
.bn 087.png
.pn +1
Then to-morrow—to-morrow she opened the café
chantant for the Sailors’ Home, and they dined at
the Fort with the General. On Wednesday
there was the Eurasian Female Orphans’ prize-giving,
and the dance on board the Boetia. On
Friday a “Lady Dufferin” meeting—or was it
the Dhurrumtollah Self-Help Society, or the
Sisters’ Mission?—she must look it up in her
book. And, sandwiched in somewhere, she
knew there was a German bacteriologist and a
lecture on astronomy. She put up both her
slender hands in her black gloves and yawned;
remembering at the same time that it was ten
days since she had seen Lewis Ancram. Her
responsibilities, when he mocked at them with
her, seemed light and amusing. He gave her
strength and stimulus: she was very frank with
herself in confessing how much she depended
upon him.
The carriage drew up on one side of the
stately width of Chowringhee. That is putting
it foolishly; for Chowringhee has only one side
to draw up at—the other is a footpath bordering
the great green Maidan, which stretches on
.bn 088.png
.pn +1
across to the river’s edge, and is fringed with
masts from Portsmouth and Halifax and Ispahan.
When the sun goes down behind them——But
the sun had not gone down when Mrs. Church
got out of her carriage and went up the steps of
the School of Art: it was still burnishing the
red bricks of that somewhat insignificant building,
and lying in yellow sheets over the vast
stucco bulk of the Indian Museum on one side,
and playing among the tree-tops in the garden
of the Commissioner of Police on the other.
Anglo-Indian aspirations, in their wholly subordinate,
artistic form, were gathered together in
an exhibition here, and here John Church, who
was inspecting a gaol at the other end of Calcutta,
had promised to meet his wife at five
o’clock.
The Lieutenant-Governor had been looking
forward to this: it was so seldom, he said, that
he found an opportunity of combining a duty
and a pleasure. Judith Church remembered
other Art Exhibitions she had seen in India, and
thought that one category was enough.
At the farther end of the room a native gentleman
.bn 089.png
.pn +1
stood transfixed with admiration before a
portrait of himself by his own son. Two or
three ladies with catalogues darted hurriedly,
like humming-birds, from water-colour to water-colour.
A cadaverous planter from the Terai,
who turned out sixty thousand pounds of good
tea and six yards of bad pictures annually, talked
with conviction to an assenting broker with his
thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, about
the points of his “Sunset View of Kinchinjunga,”
that hung among the oils on the other wall.
There was no one else in the room but Mr.
Lewis Ancram, who wore a straw hat and an air
of non-expectancy, and looked a sophisticated
twenty-five.
For a moment, although John Church was
the soul of punctuality, it did not seem remarkable
to Mrs. Church that her husband had failed
to turn up. Ancram had begun to explain,
indeed, before it occurred to her to ask; and
this, when she remembered it, brought a delicate
flush to her cheeks which stayed there, and
suggested to the Chief Secretary the pleasant
recollection of a certain dewy little translucent
.bn 090.png
.pn +1
flower that grew among the Himalayan mosses
very high up.
“It was a matter His Honour thought really
required looking into—clear evidence, you know,
that the cholera was actually being communicated
inside the gaol—and when I offered to
bring his apologies on to you I honestly believe
he was delighted to secure another hour
of investigation.”
“John works atrociously hard,” she replied;
and when he weighed this afterward, as he had
begun to weigh the things she said, he found in it
appreciably more concern for John’s regrettable
habit of working atrociously hard than vexation
at his failure to keep their engagement.
They walked about for five minutes and
looked at the aspirations. Ancram remembered
Rhoda Daye’s hard little sayings on the opening
day, and reflected that some women could laugh
with a difference. Mrs. Church did it with
greatest freedom, he noticed, at the prize pictures.
For the others she had compunction,
and she regarded the “Sunset View of Kinchinjunga”
with a smile that she plainly atoned for
.bn 091.png
.pn +1
by an inward tear. “Don’t!” she said, looking
round the walls, as he invested that peak with
the character of a strawberry ice. “It means
all the bloom of their lives, poor things. At all
events it’s ideality, it isn’t——”
“Pig-sticking!”
“Yes,” she said softly. “If I knew what in
the world to do with it, I would buy that ‘Kinchin.’
But its ultimate disposal does present
difficulties.”
“I don’t think you would have any right to
do that, you know. You couldn’t be so dishonest
with the artist. Who would sell the
work of his hand to be burned!”
He was successful in provoking her appreciation.
“You are quite right,” she said. “The
patronage of my pity! You always see!”
“I have bought a picture,” Ancram went on,
“by a fellow named Martin, who seems to have
sent it out from England. It’s nothing great,
but I thought it was a pity to let it go back.
That narrow one, nearest to the corner.”
“It is good enough to escape getting a prize,”
she laughed. “Yes, I like it rather—a good deal—very
.bn 092.png
.pn +1
much indeed. I wish I were a critic and
could tell you why. It will be a pleasure to
you; it is so green and cool and still.”
Mr. Ancram’s purchase was of the type that
is growing common enough at the May exhibitions—a
bit of English landscape on a dull day
towards evening, fields and a bank with trees on
it, a pool with water-weeds in it, the sky crowding
down behind and standing out in front in
the quiet water. Perhaps it lacked imagination—there
was no young woman leaning out
of the canoe to gather water-lilies—but it had
been painted with a good deal of knowledge.
Mr. James Springgrove at the moment was
talking about it to another gentleman. Mr.
Springgrove was one of Calcutta’s humourists.
He was also a member of the Board of Revenue;
and for these reasons, combined with his subscription,
it was originally presumed that Mr.
Springgrove understood Art. People generally
thought he did, because he was a Director and
a member of the Hanging Committee, but this
was a mistake. Mr. Springgrove brought his
head as nearly as possible into a line with the
.bn 093.png
.bn 094.png
.bn 095.png
.pn +1
other gentleman’s head, from which had issued,
in weak commendation, the statement that No.
223 reminded it of home.
.il id=i082a fn=i_082a.jpg w=550px ew=90%
.ca There was a moment’s pause.
“If you asked what it reminded me of,” said
Mr. Springgrove, clapping the other on the
back, “I should say verdigris, sir—verdigris.”
Mrs. Church and the Honourable Mr. Lewis
Ancram looked into each other’s eyes and smiled
as long as there was any excuse for smiling.
“I am glad you are not a critic,” he said.
She was verging toward the door. “What are
you going to do now?”
“Afterward—we meant to drive to Hastings
House. John thought there would be time. It
is quite near Belvedere, you know. But——And
I shall not have another free afternoon for
a fortnight.”
They went out in silence, past the baboo who
sat behind a table at the receipt of entrance
money, and down the steps. The syce opened
the carriage door, and Mrs. Church got in.
There was a moment’s pause, while the man
looked questioningly at Ancram, still holding
open the door.
.bn 096.png
.pn +1
“If he invites himself,” said Judith inwardly,
with the intention of self-discipline; and the rest
was hope.
“Is there any reason——?” he asked, with
his foot on the step; and it was quite unnecessary
that he should add “against my coming?”
“No—there is no reason.” Then she added,
with a visible effort to make it the commonplace
thing it was not, “Then you will drive out with
me, and I shall see the place after all? How
nice!”
They rolled out into the gold-and-green afternoon
life of the Maidan, along wide pipal-shadowed
roads, across a bridge, through a lane
or two where the pariahs barked after the carriage
and the people about the huts stared,
shading their eyes. There seemed very little
to say. They thought themselves under the
spell of the pleasantness of it—the lifting of
the burden and the heat of the day, the little
wind that shook the fronds of the date palms
and stole about bringing odours from where
the people were cooking, the unyoked oxen,
the hoarse home-going talk of the crows that
.bn 097.png
.pn +1
flew city-ward against the yellow sky with a
purple light on their wings.
“Let the carriage stay here,” Judith said, as
they stopped beside a dilapidated barred gate.
“I want to walk to the house.”
A salaaming creature in a dhoty hurried out of
a clump of bamboos in the corner and flung
open the gate. It seemed to close again upon
the world. They were in an undulating waste
that had once been a stately pleasure-ground,
and it had a visible soul that lived upon its
memories and was content in its abandonment.
It was so still that the great teak leaves, twisted
and discoloured and full of holes like battered
bronze, dropping singly and slowly through the
mellow air, fell at their feet with little rustling
cracks.
“What a perfection of silence!” Judith exclaimed
softly; and then some vague perception
impelled her to talk of other things—of her
dinner-party and Nellie Vansittart.
Ancram looked on, as it were, at her conversation
for a moment or two with his charming
smile. Then, “Oh, dear lady,” he broke in, “let
.bn 098.png
.pn +1
them go—those people. They are the vulgar
considerations of the time which has been—which
will be again. But this is a pause—made
for us.”
She looked down at the rusty teak-leaves, and
he almost told her, as he knocked them aside,
how poetic a shadow clung round her eyelids.
The curve of the drive brought them to the
old stucco mansion, dreaming quietly and open-eyed
over its great square porch of the Calcutta
of Nuncomar and Philip Francis.
“It broods, doesn’t it?” said Judith Church,
standing under the yellow honeysuckle of the
porch. “Don’t you wish you could see the
ghost!”
The gatekeeper reappeared, and stood offering
them each a rose.
“This gentleman,” replied Ancram, “will
know all about the ghost. He probably makes
his living out of Warren Hastings, in the
tourist season. Without doubt, he says, there
is a bhut, a very terrible bhut, which lives in the
room directly over our heads and wears iron
boots. Shall we go and look for it?”
.bn 099.png
.pn +1
Half way up the stairs Ancram turned and
saw the gatekeeper following them. “You have
leave to go,” he said in Hindustani.
At the top he turned again, and found the
man still salaaming at their heels. “Jao!” he
shouted, with a threatening movement, and the
native fled.
“It is preposterous,” he said apologetically to
Mrs. Church, “that one should be dogged everywhere
by these people.”
They explored the echoing rooms, and looked
down the well of the ruined staircase, and decided
that no ghost with the shadow of a title
to the property could let such desirable premises
go unhaunted. They were in absurdly good
spirits. They had not been alone together
for a fortnight. The sky was all red in the
west as they stepped out upon the wide
flat roof, and the warm light that was left
seemed to hang in mid-air. The spires and
domes of Calcutta lay under a sulphur-coloured
haze, and the palms on the horizon stood in
filmy clouds. The beautiful tropical day was
going out.
.bn 100.png
.pn +1
“We must go in ten minutes,” said Judith,
sitting down on the low mossy parapet.
“Back into the world.” He reflected hastily
and decided. Up to this time Rhoda Daye had
been a conventionality between them. He had
a sudden desire to make her the subject of a
confidence—to explain, perhaps to discuss, anyhow
to explain.
“Tell me, my friend,” he said, making a pattern
on the lichen of the roof with his stick,
“what do you think of my engagement?”
She looked up startled. It was as if the question
had sprung at her. She too felt the need
of a temporary occupation, and fell upon her rose.
“You had my congratulations a long time
ago,” she said, carefully shredding each petal
into three.
“Don’t!” he exclaimed impatiently: “I’m
serious!”
“Well, then—it is not a fair thing that you
are asking me. I don’t know Miss Daye. I
never shall know her. To me she is a little
marble image with a very pretty polish.”
“And to me also,” he repeated, seizing her
.bn 101.png
.pn +1
words: “she is a little marble image with a very
pretty polish.” He put an unconscious demand
for commiseration into his tone. Doubtless he
did not mean to go so far, but his inflection
added, “And I’ve got to marry her!”
“To you—to you!” She plucked aimlessly
at her rose, and searched vainly for something
which would improve the look of his situation.
But the rush of this confidence had torn up
commonplaces by the roots. She felt it beating
somewhere about her heart; and her concern,
for the moment, in hearing of his misfortune,
was for herself.
“The ironical part of it is,” he went on, very
pale with the effort of his candour, “that I was
blindly certain of finding her sympathetic. You
know what one means by that in a woman. I
wanted it, just then. I seemed to have arrived
at a crisis of wanting it. I made ludicrously
sure of it. If you had been here,” he added
with conviction, “it would never have happened.”
She opened her lips to say “Then I wish I
had been here,” but the words he heard were,
“People tell me she is very clever.”
.bn 102.png
.pn +1
“Oh,” he said bitterly, “she has the qualities
of her defects, no doubt. But she isn’t a woman—she’s
an intelligence. Conceive, I beg of you,
the prospect of passing one’s life in conjugal
relations with an intelligence!”
Judith assured herself vaguely that this brutality
of language had its excuse. She could
have told him very fluently that he ought not
to marry Rhoda Daye under any circumstances,
but something made it impossible that she should
say anything of the sort. She strove with the
instinct for a moment, and then, as it overthrew
her, she looked about her shivering. The evening
chill of December had crept in and up from
the marshes; one or two street lamps twinkled
out in the direction of the city; light white
levels of mist had begun to spread themselves
among the trees in the garden below them.
“We must go,” she said, rising hurriedly:
“how suddenly it has grown cold!” And as
she passed before him into the empty house he
saw that her face was so drawn that even he
could scarcely find it beautiful.
.bn 103.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
CHAPTER VI.
.sp 2
“Mummie,” remarked Miss Daye, as she
pushed on the fingers of a new pair of gloves
in the drawing-room, “the conviction grows
upon me that I shall never become Mrs.
Ancram.”
“Rhoda, if you talk like that you will certainly
bring on one of my headaches, and it will
be the third in a fortnight that I’ll have to
thank you for. Did I or did I not send home
the order for your wedding dress by last mail?”
“You did, mummie. But you could always
advertise it in the local papers, you know.
Could you fasten this? ‘By Private Sale—A
Wedding Dress originally intended for the Secretariat.
Ivory Satin and Lace. Skirt thirty-nine
inches, waist twenty-one. Warranted never been
worn.’ Thanks so much!”
“Rhoda! you are capable of anything——”
.bn 104.png
.pn +1
“Of most things, mummie, I admit. But I
begin to fear, not of that!”
“Are you going to break it off? There he
is this minute! Don’t let him come in here,
dear—he would know instantly that we had been
discussing him. You have upset me so!”
“He shan’t.” Miss Daye walked to the door.
“You are not to come any farther, my dear sir,”
said she to the Honourable Mr. Ancram among
the Japanese pots on the landing: “mummie’s
going to have a headache, and doesn’t want you.
I’m quite ready!” She stood for a moment in
the doorway, her pretty shoulders making admirably
correct lines, in a clinging grey skirt
and silver braided zouave, that showed a charming
glimpse of blue silk blouse underneath, buttoning
her second glove. Ancram groaned
within himself that he must have proposed to
her because she was chic. Then she looked
back. “Don’t worry, mummie. I’ll let you
know within a fortnight. You won’t have to
advertise it after all—you can countermand the
order by telegraph!” Mrs. Daye, on the sofa,
threw up her hands speechlessly, and her eyes
.bn 105.png
.pn +1
when her daughter finally left the room were
round with apprehension.
Ancram had come to take his betrothed for
a drive in his dog-cart. It is a privilege Calcutta
offers to people who are engaged: they are permitted
to drive about together in dog-carts.
The act has the binding force of a public confession.
Mr. Ancram and Miss Daye had taken
advantage of it in the beginning. By this time
it would be more proper to say that they were
taking refuge in it.
He had seen Mrs. Church several times since
the evening on which he had put her into her
carriage at the gates of Hastings House, and got
into his own trap and driven home with a feeling
which he analysed as purified but not resigned.
She had been very quiet, very self-contained,
apparently content to be gracious and
effective in the gown of the occasion; but once
or twice he fancied he saw a look of waiting, a
gleam of expectancy, behind her eyes. It was
this that encouraged him to ask her, at the first
opportunity, whether she did not think he would
be perfectly justified in bringing the thing to an
.bn 106.png
.pn +1
end. She answered him, with an unalterable
look, that she could not help him in that decision;
and he brought away a sense that he
had not obtained the support on which he had
depended. This did not prevent him from
arriving very definitely at the decision in question
unaided. Nothing could be more obvious
than that the girl did not care for him; and,
granting this, was he morally at liberty, from the
girl’s own point of view, to degrade her by a
marriage which was, on her side, one of pure
ambition? If her affections had been involved in
the remotest degree——but he shrugged his
shoulders at the idea of Rhoda Daye’s affections.
He wished to Heaven, like any schoolboy, that
she would fall in love with somebody else, but
she was too damned clever to fall in love with
anybody. The thing would require a little
finessing; of course the rupture must come
from her. There were things a man in his
position had to be careful about. But with a
direct suggestion——Nothing was more obvious
than that she did not care for him. He
would make her say so. After that, a direct
.bn 107.png
.pn +1
suggestion would be simple—and wholly justifiable.
These were Mr. Lewis Ancram’s reflections
as he stood, hat in hand, on Mrs. Daye’s
landing. They were less involved than usual,
but in equations of personal responsibility Mr.
Ancram liked a formula. By the intelligent
manipulation of a formula one could so often
eliminate the personal element and transfer the
responsibility to the other side.
The beginning was not auspicious.
“Is that le dernier cri?” he asked, looking at
her hat as she came lightly down the steps.
“Papa’s? Poor dear! yes. It was forty
rupees, at Phelps’s. You’ll find me extravagant—but
horribly!—especially in hats. I adore
hats; they’re such conceptions, such ideas! I
mean to insist upon a settlement in hats—three
every season, in perpetuity.”
They were well into the street and half-way
to Chowringhee before he found the remark, at
which he forced himself to smile, that he supposed
a time would arrive when her affections in
millinery would transfer themselves to bonnets.
The occasion was not propitious for suggestions
.bn 108.png
.pn +1
based on emotional confessions. The broad
roads that wind over the Maidan were full of
gaiety and the definite facts of smart carriages
and pretty bowing women. The sun caught the
tops of the masts in the river, and twinkled
there; it mellowed the pillars of the bathing-ghats,
and was also reflected magnificently from
the plate-glass mirrors with which Ram Das
Mookerjee had adorned the sides of his barouche.
A white patch a mile away resolved
itself into a mass of black heads and draped
bodies watching a cricket match. Mynas chattered
by the wayside, stray notes of bugle practice
came crisply over the walls of the Fort;
there was an effect of cheerfulness even in the
tinkle of the tram bells. If the scene had required
any further touch of high spirits, it was
supplied in the turn-out of the Maharajah of
Thuginugger, who drove abroad in a purple velvet
dressing gown, with pink outriders. Ancram
had a fine susceptibility to atmospheric effect,
and it bade him talk about the Maharajah of
Thuginugger.
“That chap Ezra, the Simla diamond merchant,
.bn 109.png
.pn +1
told me that he went with the Maharajah
through his go-downs once. His Highness
likes pearls. Ezra saw them standing about in
bucketsful.”
“Common wooden buckets?”
“I believe so.”
“How satisfying! Tell me some more.”
“There isn’t any more. The rest was between
Ezra and the Maharajah. I dare say there
was a margin of profit somewhere. What queer
weather they seem to be having at home!”
“It’s delicious to live in a place that hasn’t
any weather—only a permanent fervency. I like
this old Calcutta. It’s so wicked and so rich
and so cheerful. People are born and burned
and born and burned, and nothing in the world
matters. Their nice little stone gods are so easy
to please, too. A handful of rice, a few marigold
chains, a goat or two: hardly any of them ask
more than that. And the sun shines every day—on
the just man who has offered up his goat,
and on the unjust man who has eaten it instead.”
She sat up beside him, her slender figure
swaying a little with the motion of the cart, and
.bn 110.png
.pn +1
looked about her with a light in her grey eyes
that seemed the reflection of her mood. He
thought her chatter artificial; but it was genuine
enough. She always felt more than her usual
sense of irresponsibility with him in their afternoon
drives. The world lay all about them and
lightened their relation; he became, as a rule,
the person who was driving, and she felt at
liberty to become the person who was talking.
“There!” she exclaimed, as three or four
coolie women filed, laughing, up to a couple of
round stones under a pipal tree by the roadside,
and took their brass lotas from their heads and
carefully poured water over the stones. “Fancy
one’s religious obligations summed up in a cooking-potful
of Hughli water! Are those stones
sacred?”
“I suppose so.”
“The author of ‘The Modern Influence of
the Vedic Books,’” she suggested demurely,
“should be quite sure. He should have left no
stone unturned.”
She regarded him for a moment, and, observing
his preoccupation, just perceptibly lifted her
.bn 111.png
.pn +1
eyebrows. Then she went on: “But perhaps
big round stones under pipal trees that like
libations come in the second volume. When
does the second volume appear?”
“Not until Sir Griffiths Spence comes out
again and this lunatic goes back to Hassimabad,
I fancy. I want an appropriation for some
further researches first.”
The most enthusiastic of Mr. Ancram’s admirers
acknowledged that he was not always
discreet.
“And he won’t give it to you—this lunatic?”
“Not a pice.”
“Then,” she said, with a ripple of laughter,
“he must be a fool!”
She was certainly irritating this afternoon.
Ancram gave his Waler as smart a cut as he
dared, and they dashed past Lord Napier, sitting
on his intelligent charger in serious bronze to
all eternity, and rounded the bend into the
Strand. The brown river tore at its heaving
buoys; the tide was racing out. The sun had
dipped, and the tall ships lay in the after-glow
in twos and threes and congeries along the bank,
.bn 112.png
.pn +1
along the edge of Calcutta, until in the curving
distance they became mere suggestions of one
another and a twilight of tilted masts. Under
their keels slipped great breadths of shining
water. Against the glow on it a country-boat,
with its unwieldy load of hay, looked like a floating
barn. On the indistinct other side the only
thing that asserted itself was a factory chimney.
They talked of the eternal novelty of the river,
and the eternal sameness of the people they met;
and then he lapsed again.
Rhoda looked down at the bow of her slipper.
“Have you got a headache?” she asked. The
interrogation was one of cheerful docility.
“Thanks, no. I beg your pardon: I’m afraid
I was inexcusably preoccupied.”
“Would it be indiscreet to ask what about?
Don’t you want my opinion? I am longing to
give you my opinion.”
“Your opinion would be valuable.”
Miss Daye again glanced down at her slipper.
This time her pretty eyelashes shaded a ray of
amused perception. “He thinks he can do it
himself,” she remarked privately. “He is quite
.bn 113.png
.pn +1
ready to give himself all the credit of getting
out of it gracefully. The amount of flattery
they demand for themselves, these Secretaries!”
“A premium on my opinion!” she said.
“How delightful!”
Ancram turned the Waler sharply into the
first road that led to the Casuerina Avenue.
The Casuerina Avenue is almost always poetic,
and might be imagined to lend itself very effectively,
after sunset, to the funeral of a sentiment
which Mr. Ancram was fond of describing to
himself as still-born. The girl beside him noted
the slenderness of his foot and the excellent cut
of his grey tweed trousers. Her eyes dwelt
upon the nervously vigorous way he handled
the reins, and her glance of light bright inquiry
ascertained a vertical line between his eyebrows.
It was the line that accompanied the Honourable
Mr. Ancram’s Bills in Council, and it indicated
a disinclination to compromise. Miss
Daye, fully apprehending its significance, regarded
him with an interest that might almost
be described as affectionate. She said to herself
.bn 114.png
.pn +1
that he would bungle. She was rather sorry for
him. And he did.
“I should be glad of your opinion of our
relation,” he said—which was very crude.
“I think it is charming. I was never more
interested in my life!” she declared frankly,
bringing her lips together in the pretty composure
with which she usually told the vague little
lie of her satisfaction with life.
“Does that sum up your idea of—of the possibilities
of our situation?” He felt that he was
doing better.
“Oh no! There are endless possibilities in
our situation—mostly stupid ones. But it is a
most agreeable actuality.”
“I wish,” he said desperately, “that you
would tell me just what the actuality means to
you.”
They were in the Avenue row, and the Waler
had been allowed to drop into a walk. The
after-glow still lingered in the soft green duskiness
over their heads; there was light enough
for an old woman to see to pick up the fallen
spines in the grass; the nearest tank, darkling
.bn 115.png
.pn +1
in the gathering gloom of the Maidan, had not
yet given up his splash of red from over the
river. He looked at her intently, and her eyes
dropped to the thoughtful consideration of the
crone who picked up spines. It might have
been that she blushed, or it might have been
some effect of the after-glow. Ancram inclined
to the latter view, but his judgment could not
be said to be impartial.
“Dear Lewis!” she answered softly, “how
very difficult that would be!”
In the sudden silence that followed, the new
creaking of the Waler’s harness was perceptible.
Ancram assured himself hotly that this was simple
indecency, but it was a difficult thing to say.
He was still guarding against the fatality of
irritation when Rhoda added daintily:
“But I don’t see why you should have a
monopoly of catechising. Tell me, sir—I’ve
wanted to know for ever so long—what was the
first, the very first thing you saw in me to fall
in love with?”
.bn 116.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
CHAPTER VII.
.sp 2
The Honourable Mr. Ancram’s ideal policy
toward the few score million subjects of the
Queen-Empress for whose benefit he helped to
legislate, was a paternalism somewhat highly
tempered with the exercise of discipline. He
had already accomplished appreciable things for
their advantage, and he intended to accomplish
more. It would be difficult to describe intelligibly
all that he had done; besides, his tasks
live in history. The publications of the Government
of India hold them all, and something
very similar may be found in the record which
every retired civilian of distinction cherishes in
leather, behind the glass of his bookcases in
Brighton or Bournemouth. It would therefore
be unnecessary as well.
It was Mr. Ancram’s desire to be a conspicuous
benefactor—this among Indian administrators
.bn 117.png
.pn +1
is a matter of business, and must not be smiled
at as a weakness—and in very great part he had
succeeded. The fact should be remembered in
connection with his expressed opinion—it has
been said that he was not always discreet—that
the relatives in the subordinate services of troublesome
natives should be sent, on provocation,
to the most remote and unpleasant posts in the
province. To those who understand the ramifications
of cousinly connection in the humbler
service of the sircar, the detestation of exile and
the claims of family affection in Bengal, the
efficacy of this idea for promoting loyalty will
appear. It was Mr. Ancram’s idea, but he despaired
of getting it adopted. Therefore he
talked about it. Perhaps upon this charge he
was not so very indiscreet after all.
It will be observed that Mr. Ancram’s policy
was one of exalted expediency. This will be
even more evident when it is understood that,
in default of the opportunity of coercing the
subject Aryan for his highest welfare, Mr. Ancram
conciliated him. The Chief Secretary
had many distinguished native friends. They
.bn 118.png
.pn +1
were always trying to make him valuable
presents. When he returned the presents he
did it in such a way that the bond of their
mutual regard was cemented rather than otherwise—cemented
by the tears of impulsive Bengali
affection. He had other native friends who
were more influential than distinguished. They
spoke English and wrote it, most of them. They
created the thing which is quoted in Westminster
as “Indian Public Opinion.” They were
in the van of progress, and understood all the
tricks for moving the wheels. The Government
of India in its acknowledged capacity as
brake found these gentlemen annoying; but
Mr. Ancram, since he could not imprison
them, offered them a measure of his sympathy.
They quite understood that it was a small
measure, but there is a fascination about the
friendship of a Chief Secretary, and they often
came to see him. They did not bring him
presents, however; they knew very much better
than that.
Mohendra Lall Chuckerbutty was one of
these inconspicuously influential friends. Mohendra
.bn 119.png
.pn +1
was not a maharajah: he was only a
baboo, which stands, like “Mr.” for hardly anything
at all. To say that he was a graduate
of the Calcutta University is to acknowledge
very little; he was as clever before he matriculated
as he was after he took his degree.
But it should not be forgotten that he was
the editor and proprietor of the Bengal Free
Press; that was the distinction upon which,
for the moment, he was insisting himself.
The Bengal Free Press was a voice of the people—a
particularly aggressive and pertinacious
voice. It sold for two pice in the bazar, and
was read by University students at the rate
of twenty-five to each copy. It was regularly
translated for the benefit of the Amir of Afghanistan,
the Khan of Kelat, and such other
people as were interested in knowing how insolent
sedition could be in Bengal with safety;
and it lay on the desk of every high official
in the Province. Its advertisements were very
funny, and its editorial English was more
fluent than veracious: but when it threw mud
at the Viceroy, and called the Lieutenant-Governor
.bn 120.png
.pn +1
a contemptible tyrant, and reminded
the people that their galls were of the yoke
of the stranger, there was no mistaking the
direction of its sentiment.
Mohendra Lall Chuckerbutty sat in the room
the Chief Secretary called his workshop, looking,
in a pause of their conversation, at the
Chief Secretary. No one familiar with that
journal would have discovered in his amiable
individuality the incarnation of the Bengal Free
Press. On his head he wore a white turban, and
on his countenance an expression of benign intelligence
just tinged with uncertainty as to
what to say next. His person was buttoned
up to his perspiring neck in a tight black surtout,
which represented his compromise with
European fashions, and across its most pronounced
rotundity hung a substantial gold
watch-chain. From the coat downwards he
fell away, so to speak, into Aryanism: the
indefinite white draperies of his race were
visible, and his brown hairy legs emerged
from them bare. He had made progress, however,
with his feet, on which he wore patent
.bn 121.png
.pn +1
leather shoes, almost American in their neatness,
with three buttons at the sides. He sat
leaning forward a little, with his elbows on his
knees, and his plump hands, their dimpled fingers
spread apart, hanging down between them.
Mohendra Lall Chuckerbutty’s attitude expressed
his very genuine anxiety to make the
most of his visit.
Ancram leaned back in his tilted chair, with
his feet on his desk, sharpening a lead pencil.
“And that’s my advice to you,” he said, with
his eyes on the knife.
“Well, I am grateful foritt! I am very much
obliged foritt!” Mohendra paused to relieve
his nerves by an amiable, somewhat inconsequent
laugh. “It iss my wish offcourse to be
guided as far as possible by your opinion.”
Mohendra glanced deprecatingly at the matting.
“But this is a sirrious grievance. And there are
others who are always spikking with me and
pushing me——”
“No grievance was ever mended in a day or
a night, or a session, Baboo. Government moves
slowly. Ref—changes are made by inches, not
.bn 122.png
.pn +1
by ells. If you are wise, you’ll be content with
one inch this year and another next. It’s the
only way.”
Mohendra smiled in sad agreement, and
nodded two or three times, with his head
rather on one side. It was an attitude so expressive
of submission that the Chief Secretary’s
tone seemed unnecessarily decisive.
“The article on that admirable Waterways
Bill off yours I hope you recivved. I sent
isspecial marked copy.”
“Yes,” replied Ancram, in cordial admission:
“I noticed it. Very much to the point. The
writer thoroughly grasped my idea. Very
grammatical too—and all that.” Mr. Ancram
yawned a little. “But you’d better keep my
name out of your paper, Baboo—unless you
want to abuse me. I’m a modest man, you
know. That leader you speak of made me
blush, I assure you.”
It required all Mohendra’s agility to arrive at
the conclusion that if the Honourable Mr. Ancram
really considered the influence of the Bengal
Free Press of no importance, he would not
.bn 123.png
.pn +1
take the trouble to say so. He arrived at it
safely, though, while apparently he was only
shaking his head and respectfully enjoying Mr.
Ancram’s humour, and saying, “Oh, no, no!
If sometimes we blame, we must also often
praise. Oh yess, certainlie. And efery one
says it iss a good piece off work.”
Ancram looked at his watch. The afternoon
was mellowing. If Mohendra Lall Chuckerbutty
had come for the purpose of discussing His
Honour the Lieutenant-Governor’s intentions
towards the University Colleges, he had better
begin. Mr. Ancram was aware that in so far as
so joyous and auspicious an event as a visit to a
Chief Secretary could be dominated by a purpose,
Mohendra’s was dominated by this one;
and he had been for some time reflecting upon
the extent to which he would allow himself to be
drawn. He was at variance with John Church’s
administration—now that three months had made
its direction manifest—at almost every point.
He was at variance with John Church himself—that
he admitted to be a matter of temperament.
But Church had involved the Government of
.bn 124.png
.pn +1
Bengal in blunders from which the advice of his
Chief Secretary, if he had taken it, would have
saved him. He had not merely ignored the
advice: he had rejected it somewhat pointedly,
being a candid man and no diplomat. If he
had acknowledged his mistakes ever so privately,
his Chief Secretary would have taken a fine
ethical pleasure in forgiving them; but the
Lieutenant-Governor appeared to think that
where principle was concerned the consideration
of expediency was wholly superfluous, and continued
to defend them instead, even after he
could plainly see, in the Bengal Free Press and
elsewhere, that they had begun to make him
unpopular. Ancram’s vanity had never troubled
him till now. It had grown with his growth,
and strengthened with his strength, under the
happiest circumstances, and he had been as
little aware of it as of his arterial system. John
Church had made him unpleasantly conscious of
it, and he was as deeply resentful as if John
Church had invested him with it. The Honourable
Mr. Ancram had never been discounted
before, and that this experience should come
.bn 125.png
.pn +1
to him through an official superior whom he
did not consider his equal in many points of
administrative sagacity, was a circumstance that
had its peculiar irritation. Mohendra Lall
Chuckerbutty was very well aware of this;
and yet he did not feel confident in approaching
the matter of His Honour and the higher
culture. It was a magnificent grievance. Mohendra
had it very much at heart, the Free Press
would have it very much at heart, and nothing
was more important than the private probing
of the Chief Secretary’s sentiment regarding it;
yet Mohendra hesitated. He wished very much
that there were some tangible reason why
Ancram should take sides against the Lieutenant-Governor,
some reason that could be expressed
in rupees: then he would have had
more confidence in hoping for an adverse
criticism. But for a mere dislike, a mere personal
antagonism, it would be so foolish. Thus
Mohendra vacillated, stroking his fat cheek
with his fingers, and looking at the matting.
Ancram saw that his visitor would end by
abandoning his intention, and became aware
.bn 126.png
.pn +1
that he would prefer that this should not
happen.
“And what do you think,” he said casually,
“of our proposal to make you all pay for your
Greek?”
Mohendra beamed. “I think, sir, that it
cannot be your proposal.”
“It isn’t,” said Ancram sententiously.
“If it becomes law, it will be the signal for
a great disturbance. I mean, off course,” the
Baboo hastened to add, “of a pacific kind. No
violence, of course! Morally speaking the community
is already up in arms—morally speaking!
It is destructive legislation, sir; we must
protest.”
“I don’t blame you for that.”
“Then you do not yourself approve off it?”
“I think it’s a mistake. Well-intentioned, but
a mistake.”
“Oh, the intention, that iss good! But impracticable,”
Mohendra ventured vaguely: “a
bubble in the air—that is all; but the question
i—iz,” he went on, “will it become law? Yesterday
only I first heard offitt. Mentally I said,
.bn 127.png
.pn +1
‘I will go to my noble friend and find out for
myself the rights offitt!’ Then I will act.”
“Oh, His Honour intends to put it through.
If you mean to do anything there’s no time to
lose.” Ancram assured himself afterwards that
between his duty as an administrator and his
private sentiment toward his chief there could be
no choice.
“We will petition the Viceroy.”
Ancram shook his head. “Time wasted.
The Viceroy will stick to Church.”
“Then we can petition the Secretary-off-State.”
“That might be useful, if you get the right
names.”
“We will have it fought out in Parliament.
Mr. Dadabhai——”
“Yes,” Ancram responded with a smile, “Mr.
Dadabhai——”
“There will be mass meetings on the
Maidan.”
“Get them photographed and send them to
the Illustrated London News.”
“And every paper will be agitating it. The
.bn 128.png
.pn +1
Free Press,'> the Hindu Patriot, the Bengalee—all
offthem will be writing about it——”
“There is one thing you must remember if
the business goes to England—the converts of
these colleges from which State aid is to be withdrawn.”
“Christians?” Mohendra shook his head
with a smile of contempt. “There are none.
It iss not to change their religion that the
Hindus go to college.”
“Ah!” returned Ancram. “There are none?
That is a pity. Otherwise you might have got
them photographed too, for the illustrated
papers.”
“Yes. It iss a pity.”
Mohendra reflected profoundly for a moment.
“But I will remember what you say about the
fottograff—if any can be found.”
“Well, let me know how you get on. In my
private capacity—in my private capacity, remember—as
the friend and well-wisher of the
people, I shall be interested in what you do. Of
course I talk rather freely to you, Baboo, because
we know each other well. I have not concealed
.bn 129.png
.pn +1
my opinion in this matter at any time, but
for all that it mustn’t be known that I have
active sympathies. You understand. This is
entirely confidential.”
“Oh, offcourse! my gracious goodness, yes!”
Mohendra’s eyes were moist—with gratification.
He was still trying to express it when he
withdrew, ten minutes later, backing toward the
door. Ancram shut it upon him somewhat
brusquely, and sent a servant for a whisky-and-soda.
It could not be said that he was in the
least nervous, but he was depressed. It always
depressed him to be compelled to take up an
attitude which did not invite criticism from
every point of view. His present attitude had
one aspect in which he was compelled to see
himself driving a nail into the acting Lieutenant-Governor’s
political coffin. Ancram would have
much preferred to see all the nails driven in
without the necessity for his personal assistance.
His reflections excluded Judith Church as completely
as if the matter were no concern of hers.
He considered her separately. The strengthening
of the bond between them was a pleasure
.bn 130.png
.pn +1
which had detached itself from all the other
interests of his life; he thought of it tenderly,
but the tenderness was rather for his sentimental
property in her than for her in any material
sense. She stood, with the dear treasure of her
sympathy, apart from the Calcutta world, and as
far apart from John Church as from the rest.
That evening, at dinner, Ancram told Philip
Doyle and another man that he had been drawing
Mohendra Lall Chuckerbutty on the University
College question, and he was convinced that
feeling was running very high.
“The fellow had the cheek to boast about
the row they were going to make,” said Mr.
Ancram.
.bn 131.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
CHAPTER VIII.
.sp 2
Philip Doyle did not know at all how it
was that he found himself at the Maharajah of
Pattore’s garden-party. He had not the honour
of knowing the Maharajah of Pattore—his invitation
was one of the many amiabilities which he
declared he owed to his distinguished connection
with the Bengal Secretariat in the person of
Lewis Ancram. Certainly Ancram had asked
him to accept, and take his, Ancram’s, apologies
to the Maharajah; but that seemed no
particular reason why he should be there. The
fact was, Doyle assured himself, as he bowled
along through the rice-fields of the suburbs
to His Highness’s garden-house—the fact was,
he was restless, he needed change supremely,
and anything out of the common round had
its value. Things in Calcutta had begun to wear
an unusually hard and irritating look; he felt
.bn 132.png
.pn +1
his eye for the delinquencies of human nature
growing keener and more critical. This state
of things, taken in connection with the possession
of an undoubted sense of humour, Doyle
recognised to be grave. He told himself that,
although he was unaware of anything actually
physically wrong, the effects of the climate
were most insidious, and he made it a subject
of congratulation that his passage was taken in
the Oriental.
There was a festival arch over the gate when
he reached it, and a multitude of little flags,
and “Wellcome” pendent in yellow marigolds.
Doyle was pleased that he had come. It was a
long time since he had attended a Maharajah’s
garden party; its features would be fresh and in
some ways soothing. He shook hands gravely
with the Maharajah’s eldest son, a slender, subdued,
cross-eyed young man in an embroidered
smoking-cap and a purple silk frock-coat, and said
“Thank you—thank you!” for a programme of
the afternoon’s diversions. The programme was
printed in gold letters, and he was glad to learn
from it that His Highness’s country residence
.bn 133.png
.pn +1
was called “Floral Bower.” This was entirely
as it should be. He noticed that the Maharajah
had provided wrestling and dancing and theatricals
for the amusement of his guests, and resolved
to see them all. He had a pleasant sense
of a strain momentarily removed, and he did not
importune himself to explain it. There were
very few English people in the crowd that
flocked about the grounds, following with docile
admiration the movements of the principal
guests; it was easy to keep away from them.
He had only to stroll about, and look at the
curiously futile arrangement of ponds and grottoes
and fountains and summer-houses, and observe
how pretty a rose-bush could be in spite
of everything and how appropriately brilliant
the clothes of the Maharajah’s friends were.
Some of the younger ones were playing football,
with much laughter and screaming and
wonderfully high kicks. He stood and watched
them, smilingly reflecting that he would back a
couple of Harrovians against the lot. His eyes
were still on the boys and the smile was still on
his lips when he found himself considering that
.bn 134.png
.pn +1
he would reach England just about the day of
Ancram’s wedding. Then he realised that Ancram’s
wedding had for him some of the characteristics
of a physical ailment which one tries,
by forgetting, to conjure out of existence. The
football became less amusing, and he was conscious
that much of its significance had faded
out of the Maharajah’s garden-party. Nevertheless
he followed the feebly curved path which
led to His Highness’s private menagerie, and it
was while he was returning the unsympathetic
gaze of a very mangy tiger in a very ramshackle
cage, that the reflection came between them, as
forcibly as if it were a new one, that he would
come back next cold weather to an empty house.
Ancram would be married. He acknowledged,
still carefully examining the tiger, that he would
regret the man less if his departure were due to
any other reason; and he tried to determine,
without much success, to what extent he could
blame himself in that his liking for Ancram had
dwindled so considerably during the last few
months. By the time he turned his back upon
the zoölogical attraction of the afternoon he had
.bn 135.png
.pn +1
fallen into the reverie from which he hoped to
escape in the Oriental—the recollection, perfect
in every detail, of the five times he had met
Rhoda Daye before her engagement, and a little
topaz necklace she had worn three times out of
the five, and the several things that he wished he
had said, and especially the agreeable exaltation
of spirit in which he had called himself, after
every one of these interviews, an elderly fool.
His first thought when he saw her, a moment
after, walking towards him with her father, was
of escape—the second quickened his steps in
her direction, for she had bowed, and after that
there could be no idea of going. He concluded
later, with definiteness, that it would have been
distinctly rude when there were not more than
twenty Europeans in the place. Colonel Daye’s
solid white-whiskered countenance broke into
a square smile as Doyle approached—a smile
which expressed that it was rather a joke to meet
a friend at a maharajah’s garden party.
“You’re a singular being,” he said, as they
shook hands; “one never comes across you in
the haunts of civilisation. Here’s my excuse.”
.bn 136.png
.pn +1
Colonel Daye indicated his daughter. “Would
come. Offered to take her to the races instead—wouldn’t
look at it!”
“If I had no reason for coming before, I’ve
found one,” said Doyle, with an inclination towards
Rhoda that laid the compliment at her
feet. There were some points about Philip Doyle
that no emotional experience could altogether
subdue. He would have said precisely the same
thing, with precisely the same twinkle, to any
woman he liked.
Rhoda looked at him gravely, having no response
ready. If the in-drawing of her under-lip
betrayed anything it was that she felt the least
bit hurt—which, in Rhoda Daye, was ridiculous.
If she had been asked she might have explained
it by the fact that there were people whom she
preferred to take her seriously, and in the ten
seconds during which her eyes questioned this
politeness she grew gradually delicately pink
under his.
“Rum business, isn’t it?” Colonel Daye went
on, tapping the backs of his legs with his stick.
“Hallo! there’s Grigg. I must see Grigg—do
.bn 137.png
.pn +1
you mind? Don’t wait, you know—just walk on.
I’ll catch you up in ten minutes.”
Without further delay Colonel Daye joined
Grigg.
“That’s like my father,” said the girl, with a
trace of embarrassment: “he never can resist the
temptation of disposing of me, if it’s only for ten
minutes. We ought to feel better acquainted
than we do. I’ve been out seven months now,
but it is still only before people that we dare to
chaff each other. I think,” she added, turning
her grey eyes seriously upon Doyle, “that he
finds it awkward to have so much of the society
of a young lady who requires to be entertained.”
“What a pity that is!” Doyle said involuntarily.
She was going to reply with one of her
bright, easy cynicisms, and then for some reason
changed her mind. “I don’t know about the
advantage of very deep affections,” she said involuntarily,
and there was no flippancy in her
tone. Doyle fancied that he detected a note of
pathos instead, but perhaps he was looking for it.
They were walking with a straggling company
.bn 138.png
.pn +1
of baboos in white muslin down a double
row of plantains towards the wrestling ring.
Involuntarily he made their pace slower.
“You can’t be touched by that ignoble spirit
of the age—already.”
Miss Daye felt her moral temperature fall
several degrees from the buoyant condition in
which she contrived to keep it as a rule. To
say she experienced a chill in the region of her
conscience is perhaps to put it grotesquely, but
she certainly felt inclined to ask Philip Doyle
with some astonishment what difference it made
to him.
“The spirit of the age is an annoying thing.
It robs one of all originality.”
“Pray,” he said, “be original in some other
direction. You have a very considerable choice.”
His manner disarmed his words. It was
grave, almost pleading. She wondered why she
was not angry, but the fact remained that she
was only vaguely touched, and rather unhappy.
Then he spoiled it.
“In my trade we get into dogmatic ways,”
he apologised. “You won’t mind the carpings
.bn 139.png
.pn +1
of an elderly lawyer who has won a bad eminence
for himself by living for twenty years in
Calcutta. By the way, I had Ancram’s apologies
to deliver to the Maharajah. If he had known
he would perhaps have entrusted me with more
important ones.” Doyle made this speech in
general compensation, to any one who wanted
it, for being near her—with her. If he expected
blushing confusion he failed to find it.
“He didn’t know,” she said indifferently;
“and if he had——Oh, there are the wrestlers.”
She looked at them for a moment with disfavour.
“Do you like them? I think they are like performing
animals.”
The men separated for a moment and rubbed
their shining brown bodies with earth. Somewhere
near the gate the Maharajah’s band struck
up “God Save the Queen,” four prancing pennons
appeared over the tops of the bushes, and
with one accord the crowd moved off in that
direction. A moment later His Highness was
doubling up in appreciation of His Excellency’s
condescension in arriving. His Excellency himself
was surrounded ten feet deep by his awe-struck
.bn 140.png
.pn +1
and delighted fellow-guests, and the wrestlers,
bereft of an audience, sat down and spat.
What Doyle always told himself that he must
do with regard to Miss Daye was to approach
her in the vein of polished commonplace—polished
because he owed it to himself, commonplace
because its after effect on the nerves he
found to be simpler. Realising his departure
from this prescribed course, he fervently set himself
down a hectoring idiot, and looked round for
Colonel Daye. Colonel Daye radiated the commonplace;
he was a most usual person. In his
society there was not the slightest danger of
saying anything embarrassing. But he was not
even remotely visible.
“Believe me,” said Rhoda, with sudden
divination, “we shall be lucky if we see my
father again in half an hour. I am very sorry,
but he really is a most unnatural parent.” There
was a touch of defiance in her laugh. He
should not lecture her again. “Where shall
we go?”
“Have you seen the acting?”
“Yes. It’s a conversation between Rama
.bn 141.png
.pn +1
and Shiva. Rama wears a red wig and Shiva
wears a yellow one; the rest is tinsel and pink
muslin. They sit on the floor and argue—that
is the play. While one argues the other chews
betel and looks at the audience. I’ve seen better
acting,” she added demurely, “at the Corinthian
Theatre.”
Doyle laughed irresistibly. Calcutta’s theatrical
resources, even in the season, lend themselves
to frivolous suggestion.
“I could show you the Maharajah’s private
chapel, if you like,” she said.
Doyle replied that nothing could be more
amusing than a Maharajah’s private chapel; and
as they walked together among the rose bushes
he felt every consideration, every scruple almost,
slip away from him in the one desire her nearness
always brought him—the desire for that
kind of talk with her which should seal the
right he vaguely knew was his to be acknowledged
in a privacy of her soul that was
barred against other people. Once or twice before
he had seemed almost to win it, and by
some gay little saying which rang false upon
.bn 142.png
.pn +1
his sincerity she had driven him back. She assuredly
did not seem inclined to give him an
opportunity this afternoon. It must be confessed
that she chattered, in that wilful, light, irrelevant
way that so stimulated his desire to be upon
tenderly serious terms with her, by no means as
her mentor, but for his own satisfaction and delight.
She chattered, with her sensitiveness
alive at every point to what he should say and
to what she thought she could guess he was
thinking. She believed him critical, which was
distressing in view of her conviction that he
could never understand her—never! He belonged
to an older school, to another world;
his feminine ideal was probably some sister or
mother, with many virtues and no opinions.
He was a person to respect and admire—she did
respect and she did admire him—but to expect
any degree of fellowship from him was absurd.
The incomprehensible thing was that this conclusion
should have any soreness about it. For
the moment she was not aware that this was
so; her perception of it had a way of coming
afterwards, when she was alone.
.bn 143.png
.pn +1
“Here it is,” she said, at the entrance of a
little grotto made of stucco and painted to look
like rock, serving no particular purpose, by the
edge of an artificial lake. “And here is the
shrine and the divinity!”
As a matter of fact, there was a niche in the
wall, and the niche held Hanuman with his
monkey face and his stolen pineapple, coy in
painted plaster.
Miss Daye looked at the figure with a crisp
assumption of interest. “Isn’t he amusing!” she
remarked: “‘Bloomin’ idol made o’ mud’!”
“And so this is where you think His Highness
comes to say his prayers?” Doyle said,
smiling.
“Perhaps he has a baboo to say them for
him,” she returned, as they strolled out.
“That would be an ideal occupation for a
baboo—to make representations on behalf of
one exalted personage to another. I wonder
what he asks Hanuman for! To be protected
from all the evils of this life, and to wake up
in the next another maharajah!”
He was so engaged with the airiness of her
.bn 144.png
.pn +1
whimsicality and the tilt of the feather in her
hat that he found no answer ready for this,
and to her imagination he took the liberty of
disapproving her flippancy. Afterwards she
told herself that it was not a liberty—that the
difference in their ages made it a right if he
chose to take it—but at the moment the idea
incited her to deepen his impression. She cast
about her for the wherewithal to make the
completest revelation of her cheaper qualities.
In a crisis of candour she would show him
just how audacious and superficial and trivial
she could be. Women have some curious instincts.
“I am dying,” she said, with vivacity, “to
see how His Highness keeps house. They say
he has a golden chandelier and the prettiest
harem in Bengal. And I confide to you, Mr.
Doyle, that I should like a glass of simpkin—immensely.
It goes to my head in the
most amusing way in the middle of the afternoon.”
“His ideal young woman,” she declared to
herself, “would have said ‘champagne’—no,
.bn 145.png
.pn +1
she would have preferred tea; and she would
have died rather than mention the harem.”
But it must be confessed that Philip Doyle
was more occupied for the moment with the
curve of her lips than with anything that
came out of them, except in so far that everything
she said seemed to place him more definitely
at a distance.
“I’m afraid,” he returned, “that the ladies
are all under double lock and key for the occasion,
but there ought to be no difficulty
about the champagne and the chandelier.”
At that moment Colonel Daye’s tall grey hat
came into view, threading the turbaned crowd in
obvious quest. Rhoda did not see it, and Doyle
immediately found a short cut to the house
which avoided the encounter. He had suddenly
remembered several things that he wanted
to say. They climbed a flight of marble
stairs covered with some dirty yards of matting,
and found themselves almost alone in the
Maharajah’s drawing-room. The Viceroy had
partaken of an ice and gone down again,
taking the occasion with him; and the long
.bn 146.png
.pn +1
table at the end of the room was almost as
heavily laden as when the confectioner had set
it forth.
“A little pink cake in a paper boat, please,”
she commanded, “with jam inside”; and then,
as Doyle went for it, she sat down on one of
Pattore’s big brocaded sofas, and crossed her
pretty feet, and looked at the chromolithographs
of the Prince and Princess of Wales
askew upon the wall, and wondered why she
was making a fool of herself.
“I’ve brought you a cup of coffee: do you
mind?” he asked, coming back with it. “His
Highness’ intentions are excellent, but the source
of his supplies is obscure. I tried the champagne,”
he added apologetically: “it’s unspeakable!”
No, Miss Daye did not mind. Doyle sat
down at the other end of the sofa, and reflected
that another quarter of an hour was all he
could possibly expect, and then——
“I am going home, Miss Daye,” he said.
Since there was no other way of introducing
himself to her consideration, he would do
it with a pitchfork.
.bn 147.png
.pn +1
“I knew you were. Soon?”
“The day after to-morrow, in the Oriental.
I suppose Ancram told you?”
“I believe he did. You and he are great
friends, aren’t you?”
“We live together. Men must be able to
tolerate each other pretty fairly to do that.”
“How long shall you be in England?”
“Six months, I hope.”
She was silent, and he fancied she was thinking,
with natural resentment, that he might have
postponed his departure until after the wedding.
Doyle hated a lie more than most people,
but he felt the situation required that he
should say something.
“The exigency of my going is unkind,” he
blundered. “It will deprive me of the pleasure
of offering Ancram my congratulations.”
There was only the faintest flavour of mendacity
about this; but she detected it, and fitted
it, with that unerring feminine instinct we hear
so much about, to her thought. For an instant
she seemed lost in buttoning her glove; then
she looked up, with a little added colour.
.bn 148.png
.pn +1
“Don’t tamper with your sincerity for me,”
she said quickly: “I’m not worth it. It’s very
kind of you to consider my feelings, but I
would much rather have the plain truth between
us—that you don’t approve of me or
of the—the marriage. I jar upon you—oh!
I see it! a dozen times in half an hour—and
you are sorry for your friend. For his sake
you even try to like me: I’ve seen you doing
it. Please don’t: it distresses me to know
that you take that trouble——”
“Here you are!” exclaimed Colonel Daye,
in the doorway. “Much obliged to you, Doyle,
really, for taking care of this little girl. Most
difficult man to get hold of, Grigg.”
.bn 149.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
CHAPTER IX.
.sp 2
It has been obvious, I hope, that Lewis
Ancram was temperamentally equal to adjusting
himself to a situation. His philosophy was
really characteristic of him; and none the less so
because it had a pessimistic and artistic tinge,
and he wore it in a Persian motto inside a crest
ring on his little finger. It can hardly be said
that he adjusted himself to his engagement and
his future, when it became apparent to him
that the one could not be broken or the other
changed, with cheerfulness—for cheerfulness was
too commonplace a mental condition to have
characterised Mr. Ancram under the happiest
circumstances. Neither can it be denied, however,
that he did it with a good deal of dignity
and some tact. He permitted himself to lose
the abstraction that had been overcoming him so
habitually in Rhoda’s society, and he said more
.bn 150.png
.pn +1
of those clever things to her which had been
temporarily obscured by the cloud on his spirits.
They saw one another rather oftener than usual
in the fortnight following the evening on which
Mr. Ancram thought he could suggest a course
for their mutual benefit to Miss Daye and
her daintily authoritative manner with him convinced
him that his chains were riveted very
firmly. At times he told himself that she had,
after all, affectionate potentialities, though he met
the problem of evolving them with a shrug. He
disposed himself to accept all the ameliorations
of the situation that were available, all the consolations
he could find. One of the subtlest and
therefore most appreciable of these was the
necessity, which his earlier confidence involved,
of telling Judith Church in a few suitably hesitating
and well-chosen words that things were
irrevocable. Judith kept silence for a moment,
and then, with a gravely impersonal smile, she
said, “I hope—and think—you may be happier
than you expect,” in a manner which made
further discussion of the matter impossible. It
cannot be doubted, however, that she was able
.bn 151.png
.pn +1
to convey to him an under-current of her sympathy
without embarrassment. Otherwise he
would hardly have found himself so dependent
on the odd half-hours during which they talked
of Henley’s verses and Swan’s pictures and the
possibility of barricading oneself against the
moral effect of India. Ancram often gave her
to understand, in one delicate way or another,
that if there were a few more women like her in
the country it could be done.
The opinion seemed to be general, though
perhaps nobody else formulated it exactly in
those terms. People went about assuring each
other that Mrs. Church was the most charming
social success, asserting this as if they recognised
that it was somewhat unusual to confer such a
decoration upon a lady whose husband had as
yet none whatever. People said she was a really
fascinating woman in a manner which at once condoned
and suggested her undistinguished antecedents—an
art which practice has made perfect
in the bureaucratic circles of India. They even
went so far as to add that the atmosphere of
Belvedere had entirely changed since the beginning
.bn 152.png
.pn +1
of the officiating period—which was preposterous,
for nothing could change the social atmosphere
of any court of Calcutta short of the
reconstruction of the Indian Empire. The total
of this meant that Mrs. Church had a good memory,
much considerateness, an agreeable disposition,
and pretty clothes. Her virtues, certainly
her virtues as I know them, would hardly be
revealed in the fierce light which beats upon the
wife of an acting Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal
from November until April, though a shadow
of one of them might have been detected in the
way she behaved to the Dayes. Ancram thought
her divine in this, but she was only an honest
woman with a temptation and a scruple. Her
dignity made it difficult; she was obliged to think
out delicate little ways of offering them her friendship
in the scanty half hours she had to herself
after dinner, while the unending scratch of her
husband’s pen came through the portière that
hung across the doorway into his dressing-room.
What she could do without consulting them she
did; though it is not likely that Colonel Daye
will ever attribute the remarkable smoothness of
.bn 153.png
.pn +1
his official path at this time to anything but the
spirit of appreciation in which he at last found
Government disposed to regard his services.
The rest was not so easy, because she had to
count with Rhoda. On this point her mother
was in the habit of invoking Rhoda’s better
nature, with regrettable futility. Mrs. Daye said
that for her part she accepted an invitation in the
spirit in which it was given, and it is to be feared
that no lady in Mrs. Church’s “official position”
would be compelled to make overtures twice to
Mrs. Daye, who told other ladies, in confidence,
that she had the best reason to believe Mrs.
Church a noble-minded woman—a beautiful soul.
It distressed her that she was not able to say
this to Rhoda also, to be frank with Rhoda, to
discuss the situation and perhaps to hint to the
dear child that her non-responsiveness to Mrs.
Church’s very kind attitude looked “the least bit
in the world like the little green monster, you
know, dearest one.” It was not, Mrs. Daye acknowledged,
that Rhoda actively resisted Mrs.
Church’s interest; she simply appeared to be unaware
of it, and sat on a chair beside that sweet
.bn 154.png
.pn +1
woman in the Belvedere drawing-room with the
effect of being a hundred miles away. Mrs. Daye
sometimes asked herself apprehensively how
soon Mrs. Church would grow tired of coaxing
Rhoda, how long their present beatitudes might
be expected to last. It was with this consideration
in mind that she went to her daughter’s
room the day after the Maharajah of Pattore’s
garden-party, which was Thursday. The windows
of that apartment were wide open, letting
in great squares of vivid sunlight, and their
muslin curtains bellied inward with the pleasant
north wind. It brought gusts of sound from the
life outside—the high plaintive cheeling of the
kites, the interminable cawing of the crows, the
swish of the palm fronds, the scolding of the
mynas; and all this life and light and clamour
seemed to centre in and circle about the yellow-haired
girl who sat, half-dressed, on the edge of
the bed writing a letter. She laid it aside face
downward, at her mother’s knock, and that
amiable lady found her daughter seated before
the looking-glass with a crumpled little brown
ayah brushing her hair.
.bn 155.png
.pn +1
Mrs. Daye cried out at the glare, at the noise.
“It’s like living in one of those fretwork marble
summer-houses at Delhi where the kings of
what-you-may-call-it dynasty kept their wives!”
she declared, with her hands pressed on her
eyes and a thumb in each ear; and when the
shutters were closed and the room reduced to
some degree of tranquillity, broken by glowing
points where the green slats came short of the
sash, she demanded eau-de-cologne and sank into
a chair. “I’ve come for ‘Cruelle Enigme,’
Rhoda,” Mrs. Daye announced.
“No, you haven’t, mummie. And besides,
you can’t have it—it isn’t a nice book for you
to read.”
“Can’t I?” Mrs. Daye asked plaintively.
“Well, dear, I suppose I must take your opinion—you
know how much my wretched nerves will
stand. From all I hear I certainly can’t be too
thankful to you for protecting me from Zola.”
“Ayah,” Rhoda commanded in the ayah’s
tongue, “give me the yellow book on the little
table—the yellow one, owl’s daughter! Here’s
one you can have, mother,” she said, turning
.bn 156.png
.pn +1
over a few of the leaves with a touch that was a
caress—“‘Robert Helmont’—you haven’t read
that.”
Mrs. Daye glanced at it without enthusiasm.
“It’s about a war, isn’t it? I’m not fond of
books about wars as a rule, they’re so ‘bluggy,’”
and the lady made a little face; “but of course—oh
yes, Daudet, I know he would be charming
even if he was bluggy. Rhoda, don’t make any
engagement for Sunday afternoon. I’ve accepted
an invitation from Belvedere for a river-party.”
The face in the looking-glass showed the least
contraction between the eyebrows. The ayah
saw it, and brushed even more gently than
before. Mrs. Daye was watching for it, and
hurried on. “I gather from Mrs. Church’s extremely
kind note—she writes herself, and not
the aide-de-camp—that it is a little fête she is
making especially, in a manner, for you and
Mr. Ancram, dear—in celebration, as it were.
She has asked only people we know very well
indeed; it is really almost a family affair. Very
sweet of her I call it, though of course Lewis
.bn 157.png
.pn +1
Ancram is an old friend of—of the Lieutenant-Governor’s.”
The contraction between the girl’s brows
deepened seriously, gave place to a considering
air, and for a moment she looked straight into her
own eyes in the glass and said nothing. They
rewarded her presently with a bubble of mischievous
intelligence, which almost broke into
a smile. Mrs. Daye continued to the effect that
nothing did one so much good as a little jaunt
on the river—it seemed to blow the malaria out
of one’s system—for her part she would give up
anything for it. But Rhoda had no other engagement?
“Oh dear no!” Miss Daye replied. “There
is nothing in the world to interfere!”
“Then you will go, dearest one?”
“I shall be delighted.”
“My darling child, you have relieved my
mind! I was so afraid that some silly little fad—I
know how much you dislike the glare of the
river——” then, forgetfully, “I will write at once
and accept for us all.” Mrs. Daye implanted a
kiss upon her daughter’s forehead, with a sense
.bn 158.png
.pn +1
that she was picturesquely acknowledging dutiful
obedience, and rustled out. “Robert Helmont”
remained on the floor beside her chair,
and an indefinitely pleasant freshness was diffused
where she had been.
As Rhoda twisted her hair a little uncontrollable
smile came to her lips and stayed
there. “Ayah, worthy one,” she said, “give me
the letter from the bed”; and having read
what she had written she slowly tore it into
very small pieces. “After all,” she reflected,
“that would be a stupid way.”
.bn 159.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
CHAPTER X.
.sp 2
The opinion was a united one on board the
Annie Laurie the next Sunday afternoon that
Nature had left nothing undone to make the
occasion a success. This might have testified
to less than it did; for a similar view has been
expressed as unanimously, and adhered to as
firmly, on board the Annie Laurie when the banks
of the Hooghly have been grey with deluge and
the ladies have saved their skirts by sitting on
one another’s knees in her tiny cabin. The
Annie Laurie being the Lieutenant-Governor’s
steam-launch, nobody but the Lieutenant-Governor
presumes to be anything but complimentary
as to the weather experienced aboard her. And
this in India is natural. It could not be said,
however, that there was anything necessarily
diplomatic even in Mrs. Daye’s appreciation of
this particular afternoon. The air—they all dilated
.bn 160.png
.pn +1
on the air—blew in from the sea, across
the salt marshes, through the plantains and the
cocoanut-trees of the little villages, and brought
a dancing crispness, softened by the sun. The
brown river hurtled outwards past her buoys,
and a great merchant ship at anchor in midstream
swung slowly round with the tide. A
vague concourse of straight masts and black
hulls and slanting funnels stretched along the
bank behind them with the indefiniteness that
comes of multitude, for every spar and line stood
and swung clear cut in the glittering sun; and
the point they were bound for elbowed itself
out into the river two miles farther down, in the
grey greenness of slanting, pluming palms. Already
the water was growing more golden
where the palms toppled over the river: there
would not be more than two good hours of
daylight. As Mrs. Daye remarked to the Lieutenant-Governor,
life was all too short in the
cold weather really to absorb, to drink in, the
beauties of nature—there was so much going on.
“Then,” said His Honour, “we must make
the most of our time.” But he did not prolong
.bn 161.png
.pn +1
his gaze at Mrs. Daye by way of emphasising his
remark, as another man, and especially another
lieutenant-governor, might have done. He fixed
it instead on the dilapidated plaster façade on
the left bank of the river, formerly inhabited by
the King of Oudh and his relatives, and thought
of the deplorable sanitation there.
Not that John Church was by any means
unappreciative of the beauties of nature. It
was because he acknowledged the moral use of
them that he came on these Sunday afternoon
picnics. He read the poets, and would pay a
good price for a bronze or a picture, for much
the same reason. They formed part of his system
of self-development; he applied them to his
mind through the medium which nature has
provided, and trusted that the effect would be
good. He did it, however, as he did everything,
with the greatest possible economy of time, and
sometimes other considerations overlapped.
That very afternoon he meant to speak to the
Superintendent of the Botanical Gardens—the
green elbow of the river crooked about this
place—concerning the manufacture and distribution
.bn 162.png
.pn +1
of a new febrifuge, and he presently edged
away from Mrs. Daye with the purpose of finding
out her husband’s views concerning the silting
up of river-beds in Bengal and the cost of
preventive measures. Life with John Church
could be measured simply as an area for effort.
.il id=i150a fn=i_150a.jpg w=550px ew=90%
.ca Notwithstanding, it was gay enough.
Notwithstanding these considerations, it was
gay enough. Captain Thrush, A.D.C., sat on the
top of the cabin, and swung his legs to the accompaniment
of his amusing experiences the last
time he went quail shooting. The St. Georges
were there, and the St. Georges were proverbial
in Calcutta for lightheartedness. Sir William
Scott might have somewhat overweighted the
occasion; but Sir William Scott had taken off his
hat, the better to enjoy the river-breeze, and this
reduced him to a name and a frock coat. In the
general good spirits the abnegation and the resolution
with which Lewis Ancram and Judith
Church occupied themselves with other people
might almost have passed unnoticed. Rhoda
Daye found herself wondering whether it would
be possible for Ancram to be pathetic under the
most moving circumstances, so it may be presumed
.bn 163.png
.bn 164.png
.bn 165.png
.pn +1
that she perceived it; but the waves of
mirth engendered by Captain Thrush and the
St. Georges rolled over it so far as the rest were
concerned, as they might over a wreck of life
and hope. This pretty simile occurred to Miss
Daye, who instantly dismissed it as mawkish,
but nevertheless continued, for at least five minutes,
to reflect on the irony of fate, as, for the
moment, she helped to illustrate it. A new gravity
fell upon her for that period, as she sat there
and watched Judith Church talking to Sir William
Scott about his ferns. For the first time
she became aware that the situation had an
edge to it—that she was the edge. She was
the saturnine element in what she had hitherto
resolutely regarded as a Calcutta comedy; she
was not sure that she could regard it as a
comedy any longer, even from the official point
of view. Ancram evidently had it in mind to
make an exhibition to the world in general, and
to Mrs. Church in particular, of devotion to his
betrothed. She caught him once or twice in the
act of gratefully receiving Mrs. Church’s approving
glance. Nevertheless she had an agreeable
.bn 166.png
.pn +1
tolerance for all that he found to do for her.
She forbade herself, for the time being, any
further analysis of a matter with which she meant
to have in future little concern. In that anticipation
she became unaccountably light-hearted and
talkative and merry. So much so, that Captain
Thrush, A.D.C., registered his conviction that
she was really rather a pretty girl—more in her
than he thought; and the Honourable Mr. Lewis
Ancram said to himself that she was enjoying,
in anticipation, the prestige she would have a
month later, and that the cleverest of women
were deplorably susceptible to social ambition.
The Superintendent met them at the wharf,
and John Church led the way up the great
central avenue of palms, whose grey, shaven
polls look as if they had been turned by some
giant lathe, with his hand on the arm of this
gentleman. The others arranged themselves
with a single eye to avoiding the stupidity
of walking with their own wives and trooped
after.
“We are going to the orchid-houses, John,”
Mrs. Church called after her husband, as Sir
.bn 167.png
.pn +1
William Scott brought them to a halt at a
divergent road he loved; and Church took off
his hat in hurried acquiescence.
“Notice my new Dendrobium!” cried the
Superintendent, turning a rueful countenance
upon them. “The only one in Asia!” Then
his head resumed its inclination of respectful
attention, and the pair disappeared.
Mrs. Church laughed frankly. “Poor Dr.
James!” she exclaimed. “My husband is
double-dyed in febrifuge to-day.”
Ancram took the privilege—it was one he
enjoyed—of gently rebuking her. “It is one
of those common, urgent needs of the people,”
he said, “that His Honour so intimately
understands.”
Judith looked at him with a sudden sweet
humility in her eyes. “You are quite right,”
she returned. “I sometimes think that nobody
knows him as you do. Certainly,” she added,
in a lower tone, as the two fell back, “nobody
has more of his confidence, more of his
dependence.”
“I don’t know,” Ancram answered vaguely.
.bn 168.png
.pn +1
“Do you really think so? I don’t
know.”
“I am sure of it.”
He looked straight before him in silence,
irritated in his sensitive morality—the morality
which forbade him to send a Government
chuprassie on a private errand, or to write to
his relations in England on office paper. A
curve in the walk showed them Rhoda Daye,
standing alone on the sward, beside a bush in
crimson-and-orange flower, intently examining a
spray. Almost involuntarily they paused, and
Ancram turned his eyes upon Mrs. Church
with the effect of asking her what he should
do, what he must do.
“Go!” she said; and then, as if it were a
commonplace: “I think Miss Daye wants you.
I will overtake the others.”
She thought he left her very willingly, and
hurried on with the conviction that, like everything
else, it would come right—quite right—in
the end. She was very happy if in any way she
had helped it to come right—so happy that she
longed to be alone with her sensations, and revolted
.bn 169.png
.pn +1
with all her soul against the immediate
necessity of Sir William Scott and the St.
Georges. To be for a few hours quite alone,
unseen and unknown, in the heart of some
empty green wilderness like this, would help
her, she knew, to rationalise her satisfaction.
“My dear boy,” she said, with nervous patience,
as Captain Thrush appeared in search
of her, “did you think I had fallen into a
tank? Do go and take care of the other people.”
An aide-de-camp was not a serious impediment
to reflection, but at the moment
Judith would have been distressed by the attendance
of her own shadow, if it were too
perceptible.
Ancram crossed over to Rhoda, with his
antipathy to the Lieutenant-Governor sensibly
aggravated by the fact that his wife took an
interest in him—an appreciative interest. It
was out of harmony, Ancram felt vaguely, that
she should do this—it jarred. He had so admired
her usual attitude of pale, cool, sweet
tolerance toward John Church—had so approved
it. That attitude had been his solace
.bn 170.png
.pn +1
in thinking about her in her unique position
and with her rare temperament. To suppose
her counting up her husband’s virtues, weighing
them, doing justice to them, tinged her
with the commonplace, and disturbed him.
“That’s a curious thing,” he said to Rhoda.
She let go her hold of the twig, and the
red-and-gold flower danced up like a flame.
“It belongs to the sun and the soil; so it
pleases one better than any importation.”
“An orchid is such a fairy—you can’t expect
it to have a nationality,” he returned.
She stood, with her head thrown back a little,
looking at the sprays that swung above the
line of her lips. Her wide-brimmed hat dropped
a soft shadow over the upper part of her face;
her eyes shone through it with a gleam of intensely
feminine sweetness, and the tender curve
of her throat gave him an unreasoned throb of
anticipation. In six weeks he would be married
to this slender creature; it would be an excursion
into the unknown, not unaccompanied by
adventures. Tentatively, it might be agreeable;
it would certainly be interesting. He confessed
.bn 171.png
.pn +1
to a curiosity which was well on the way to become
impatient.
“Then do you want to go and see the Dendrobium?”
she asked.
“Not if you prefer to do anything else.”
“I think I would enjoy the cranes more, or
the pink water-lilies. The others will understand,
won’t they, that we two might like to take
a little walk?”
Her coquetry, he said to himself, was preposterously
pretty. They took another of the wide
solitary paths that led under showery bamboos
and quivering mahogany trees to where a stretch
of water gave back the silence of the palms
against the evening sky, and he dropped unconsciously
into the stroll which is characterised
everywhere as a lover’s. She glanced at him
once or twice corroboratively, and said to herself
that she had not been mistaken: he had real
distinction—he was not of the herd. Then she
picked up broad, crisp leaves with the point of
her parasol and pondered while he talked of a
possible walking tour in the Tyrol. Presently
she broke in irrelevantly, hurriedly.
.bn 172.png
.pn +1
“I like to do a definite thing in a definite
way: don’t you?”
“Certainly; yes, of course.”
“Well; and that is why I waited till this
afternoon to tell you—to tell you——”
“To tell me——”
“My dear Mr. Ancram, that I cannot possibly
marry you.”
She had intended to put it differently, more
effectively—perhaps with a turn that would
punish him for his part in making the situation
what it was. But it seemed a more momentous
thing than she thought, now that she came to do
it; she had a sense that destiny was too heavy a
thing to play with.
He gave her an official look, the look which
refuses to allow itself to be surprised, and
said “Really?” in a manner which expressed absolutely
nothing except that she had his attention.
“I do not pretend,” she went on, impaling
her vanity upon her candour, “that this will give
you the slightest pain. I have been quite conscious
of the relation between us” (here she
.bn 173.png
.pn +1
blushed) “for a very long time; and I am afraid
you must understand that I have reached this decision
without any undue distress—moi aussi.”
She had almost immediately regained her
note; she was wholly mistress of what she said.
For an instant Ancram fancied that the bamboos
and the mahogany trees and the flaming hibiscus
bushes were unreal, that he was walking into a
panorama, and it seemed to him that his steps
were uncertain. He was carrying his silk hat,
and he set himself mechanically to smooth it
round and round with his right hand as he
listened.
When she paused he could find nothing
better to say than “Really?” again; and he
added, “You can’t expect me to be pleased.”
“Oh, but I do,” she returned promptly.
“You are, aren’t you?”
It seemed a friendly reminder of his best interests.
It brought the bamboos back to a
vegetable growth, and steadied Ancram’s nerves.
He continued to smooth his hat; but he recovered
himself sufficiently to join her, at a
bound, in the standpoint from which she seemed
.bn 174.png
.pn +1
inclined to discuss the matter without prejudice.
“Since we are to be quite candid with each
other,” he said, smiling, “I’m not sure.”
“Your candour has—artistic qualities—which
make it different from other people’s. At all
events, you will be to-morrow: to-morrow you
will thank Heaven fasting.”
He looked at her with some of the interest
she used to inspire in him before his chains
began to gall him.
“Prickly creature!” he said. “Are you quite
sure? Is your determination unalterable?”
“I acknowledge your politeness in asking
me,” she returned. “It is.”
“Then I suppose I must accept it.” He
spoke slowly. “But for the soulagement you suggest
I am afraid I must wait longer than to-morrow.”
They walked on in silence, reached the rank
edge of the pond, and turned to go back. The
still hung mellow in mid air, and
something of its tranquillity seemed to have
descended between them. In their joint escape
.bn 175.png
.pn +1
from their mutual burden they experienced a
reciprocal good feeling, something like comradeship,
not untouched by sentiment. Once or
twice he referred to their broken bond, asking
her, with the appetite of his egotism, to give
him the crystal truth of the reason she had accepted
him.
“I accepted my idea of you,” she said simply,
“which was not altogether an accurate one.
Besides, I think a good deal about—a lot of questions
of administration. I thought I would like to
have a closer interest, perhaps a hand in them.
Such fools of women do.”
After which they talked in a friendly way (it
has been noted that Ancram was tolerant) about
how essential ambition was to the bearableness of
life in India.
“I see that you will be a much more desirable
acquaintance,” Rhoda said once, brightly,
“now that I am not going to marry you.” And
he smiled in somewhat unsatisfied acquiescence.
Ancram grew silent as they drew near the
main avenue and the real parting. The dusk
had fallen suddenly, and a little wind brought
.bn 176.png
.pn +1
showers of yellow leaves out of the shivering
bamboos. They were quite alone, and at a short
distance almost indistinguishable from the ixora
bushes and the palmettos.
“Rhoda,” he said, stopping short, “this is
our last walk together—we who were to have
walked together always. May I kiss you?”
The girl hesitated for an instant. “No,” she
said, with a nervous laugh: “not that. It would
be like the resurrection of something that had
never lived and never died!”
But she gave him her hand, and he kissed
that, with some difficulty in determining whether
he was grateful or aggrieved.
“It’s really very raw,” said Miss Daye, as
they approached the others; “don’t you think
you had better put on your hat?”
.bn 177.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
CHAPTER XI.
.sp 2
“Rhoda,” said Mrs. Daye, as her daughter
entered the drawing-room next morning, “I
have thought it all out, and have decided to ask
them. Mrs. St. George quite agrees with me.
She says, sound the Military Secretary first, and
of course I will; but she thinks they are certain
to accept. Afterward we’ll have the whole
party photographed on the back verandah—I
don’t see how they could get out of it—and
that will be a souvenir for you, if you like.”
The girl sank into a deep easy chair and
crossed her knees with deliberation. She was
paler than usual; she could not deny a certain
lassitude. As her mother spoke she put up her
hand to hide an incipient yawn, and then turned
her suffused eyes upon that lady, with the effect
of granting a weary but necessary attention.
.bn 178.png
.pn +1
“You have decided to ask them?” she asked,
with absent-minded interrogation. “Whom?”
“How ridiculous you are, Rhoda! The
Viceroy and Lady Scansleigh, of course! As
if there could be the slightest doubt about anybody
else! You will want to know next what
I intend to ask them to. I have never known
a girl take so little interest in her own wedding.”
“That brings us to the point,” said Rhoda.
An aroused suspicion shot into Mrs. Daye’s
brown eyes. “What point, pray? No nonsense,
now, Rhoda!”
“No nonsense this time, mummie; but no
wedding either. I have decided—finally—not to
marry Mr. Ancram.”
Mrs. Daye sat upright—pretty, plump, determined.
She really looked at the moment as if
she could impose her ideas upon anybody. She
had a perception of the effect, to this end, of an
impressive tournure. Involuntarily she put a
wispish curl in its place, and presented to her
daughter the outline of an unexceptionable
shoulder and sleeve.
.bn 179.png
.pn +1
“Your decision comes too late to be effectual,
Rhoda. People do not change their minds in
such matters when the wedding invitations are
actually——”
“Written out to be lithographed—but not
ordered yet, mummie.”
“In half an hour they will be.”
“Would have been, mummie dear.”
Mrs. Daye assumed the utmost severity possible
to a countenance intended to express only
the amenities of life, and took her three steps
toward the door. “This is childish, Rhoda,”
she said over her shoulder, “and I will not
remain to listen to it. Retraction on your part
at this hour would be nothing short of a crying
scandal, and I assure you once for all that
neither your father nor I will hear of it.”
Mrs. Daye reached the door very successfully.
Rhoda turned her head on its cushion,
and looked after her mother in silence, with a
half-deprecating smile. Having achieved the
effect of her retreat, that lady turned irresolutely.
“I cannot remain to listen to it,” she repeated,
and stooped to pick up a pin.
.bn 180.png
.pn +1
“Oh, do remain, mummie! Don’t behave
like the haughty and hard-hearted mamma of
primitive fiction; she is such an old-fashioned
person. Do remain and be a nice, reasonable,
up-to-date mummie: it will save such a lot of
trouble.”
“You don’t seem to realise what you are
talking of throwing over!”
Mrs. Daye, in an access of indignation, came
as far back as the piano.
“Going down to dinner before the wives of
the Small Cause Court! What a worldly lady
it is!”
“I wish,” Mrs. Daye ejaculated mentally,
“that I had been brought up to manage daughters.”
What she said aloud, with the effect of
being forced to do so, was that Rhoda had also
apparently forgotten that her sister Lettice was
to come out next year. Before the gravity of
this proposition Mrs. Daye sank into the nearest
chair. And the expense, with new frocks for
Darjiling, would be really——
“All the arguments familiar to the pages of
the Family Herald,” the girl retorted, a dash of
.bn 181.png
.pn +1
bitterness in her amusement, “‘with a little store
of maxims, preaching down a daughter’s heart!’
Aren’t you ashamed, mummie! But you needn’t
worry about that. I’ll go back to England and
live with Aunt Jane: she dotes on me. Or I’ll
enter the Calcutta Medical College and qualify
as a lady-doctor. I shouldn’t like the cutting up,
though—I really shouldn’t.”
“Rhoda, tu me fais mal! If you could only
be serious for five minutes together. I suppose
you have some absurd idea that Mr. Ancram is
not sufficiently—demonstrative. But that will
all come in due time, dear.”
The girl laughed so uncontrollably that Mrs.
Daye suspected herself of an unconscious witticism,
and reflected a compromising smile.
“You think I could win his affections afterwards.
Oh! I should despair of it. You have
no idea how coy he is, mummie!”
Mrs. Daye made a little grimace of sympathy,
and threw up her eyes and her hands.
They laughed together, and then the elder lady
said with severity that her daughter was positively
indecorous. “Nothing could have been
.bn 182.png
.pn +1
more devoted than his conduct yesterday afternoon.
‘How ridiculously happy,’ was what
Mrs. St. George said—‘how ridiculously happy
those two are!’”
Mrs. Daye had become argumentative and
plaintive. She imparted the impression that
if there was another point of view—which she
doubted—she was willing to take it.
“Oh! no doubt it was evident enough,”
Rhoda said tranquilly: “we had both been let
off a bad bargain. An afternoon I shall always
remember with pleasure.”
“Then you have actually done it—broken
with him!”
“Yes.”
“Irrevocably?”
“Very much so.”
“Do tell me how he took it!”
“Calmly. With admirable fortitude. It occupied
altogether about ten minutes, with
digressions. I’ve never kept any of his notes—he
doesn’t write clever notes—and you know
I’ve always refused to wear a ring. So there
was nothing to return except Buzz, which
.bn 183.png
.pn +1
wouldn’t have been fair to Buzz. It won’t
make a scandal, will it, my keeping Buzz?
He’s quite a changed dog since I’ve had him,
and I love him for himself alone. He doesn’t
look in the least,” Rhoda added, thoughtfully
regarding the terrier curled up on the sofa,
who turned his brown eyes on her and wagged
his tail without moving, “like a Secretariat
puppy.”
“And is that all?”
“That’s all—practically.”
“Well, Rhoda, of course I had to think of
your interests first—any mother would; but if
it’s really quite settled, I must confess that I
believe you are well out of it, and I’m rather
relieved myself. When I thought of being that
man’s mother-in-law I used to be thankful sometimes
that your father would retire so soon—which
was horrid, dear.”
“I can understand your feelings, mummie.”
“I’m sure you can, dear: you are always my
sympathetic child. I wouldn’t have married him
for worlds! I never could imagine how you
made up your mind to it in the first place.
.bn 184.png
.pn +1
Now, I suppose that absurd Mrs. St. George
will go on with her theory that no daughter
of mine will ever marry in India, because the
young men find poor old me so amusing!”
“She’s a clever woman—Mrs. St. George,”
Rhoda observed.
“And now that we’ve had our little talk,
dear, there’s one thing I should like you to
take back—that quotation from Longfellow, or
was it Mrs. Hemans?—about a daughter’s heart,
you know.” Mrs. Daye inclined her head coaxingly
towards the side. “I shouldn’t like to have
that to remember between us, dear,” she said,
and blew her nose with as close an approach
to sentiment as could possibly be achieved in
connection with that organ.
“You ridiculous old mummie! I assure you
it hadn’t the slightest application.”
“Then that’s all right,” Mrs. Daye returned,
in quite her sprightly manner. “I’ll refuse the
St. Georges’ dinner on Friday night; it’s only
decent that we should keep rather quiet for a
fortnight or so, till it blows over a little. And
we shall get rid of you, my dear child, I’m
.bn 185.png
.pn +1
perfectly certain, quite soon enough,” she added
over her shoulder, as she rustled out. “With
your brains, you might even marry very well
at home. But your father is sure to be put out
about this—awfully put out!”
“Do you know, Buzz,” murmured Rhoda a
moment later (the terrier had jumped into her
lap), “if I had been left an orphan in my early
youth, I fancy I would have borne it better than
most people.”
.bn 186.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
CHAPTER XII.
.sp 2
The editor of the Word of Truth sat in his
office correcting a proof. The proof looked insurmountably
difficult of correction, because it
was printed in Bengali; but Tarachand Mookerjee’s
eye ran over it nimbly, and was accompanied
by a smile, ever expanding and contracting,
of pleased, almost childish appreciation.
The day was hot, unusually so for February;
and as the European editors up-town worked
in their shirt-sleeves, so Tarachand Mookerjee
worked in his dhoty, which left him bare from
his waist up—bare and brown and polished, like
a figure carved in mahogany, for his ribs were
very visible. He wore nothing else, except
patent leather shoes and a pair of white cotton
stockings, originally designed for a more
muscular limb, if for a weaker sex. These
draperies were confined below the knee by
.bn 187.png
.pn +1
pieces of the red tape with which a considerate
Government tied up the reports and resolutions
it sent the editor of the Word of
Truth for review. Above Tarachand’s three-cornered
face his crisp black hair stood in
clumps of oily and admired disorder; he had
early acquired the literary habit of running his
fingers through it. He had gentle, velvety eyes,
and delicate features, and a straggling beard.
He had lost two front teeth, and his attenuated
throat was well sunk between his narrow shoulders.
This gave him the look of a poor nervous
creature; and, indeed, there was not a black-and-white
terrier in Calcutta that could not have
frightened him horribly. Yet he was not in
the least afraid of a watch-dog belonging to
Government—an official translator who weekly
rendered up a confidential report of the emanations
of the Word of Truth in English—because
he knew that this animal’s teeth were drawn by
the good friends of Indian progress in the English
Parliament.
Tarachand did almost everything that had
to be done for the Word of Truth except the
.bn 188.png
.pn +1
actual printing; although he had a nephew
at the Scotch Mission College who occasionally
wrote a theatrical notice for him in consideration
of a free ticket, and who never
ceased to urge him to print the paper in
English, so that he, the nephew, might have
an opportunity of practising composition in that
language. It was Tarachand who translated the
news out of the European papers into his own
columns, where it read backwards, who reviewed
the Bengali school-books written by the pundits
of his acquaintance, who “fought” the case of
the baboo in the Public Works Department
dismissed for the trivial offence of stealing blotting-paper.
It was, above all, Tarachand who
wrote editorials about the conduct of the Government
of India: that was the business of his
life, his morning and his evening meditation.
Tarachand had a great pull over the English
editors uptown here; had a great pull, in fact,
over any editors anywhere who felt compelled
to base their opinions upon facts, or to express
them with an eye upon consequences. Tarachand
knew nothing about facts—it is doubtful
.bn 189.png
.pn +1
whether he would recognise one if he saw it—and
consequences did not exist for him. In place
of these drawbacks he had the great advantages
of imagination and invective. He was therefore
able to write the most graphic editorials.
He believed them, too, with the open-minded,
admiring simplicity that made him wax and
wane in smiles over this particular proof. I
doubt whether Tarachand could be brought to
understand the first principles of veracity as applied
to public affairs, unless possibly through his
pocket. A definition to the Aryan mind is always
best made in rupees, and to be mulcted
heavily by a court of law might give him a
grieved and surprised, but to some extent convincing
education in political ethics. It would
necessarily interfere at the same time, however,
with his untrammelled and joyous talent for the
creation and circulation of cheap fiction; it
would be a hard lesson, and in the course of it
Tarachand would petition with fervid loyalty and
real tears. Perhaps it was on some of these
accounts that the Government of India had never
run Tarachand in.
.bn 190.png
.pn +1
Even for an editor’s office it was a small
room, and though it was on the second floor, the
walls looked as if fungi grew on them in the
rains. The floor was littered with publications;
for the Word of Truth was taken seriously in
Asia and in Oxford, and “exchanged” with a
number of periodicals devoted to theosophical
research, or the destruction of the opium revenue,
or the protection of the sacred cow by combination
against the beef-eating Briton. In one
corner lay a sprawling blue heap of the reports
and resolutions before mentioned, accumulating
the dust of the year, at the end of which
Tarachand would sell them for waste paper.
For the rest, there was the editorial desk, with
a chair on each side of it, the editorial gum-pot
and scissors and waste-paper basket; and portraits,
cut from the Illustrated London News,
askew on the wall and wrinkling in their frames,
of Max Müller and Lord Ripon. The warm air
was heavy with the odour of fresh printed sheets,
and sticky with Tarachand’s personal anointing
of cocoa-nut oil, and noisy with the clamping
of the press below, the scolding of the crows,
.bn 191.png
.pn +1
the eternal wrangle of the streets. Through the
open window one saw the sunlight lying blindly
on the yellow-and-pink upper stories, with their
winding outer staircases and rickety balconies
and narrow barred windows, of the court
below.
Tarachand finished his proof and put it aside
to cough. He was bent almost double, and still
coughing when Mohendra Lal Chuckerbutty
came in; so that the profusion of smiles with
which he welcomed his brother journalist was
not undimmed with tears. They embraced strenuously,
however, and Mohendra, with a corner
of his nether drapery, tenderly wiped the eyes
of Tarachand. For the moment the atmosphere
became doubly charged with oil and sentiment,
breaking into a little storm of phrases of affection
and gestures of respect. When it had been
gone through with, these gentlemen of Bengal
sat opposite each other beaming, and turned
their conversation into English as became gentlemen
of Bengal.
“I deplore,” said Mohendra Lal Chuckerbutty
concernedly, with one fat hand outspread
.bn 192.png
.pn +1
on his knee, “to see that this iss still remaining
with you——”
The other, with a gesture, brushed his ailment
away. “Oh, it iss nothing—nothing whatever!
I have been since three days under astronomical
treatment of Dr. Chatterjee. ‘Sir,’ he remarked
me yesterday, as I was leaving his höwwse,
‘after one month you will be again salubrious.
You will be on legs again—take my word!’”
Mohendra leaned back in his chair, put his
head on one side, and described a right angle
with one leg and the knee of the other. “Smart
chap, Chatterjee!” he said, in perfect imitation
of the casual sahib. He did not even forget to
smooth his chin judicially as he said it. The
editor of the Word of Truth, whose social opportunities
had been limited to his own caste, looked
on with admiration.
“And what news do you bring? But already
I have perused the Bengal Free Press of to-day,
so without doubt I know all the news!” Tarachand
made this professional compliment as
coyly and insinuatingly as if he and Mohendra
had been sweethearts. “I cannot withhold my
.bn 193.png
.pn +1
congratulations on that leader of thiss morning,”
he went on fervently. “Here it is to my hand;
diligently I have been studying it with awful
admiration.”
Mohendra’s chin sank into his neck in a series
of deprecating nods and inarticulate expressions
of dissent, and his eyes glistened. Tarachand
took up the paper and read from it:—
.ce
“‘The Satrap and the Colleges.’
“Ah, how will His Honour look when he sees
that!
.fs 90%
“‘Is it possible, we ask all sane men with a heart
in their bosom, that Dame Rumour is right in her
prognostications? Can it be true that the tyrant of
Belvedere will dare to lay his hand on the revenue
sacredly put aside to shower down upon our young
hopefuls the mother’s milk of an Alma Mater upon
any pretext whatsoever? We fear the affirmative.
Even as we go to press the knell of higher education
may be sounding, and any day poor Bengal may learn
from a rude Notification in the Gazette that her hope
of progress has been shattered by the blasting pen of
the caitiff Church. We will not mince matters, nor
hesitate to proclaim to the housetops that the author
.bn 194.png
.pn +1
of this dastardly action is but a poor stick. Doubtless
he will say that the College grants are wanted for
this or for that; but full well the people of this province
know it is to swell the fat pay of boot-licking
English officials that they are wanted. A wink is as
good as a nod to a blind horse, and any excuse will
serve when an autocrat without fear of God or man
sits upon the gaddi. Many are the pitiable cases of
hardship that will now come to view. One amongst
thousands will serve. Known to the writer is a family
man, and a large one. He has been blessed with
seven sons, all below the age of nine. Up to the
present he has been joyous as a lark and playful as a
kitten, trusting in the goodness of Government to
provide the nutrition of their minds and livelihoods.
Now he is beating his breast, for his treasures will be
worse than orphans. How true are the words of the
poet—
.pm start_poem
“‘Manners with fortunes, humours turn with climes,
Tenets with books, and principles with times!’
.pm end_poem
Again and yet again have we exposed the hollow,
heartless and vicious policy of the acting Lieutenant-Governor,
but, alas! without result.
.pm start_poem
“‘Destroy his fib or sophistry—in vain;
The creature’s at his dirty work again!’
.pm end_poem
But will this province sit tamely down under its
brow-beating? A thousand times no! We will
.bn 195.png
.pn +1
appeal to the justice, to the mercy of England,
through our noble friends in Parliament, and the lash
will yet fall like a scorpion upon the shrinking hide
of the coward who would filch the people from their
rights.’”
.fs 100%
Tarachand stopped to cough, and his round
liquid eyeballs, as he turned them upon Mohendra,
stood out of their creamy whites with
enthusiasm. “One word,” he cried, as soon as
he had breath: “you are the Macaulay of
Bengal! No less. The Macaulay of Bengal!”
(John Church, when he read Mohendra’s
article next day, laughed, but uneasily. He
knew that in all Bengal there is no such thing as
a sense of humour.)
“My own feeble pen,” Tarachand went on
deprecatingly, “has been busy at this thing for
the to-morrow’s issue. I also have been saying
some worthless remark, perhaps not altogether
beyond the point,” and the corrected proof went
across the table to Mohendra. While he glanced
through it Tarachand watched him eagerly, reflecting
every shade of expression that passed
over the other man’s face. When Mohendra
.bn 196.png
.pn +1
smiled Tarachand laughed out with delight,
when Mohendra looked grave Tarachand’s
countenance was sunk in melancholy.
.fs 90%
“‘Have the hearts of the people of India turned to
water that any son of English mud may ride over
their prostrate forms?’”
.fs 100%
he read aloud in Bengali. “That is well said.
.fs 90%
“‘Too often the leaders of the people have waited
on the Lieutenant-Governor to explain desirable
matters, but the counsel of grey hairs has not been
respected. Three Vedas, and the fourth a cudgel!
The descendants of monkeys have forgotten that
once before they played too many tricks. The white
dogs want another lesson.’
.fs 100%
“A-ha!” Mohendra paused to comment,
smiling. “Very good talk. But it is necessary
also to be a little careful. After that—it is my
advice—you say how Bengalis are loyal before
everything.”
The editor of the Word of Truth slowly
shook his head, showing, in his contemptuous
amusement, a row of glittering teeth stained with
the red of the betel. “No harm can come,” he
said. “They dare not muzzle thee press.”
.bn 197.png
.pn +1
The phrase was pat and familiar. “When the
loin-cloth burns one must speak out. I am a
poor man, and I have sons. Where is their rice
to come from? Am I a man without shame,
that I should let the Sirkar turn them into
carpenters?” In his excitement Tarachand had
dropped into his own tongue.
.dv class='letter'
“‘Education to Bengalis is as dear as religion.
They have fought for religion, they may well
fight for education. Let the game go on; let European
officials grow fat on our taxes; let the
wantons, their women, dance in the arms of men,
and look into their faces with impudence, at the
tamashos of the Burra Lât as before. But if the
Sirkar robs the poor Bengali of his education let him
beware. He will become without wings or feathers,
while Shiva will protect the helpless and those with a
just complaint.’
.dv-
“Without doubt that will make a sensation,”
Mohendra said, handing back the proof. “Without
doubt! You can have much more the
courage of your opinion in the vernacular.
English—that iss another thing. I wrote myséêlf,
last week, some issmall criticism on the
.bn 198.png
.pn +1
Chairman of the Municipality, maybe half a
column—about that new drain in Colootollah
which we must put our hand in our pocket.
Yesterda-ay I met the Chairman on the Red
Road, and he takes no notiss off my face! That
was not pleasant. To-day I am writing on
issecond thoughts we cannot live without drainage,
and I will send him marked copy. But in
that way it iss troublesome, the English.”
“These Europeans they have no eye-shame.
They are entirely made of wood. But I think
this Notification will be a nice kettle of fish!
Has the Committee got isspeakers for the mass
meeting on the Maidan?”
Mohendra nodded complacently. “Already
it is being arranged. For a month I have known
every word spoken by His Honour on this thing.
I have the best information. Every week I am
watching the Gazette. The morning of publication
ekdum[B] goes telegram to our good friend
in Parliament. Agitation in England, agitation
in India! Either will come another Royal Commission
.bn 199.png
.pn +1
to upset the thing, or the Lieutenant-Governor
is forced to retire.”
.fm
.fn B
In one breath.
.fn-
.fm
Mohendra’s nods became oracular. Then
his expression grew seriously regretful. “Myséêlf
I hope they will—what iss it in English?—w’itewass
him with a commission. It goes against
me to see disgrace on a high official. It is not
pleasant. He means well—he means well. And
at heart he is a very good fellow—personally I
have had much agreeable conversation with him.
Always he has asked me to his garden-parties.”
“He has set fire to his own beard, brother,”
said the editor of the Word of Truth in the
vernacular, spitting.
“Very true—oh, very true! And all the
more we must attack him because I see the reptile
English press, in Calcutta, in Bombay, in Allahabad,
they are upholding this dacoity. That iss
the only word—dacoity.” Mohendra rose. “And
we two have both off us the best occasion to
fight,” he added beamingly, as he took his departure,
“for did we not graduate hand in hand
that same year out off Calcutta University?”
.tb
.bn 200.png
.pn +1
“God knows, Ancram, I believe it is the
right thing to do!”
John Church had reached his difficult moment—the
moment he had learned to dread. It
lay in wait for him always at the end of unbaffled
investigation, of hard-fast steering by principle,
of determined preliminary action of every
kind—the actual executive moment. Neither
the impulse of his enthusiasm nor the force of
his energy ever sufficed to carry him over it
comfortably; rather, at this point, they ebbed
back, leaving him stranded upon his responsibility,
which invariably at once assumed the
character of a quicksand. He was never defeated
by himself at these junctures, but he
hated them. He turned out from himself then,
consciously seeking support and reinforcement,
to which at other times he was indifferent; and
it was in a crisis of desire for encouragement
that he permitted himself to say to Lewis
Ancram that God knew he believed the College
Grants Notification was the right thing to do.
He had asked Ancram to wait after the Council
meeting was over very much for this purpose.
.bn 201.png
.pn +1
“Yes, sir,” the Chief Secretary replied; “if
I may be permitted to say so, it is the most
conscientious piece of legislation of recent
years.”
The Lieutenant-Governor looked anxiously
at Ancram from under his bushy eyebrows, and
then back again at the Notification. It lay in
broad margined paragraphs of beautiful round
baboo’s handwriting, covering a dozen pages of
foolscap, before him on the table. It waited only
for his ultimate decision to go to the Government
Printing Office and appear in the Gazette and be
law to Bengal. Already he had approved each
separate paragraph. His Chief Secretary had
never turned out a better piece of work.
“To say precisely what is in my mind,
Ancram,” Church returned, beginning to pace
the empty chamber, “I have sometimes thought
that you were not wholly with me in this
matter.”
“I will not disguise from you, sir”—Ancram
spoke with candid emphasis—“that I think it’s a
risky thing to do, a—deuced risky thing.” His
Honour was known to dislike strong language.
.bn 202.png
.pn +1
“But as to the principle involved there can be
no two opinions.”
His Honour’s gaunt shadow passed and repassed
against the oblong patch of westering
February sunlight that lightened the opposite
wall before he replied.
“I am prepared for an outcry,” he said
slowly at last. “I think I can honestly say that
I am concerned only with the principle—with
the possible harm, and the probable good.”
Ancram felt a rising irritation. He reflected
that if His Honour had chosen to take him into
confidence earlier, he—Mr. Ancram—might have
been saved a considerable amount of moral unpleasantness.
By taking him into confidence
now the Lieutenant-Governor merely added to
it appreciably and, Ancram pointed out to himself,
undeservedly. He played with his watch-chain
for distraction, and looked speculatively
at the Notification, and said that one thing was
certain, they could depend upon His Excellency
if it came to any nonsense with the Secretary of
State. “Scansleigh is loyal to his very marrow.
He’ll stand by us, whatever happens.” No one
.bn 203.png
.pn +1
admired the distinguishing characteristic of the
Viceroy of India more than the Chief Secretary
of the Government of Bengal.
“Scansleigh sees it as I do,” Church returned;
“and I see it plainly. At least I have
not spared myself—nor any one else,” he added,
with a smile of admission which was at the
moment pathetic, “in working the thing up.
My action has no bearing that I have not carefully
examined. Nothing can result from it
that I do not expect—at least approximately—to
happen.”
Ancram almost imperceptibly raised his eyebrows.
The gesture, with its suggestion of dramatic
superiority, was irresistible to him; he
would have made it if Church had been looking
at him; but the eyes of the Lieutenant-Governor
were fixed upon the sauntering multitude in the
street below. He turned from the window, and
went on with a kind of passion.
“I tell you, Ancram, I feel my responsibility
in this thing, and I will not carry it any longer
in the shape of a curse to my country. I don’t
speak of the irretrievable mischief that is being
.bn 204.png
.pn +1
done by the wholesale creation of a clerkly class
for whom there is no work, or of the danger of
putting that sharpest tool of modern progress—higher
education—into hands that can only use it
to destroy. When we have helped these people
to shatter all their old notions of reverence and
submission and self-abnegation and piety, and
given them, for such ideals as their fathers had,
the scepticism and materialism of the West, I
don’t know that we shall have accomplished
much to our credit. But let that pass. The ultimate
consideration is this: You know and I know
where the money comes from—the three lakhs
and seventy-five thousand rupees—that goes
every year to make B.A.s of Calcutta University.
It’s a commonplace to say that it is sweated in
annas and pice out of the cultivators of the
villages—poor devils who live and breed and
rot in pest-stricken holes we can’t afford to drain
for them, who wear one rag the year through
and die of famine when the rice harvest fails!
The ryot pays, that the money-lender who screws
him and the landowner who bullies him may
give their sons a cheap European education.”
.bn 205.png
.pn +1
“The wonder is,” Ancram replied, “that it
has not been acknowledged a beastly shame long
ago. The vested interest has never been very
strong.”
“Ah well,” Church said more cheerfully, “we
have provided for the vested interest; and my
technical schools will, I hope, go some little way
toward providing for the cultivators. At all
events they will teach him to get more out of
his fields. It’s a tremendous problem, that,” he
added, refolding the pages with a last glance,
and slipping them into their cover: “the ratio
at which population is increasing out here and
the limited resources of the soil.”
He had reassumed the slightly pedantic manner
that was characteristic of him; he was again
dependent upon himself, and resolved.
“Send it off at once, will you?” he said; and
Ancram gave the packet to a waiting messenger.
“A weighty business off my mind,” he added,
with a sigh of relief. “Upon my word, Ancram,
I am surprised to find you so completely in
accord with me. I fancied you would have objections
to make at the last moment, and that I
.bn 206.png
.pn +1
should have to convince you. I rather wanted
to convince somebody. But I am very pleased
indeed to be disappointed!”
“It is a piece of work which has my sincerest
admiration, sir,” Ancram answered; and as the
two men descended the staircases from the Bengal
Council Chamber to the street, the Lieutenant-Governor’s
hand rested upon the arm of his
Chief Secretary in a way that was almost affectionate.
.bn 207.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
CHAPTER XIII.
.sp 2
Three days later the Notification appeared.
John Church sat tensely through the morning,
unconsciously preparing himself for emergencies—deputations,
petitions, mobs. None of these
occurred. The day wore itself out in the usual
routine, and in the evening His Honour was
somewhat surprised to meet at dinner a member
of the Viceroy’s Council who was not aware that
anything had been done. He turned with some
eagerness next morning to the fourth page of his
newspaper, and found its leading article illuminating
the subject of an archæological discovery
in Orissa, made some nine months previously.
The Lieutenant-Governor was an energetic person,
and did not understand the temper of Bengal.
He had published a Notification subversive
of the educational policy of the Government for
sixty years, and he expected this proceeding to
.bn 208.png
.pn +1
excite immediate attention. He gave it an importance
almost equal to that of the Derby
Sweepstakes. This, however, was in some degree
excusable, considering the short time he had
spent in Calcutta and the persevering neglect
he had shown in observing the tone of society.
Even the telegram to the sympathetic Member
of Parliament failed of immediate transmission.
Mohendra Lal Chuckerbutty wrote it
out with emotion; then he paused, remembering
that the cost of telegrams paid for by enthusiastic
private persons was not easily recoverable from
committees. Mohendra was a solid man, but
there were funds for this purpose. He decided
that he was not justified in speeding the nation’s
cry for succour at his own expense; so he submitted
the telegram to the committee, which
met at the end of the week. The committee
asked Mohendra to cut it down and let them see
it again. In the end it arrived at Westminster
almost as soon as the mail. Mohendra, besides,
had his hands and his paper full, at the moment,
with an impassioned attack upon an impulsive
judge of the High Court who had shot a bullock
.bn 209.png
.pn +1
with its back broken. As to the Word of Truth,
Tarachand Mookerjee was celebrating his daughter’s
wedding, at the time the Notification was
published, with tom-toms and sweetmeats and a
very expensive nautch, and for three days the
paper did not appear at all.
The week lengthened out, and the Lieutenant-Governor’s
anxiety grew palpably less. His
confidence had returned to such a degree that
when the officers of the Education Department
absented themselves in a body from the first of
his succeeding entertainments he was seriously
disturbed. “It’s childish,” he said to Judith.
“By my arrangement not a professor among
them will lose a pice either in pay or pension.
If the people are anxious enough for higher education
to pay twice as much for it as they do
now these fellows will go on with their lectures.
If not, we’ll turn them into inspectors, or superintendents
of the technical schools.”
“I can understand a certain soreness on the
subject of their dignity,” his wife suggested.
Church frowned impatiently. “People might
think less of their dignity in this country and
.bn 210.png
.pn +1
more of their duty, with advantage,” he said, and
she understood that the discussion was closed.
The delay irritated Ancram, who was a man
of action. He told other people that he feared
it was only the ominous lull before the storm,
and assured himself that no man could hurry
Bengal. Nevertheless, the terms in which he
advised Mohendra Lal Chuckerbutty, who came
to see him every Sunday afternoon, were successful
to the point of making that Aryan drive
rather faster on his way back to the Bengal Free
Press office. At the end of a fortnight Mr. Ancram
was able to point to the verification of his
prophecy; it had been the lull before the storm,
which developed, two days later, in the columns
of the native press, into a tornado.
“I tell you,” said he, “you might as well
petition Sri Krishna as the Viceroy,” when
Mohendra Lal Chuckerbutty reverted to this
method of obtaining redress. Mohendra, who
was a Hindoo of orthodoxy, may well have found
this flippant, but he only smiled, and assented,
and went away and signed the petition. He
yielded to the natural necessity of the pathetic
.bn 211.png
.pn +1
temperament of his countrymen—even when
they were university graduates and political
agitators—to implore before they did anything
else. An appeal was distilled and forwarded.
The Viceroy promptly indicated the nature of
his opinions by refusing to receive this document
unless it reached him through the proper channel—which
was the Bengal Government. The
prayer of humility then became a shriek of defiance,
a transition accomplished with remarkable
rapidity in Bengal. In one night Calcutta flowered
mysteriously into coloured cartoons, depicting
the Lieutenant-Governor in the prisoner’s
dock, charged by the Secretary of State, on the
bench, with the theft of bags of gold marked
“College Grants”; while the Director of Education,
weeping bitterly, gave evidence against
him. The Lieutenant-Governor was represented
in a green frock-coat and the Secretary of State
in a coronet, which made society laugh, and
started a wave of interest in the College Grants
Notification. John Church saw it in people’s
faces at his garden parties, and it added to the
discomfort with which he read advertisements
.bn 212.png
.pn +1
of various mass meetings, in protest, to be held
throughout the province, and noticed among the
speakers invariably the unaccustomed names of
the Rev. Professor Porter of the Exeter Hall
Institute, the Rev. Dr. MacInnes of the Caledonian
Mission, and Father Ambrose, who ruled
St. Dominic’s College, and who certainly insisted,
as part of his curriculum, upon the lives of the
Saints.
The afternoon of the first mass meeting in
Calcutta closed into the evening of the last
ball of the season at Government House. A
petty royalty from Southern Europe, doing
the grand tour, had trailed his clouds of glory
rather indolently late into Calcutta; and, as society
anxiously emphasized, there was practically
only a single date available before Lent for a
dance in his honour. When it was understood
that Their Excellencies would avail themselves
of this somewhat contracted opportunity, society
beamed upon itself, and said it knew they would—they
were the essence of hospitality.
There are three square miles of the green
Maidan, round which Calcutta sits in a stucco
.bn 213.png
.pn +1
semi-circle, and past which her brown river
runs to the sea. Fifteen thousand people, therefore,
gathered in one corner of it, made a
somewhat unusually large patch of white upon
the grass, but were not otherwise impressive,
and in no wise threatening. Society, which had
forgotten about the mass meeting, put up its eye-glass,
driving on the Red Road, and said that
there was evidently something “going on”—probably
a football team of Tommies from the
Fort playing the town. Only two or three
elderly officials, taking the evening freshness in
solitary walks, looked with anxious irritation at
the densely-packed mass; and Judith Church,
driving home through the smoky yellow twilight,
understood the meaning of the cheers the
south wind softened and scattered abroad.
They brought her a stricture of the heart
with the thought of John Church’s devotion
to these people. Ingrates, she named them to
herself, with compressed lips—ingrates, traitors,
hounds! Her eyes filled with the impotent
tears of a woman’s pitiful indignation; her
heart throbbed with a pang of new recognition
.bn 214.png
.pn +1
of her husband’s worth, and of tenderness for
it, and of unrecognised pain beneath that even
this could not constitute him her hero and master.
She asked herself bitterly—I fear her politics
were not progressive—what the people in
England meant by encouraging open and ignorant
sedition in India, and whole passages came
eloquently into her mind of the speech she
would make in Parliament if she were but a
man and a member. They brought her some
comfort, but she dismissed them presently to
reflect seriously whether something might not
be done. She looked courageously at the possibility
of imprisoning Dr. MacInnes. Then she
too thought of the ball, and subsided upon the
determination of consulting Lewis Ancram, at
the ball, upon this point. She drew a distinct
ethical satisfaction from her intention. It seemed
in the nature of a justification for the quickly
pulsating pleasure with which she looked forward
to the evening.
.bn 215.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
CHAPTER XIV.
.sp 2
Gentlemen native to Bengal are not usually
invited to balls at Government House. It is
unnecessary to speak of the ladies: they are
non-existent to the social eye, even if it belongs
to a Viceroy. The reason is popularly supposed
to be the inability of gentlemen native to Bengal
to understand the waltz, except by Aryan analysis.
It is thought well to circumscribe their
opportunities of explaining it thus, and they are
asked instead to evening parties which offer
nothing more stimulating to the imagination
than conversation and champagne—of neither
of which they partake. On this occasion however,
at the entreaty of the visiting royalty, the
rule was relaxed to admit perhaps fifty; and
when Lewis Ancram arrived—rather late—the
first personality he recognised as in any way
significant was that of Mohendra Lal Chuckerbutty,
.bn 216.png
.pn +1
who leaned against a pillar, with his hands
clasped behind him, raptly contemplating a
polka. Mohendra, too, had an appreciation of
personalities, and of his respectful duty to them.
He bore down in Ancram’s direction unswervingly
through the throng, his eye humid with
happiness, his hand held out in an impulse of
affection. When he thought he had arrived at
the Chief Secretary’s elbow he looked about him
in some astonishment. A couple of subalterns in
red jackets disputed with mock violence over the
dance-card of a little girl in white, and a much
larger lady was waiting with imposing patience
until he should be pleased to get off her train.
At the same moment an extremely correct black
back glanced through the palms into the verandah.
The verandah was very broad and high, and
softly lighted in a way that made vague glooms
visible and yet gave a gentle radiance to the
sweep of pale-tinted drapery that here and there
suggested a lady sunk in the depths of a roomy
arm-chair, playing with her fan and talking in
undertones. It was a place of delicious mystery,
.bn 217.png
.pn +1
in spite of the strains of the orchestra that
throbbed out from the ball-room, in spite of the
secluded fans opening and closing in some commonplace
of Calcutta flirtation. The mystery
came in from without, where the stars crowded
down thick and luminous behind the palms, and
a grey mist hung low in the garden beneath,
turning it into a fantasy of shadowed forms and
filmy backgrounds and new significances. Out
there, in the wide spaces beyond the tall verandah
pillars, the spirit of the spring was abroad—the
troubled, throbbing, solicitous Indian
spring, perfumed and tender. The air was
warm and sweet and clinging; it made life a
pathetic, enjoyable necessity, and love a luxury
of much refinement.
Ancram folded his arms and stood in the
doorway and permitted himself to feel these
things. If he was not actually looking for
Judith Church, it was because he was always,
so to speak, anticipating her; in a state of
readiness to receive the impression of her face,
the music of her voice. Mrs. Church was the
reason of the occasion, the reason of every occasion
.bn 218.png
.pn +1
in so far as it concerned him. She seemed
simply the corollary of his perception of the
exquisite night when he discovered her presently,
on one of the more conspicuous sofas, talking
to Sir Peter Bloomsbury. She was waiting for
him to find her, with a little flickering smile that
came in the pauses between Sir Peter’s remarks;
and when Ancram approached he noticed, with
as keen a pleasure as he was capable of feeling,
that her replies to this dignitary were made
somewhat at random.
Their conversation changed when Sir Peter
went away only to take its note of intimacy and
its privilege of pauses. They continued to speak
of trivial matters, and to talk in tones and in
things they left unsaid. His eyes lingered in the
soft depths of hers to ascertain whether the roses
were doing well this year at Belvedere, and there
was a conscious happiness in the words with
which she told him that they were quite beyond
her expectations not wholly explicable even by
so idyllic a fact. The content of their neigbourhood
surrounded them like an atmosphere, beyond
which people moved about irrationally and
.bn 219.png
.pn +1
a string band played unmeaning selections much
too loud. She was lovelier than he had ever
seen her, more his possession than he had ever
felt her—the incarnation, as she bent her graceful
head towards him, of the eloquent tropical night
and the dreaming tropical spring. He told himself
afterwards that he felt at this moment an
actual pang of longing, and rejoiced that he
could still experience an undergraduate’s sensation
after so many years of pleasures that were
but aridly intellectual at their best. Certainly, as
he sat there in his irreproachable clothes and
attitude, he knew that his blood was beating
warm to his finger-tips with a delicious impulse
to force the sweet secret of the situation between
them. The south wind suggested to him,
through the scent of breaking buds, that prudence
was entirely a relative thing, and not even
relative to a night like this and a woman like
that. As he looked at a tendril of her hair,
blown against the warm whiteness of her neck,
it occurred to the Honourable Mr. Ancram that
he might go a little further. He felt divinely
rash; but his intention was to go only a little
.bn 220.png
.pn +1
further. Hitherto he had gone no distance
at all.
The south wind drove them along together.
Judith felt it on her neck and arms, and in little,
cool, soft touches about her face. She did not
pause to question the happiness it brought her:
there were other times for pauses and questions;
her eyes were ringed with them, under the
powder. She abandoned herself to her woman’s
divine sense of ministry; and the man she loved
observed that she did it with a certain inimitable
poise, born of her confidence in him, which was
as new as it was entrancing.
People began to flock downstairs to supper
in the wake of the Viceroy and the visiting
royalty; the verandah emptied itself. Presently
they became aware that they were alone.
“You have dropped your fan,” Ancram said,
and picked it up. He looked at its device for
a moment, and then restored it. Judith’s hands
were lying in her lap, and he slipped the fan
into one of them, letting his own rest for a perceptible
instant in the warm palm of the other.
There ensued a tumultuous silence. He had only
.bn 221.png
.pn +1
underscored a glance of hers; yet it seemed that
he had created something—something as formidable
as lovely, as divine. As he
gently withdrew his hand she lifted her eyes to
his with mute entreaty, and he saw that they
were full of tears. He told himself afterwards
that he had been profoundly moved; but this
did not interfere with his realisation that it was
an exquisite moment.
Ancram regarded her gravely, with a smile
of much consideration. He gave her a moment
of time, and then, as she did not look up again,
he leaned forward, and said, quite naturally and
evenly, as if the proposition were entirely legitimate:
“The relation between us is too tacit.
Tell me that you love me, dear.”
For an instant he repented, since it seemed
that she would be carried along on the sweet
tide of his words to the brink of an indiscretion.
Once more she looked up, softly seeking his
eyes; and in hers he saw so lovely a light
of self-surrender that he involuntarily thanked
Heaven that there was no one else to recognise
it. In her face was nothing but the thought of
.bn 222.png
.pn +1
him; and, seeing this, he had a swift desire to
take her in his arms and experience at its fullest
and sweetest the sense that she and her little
empire were gladly lost there. In the pause of
her mute confession he felt the strongest exultation
he had known. Her glance reached him
like a cry from an unexplored country; the
revelation of her love filled him with the knowledge
that she was infinitely more adorable and
more desirable than he had thought her. From
that moment she realised to him a supreme
good, and he never afterwards thought of his
other ambitions without a smile of contempt
which was almost genuine. But she said nothing:
she seemed removed from any necessity of
speech, lifted up on a wave of absolute joy, and
isolated from all that lay either behind or before.
He controlled his impatience for words from
her—for he was very sure of one thing; that
when they came they would be kind—and chose
his own with taste.
“Don’t you think that it would be better if
we had the courage and the candour to accept
things as they are? Don’t you think we would
.bn 223.png
.pn +1
be stronger for all that we must face if we acknowledged—only
to each other—the pain and
the sweetness of it?”
“I have never been blind,” she said softly.
“All I ask is that you will not even pretend
to be. Is that too much?”
“How can it be a question of that?” Her
voice trembled a little. Then she hurried illogically
on: “But there can be no change—there
must be no change. These are things I hoped
you would never say.”
“The alternative is too wretched: to go on
living a lie—and a stupid, unnecessary lie.
Why, in Heaven’s name, should there be the
figment of hypocrisy between us? I know that
I must be content with very little, but I am
afraid there is no way of telling you how much
I want that little.”
She had grown very pale, and she put up
her hand and smoothed her hair with a helpless,
mechanical gesture.
“No, no,” she said—“stop. Let us make
an end of it quickly. I was very well content
to go on with the lie. I think I should
.bn 224.png
.pn +1
always have been content. But now there
is no lie: there is nothing to stand upon any
longer. You must get leave, or something,
and go away—or I will. I am not—really—very
well.”
She looked at him miserably, with twitching
lips, and he laid a soothing hand—there was still
no one to see—upon her arm.
“Judith, don’t talk of impossibilities. How
could we two live in one world—and apart!
Those are the heroics of a dear little schoolgirl.
You and I are older, and braver.”
She put his hand away with a touch that was
a caress, but only said irrelevantly, “And Rhoda
Daye might have loved you honestly!”
“Ah, that threadbare old story!” He felt as
if she had struck him, and the feeling impelled
him to ask her why she thought he deserved
punishment. “Not that it hurts,” Mr. Ancram
added, almost resentfully.
She gave him a look of vague surprise, and
then lapsed, refusing to make the effort to understand,
into the troubled depths of her own
thought.
.bn 225.png
.pn +1
“Be a little kind, Judith. I only want a
word.”
The south wind brought them a sound out of
the darkness—the high, faint, long-drawn sound
of a cheer from the Maidan. She lifted her head
and listened intently, with apprehensive eyes.
Then she rose unsteadily from her seat, and, as
he gave her his arm in silence, she stood for a
moment gathering up her strength, and waiting,
it seemed, for the sound to come again. Nothing
reached them but the wilder, nearer wail of
the jackals in the streets.
“I must go home,” she said, in a voice that
was quite steady; “I must find my husband
and go home.”
He would have held her back, but she walked
resolutely, if somewhat purposelessly, round the
long curve of the verandah, and stood still, looking
at the light that streamed out of the ballroom
and glistened on the leaves of a range of
palms and crotons in pots that made a seclusion
there.
“Then,” said Ancram, “I am to go on with
the forlorn comfort of a guess. I ought to be
.bn 226.png
.pn +1
thankful, I suppose, that you can’t take that from
me. Perhaps you would,” he added bitterly, “if
you could know how precious it is.”
His words seemed to fix her in a half-formed
resolve. Her hand slipped out of his arm, and
she took a step away from him toward the crotons.
Against their dark green leaves he saw,
with some alarm, how white her face was.
“Listen,” she said: “I think you do not
realise it, but I know you are hard and cruel.
You ask me if I am not to you what I ought
to be to my husband, who is a good man, and
who loves me, and trusts you. And, what is
worse, this has come up between us at a time
when he is threatened and troubled: on the
very night when I meant—when I meant”—she
stopped to conquer the sob in her throat—“to
have asked you to think of something that might
be done to help him. Well, but you ask me if
I have come to love you, and perhaps in a way
you have a right to know; and the truth is better,
as you say. And I answer you that I have.
I answer you yes, it is true, and I know it will
always be true. But from to-night you will remember
.bn 227.png
.pn +1
that every time I look into your face
and touch your hand I hurt my own honour
and my husband’s, and—and you will not let
me see you often.”
As Ancram opened his lips to speak, the
cheer from the Maidan smote the air again,
and this time it seemed nearer. Judith took
his arm nervously.
“What can they be doing out there?” she
exclaimed. “Let us go—I must find my husband—let
us go!”
They crossed the threshold into the ballroom,
where John Church joined them almost
immediately, his black brows lightened by an
unusually cheerful expression.
“I’ve been having a long talk with His Excellency,”
he said to them jointly. “An uncommonly
capable fellow, Scansleigh. He tells me
he has written a strong private letter to the
Secretary of State about this Notification of
mine. That’s bound to have weight, you know,
in case they make an attempt to get hold of
Parliament at home.”
As Mrs. Church and Mr. Lewis Ancram left
.bn 228.png
.pn +1
the verandah a chair was suddenly pushed back
behind the crotons. Miss Rhoda Daye had been
sitting in the chair, alone too, with the south
wind and the stars. She had no warning of
what she was about to overhear—no sound had
reached her, either of their talk or their approach—and
in a somewhat agitated colloquy
with herself she decided that nothing could be
so terrible as her personal interruption of what
Mrs. Church was saying. That lady’s words,
though low and rapid, were very distinct, and
Rhoda heard them out involuntarily, with a
strong disposition to applaud her and to love
her. Then she turned a key upon her emotions
and Judith Church’s secret, and slipped
quietly out to look for her mother, who asked
her, between her acceptance of an ice from the
Home Secretary and a petit four from the General
Commanding the Division, why on earth she
looked so depressed.
.il id=i214a fn=i_214a.jpg w=550px ew=90%
.ca “What do I know about the speech!”
Ancram, turning away from the Churches,
almost ran into the arms of Mohendra Lal
Chuckerbutty, with whom he shook hands.
His manner expressed, combined with all the
.bn 229.png
.bn 230.png
.bn 231.png
.pn +1
good will in the world, a slight embarrassment
that he could not remember Mohendra’s
name, which is so often to be noticed when
European officials have occasion to greet natives
of distinction—natives of distinction are so very
numerous and so very similar.
“I hope you are well!” beamed the editor of
the Bengal Free Press. “It is a very select
party.” Then Mohendra dropped his voice
confidentially: “We have sent to England, by
to-day’s mail, every word of the isspeech of
Dr. MacInnes——”
“Damn you!” Ancram said, with a respectful,
considering air: “what do I know
about the speech of Dr. MacInnes! Jehannum
jao!”[C]
.fm
.fn C
“Go to Hades!”
.fn-
.fm
Mohendra laughed in happy acquiescence as
the Chief Secretary bowed and left him. “Certainlie!
certainlie!” he said; “it is a very select
party!”
The evening had one more incident. Mr. and
Mrs. Church made their retreat early: Judith’s
.bn 232.png
.pn +1
face offered an excuse of fatigue which was better
than her words. Their carriage turned out
of Circular Road with a thickening crowd of
natives talking noisily and walking in the same
direction. They caught up with a glare and the
smell and smoke of burning pitch. Judith said
uneasily that there seemed to be a bonfire in the
middle of the road. They drew a little nearer,
and the crowd massed around them before and
behind, on the bridge leading to Belvedere out
of the city. Then John Church perceived that
the light streamed from a burning figure which
flamed and danced grotesquely, wired to a pole
attached to a bullock cart and pulled along by
coolies. The absorbed crowd that walked
behind, watching and enjoying like excited
children at a show, chattered defective English,
and the light from the burning thing
on the pole streamed upon faces already
to some extent illumined by the higher culture
of the University Colleges. But it was
not until they recognised his carriage and
outriders, and tried to hurry and to scatter
on the narrow bridge, that the Acting Lieutenant-Governor
.bn 233.png
.pn +1
of Bengal fully realised that
he had been for some distance swelling a
procession which was entertaining itself with
much gusto at the expense of his own effigy.
.bn 234.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
CHAPTER XV.
.sp 2
When it became obvious that the College
Grants Notification held fateful possibilities for
John Church personally, and for his wife incidentally,
it rapidly developed into a topic. Ladies,
in the course of midday visits in each
other’s cool drawing-rooms, repeated things their
husbands had let fall at dinner the night before,
and said they were awfully sorry for Mrs.
Church; it must be too trying for her, poor
thing. If it were only on her account, some of
them thought, the Lieutenant-Governor—the
“L.G.,” they called him—ought to let things go
on as they always had. What difference did it
make anyway! At the clubs the matter superseded,
for the moment, the case of an army
chaplain accused of improper conduct at Singapore,
and bets were freely laid on the issue—three
to one that Church would be “smashed.”
.bn 235.png
.pn +1
If this attitude seemed less sympathetic than
that of the ladies, it betokened at least no hostility.
On the contrary, no small degree of appreciation
was current for His Honour. He
would not have heard the matter discussed often
from his own point of view, but that was because
his own point of view was very much his own
property. He might have heard himself commended
from a good many others, however, and
especially on the ground of his pluck. Men said
between their cigars that very few fellows would
care to put their hands to such a piece of zubberdusti[D]
at this end of the century, however much
it was wanted. Personally they hoped the beggar
would get it through, and with equal solicitude
they proceeded to bet that he wouldn’t.
Among the sentiments the beggar evoked, perhaps
the liveliest was one of gratitude for so
undeniable a sensation so near the end of the
cold weather, when sensations were apt to take
flight, with other agreeable things, to the hill
stations.
.fm
.fn D
“High-handed proceeding.”
.fn-
.fm
.bn 236.png
.pn +1
The storm reached a point when the Bishop
felt compelled to put forth an allaying hand from
the pulpit of the Cathedral. As the head of the
Indian Establishment the Bishop felt himself
allied in no common way with the governing
power, and His Lordship was known to hold
strong views on the propriety with which lawn
sleeves might wave above questions of public
importance. Besides, neither Dr. MacInnes nor
Professor Porter were lecturing on the binomial
theorem under Established guidance, while as to
Father Ambrose, he positively invited criticism,
with his lives of the Saints. When, therefore,
the Cathedral congregation heard his Lordship
begin his sermon with the sonorous announcement
from Ecclesiastes,
.sp 1
.fs 90%
.in 4
.ti -4
“For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that
increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. He—that
increaseth—knowledge—increaseth—sorrow,”
.in
.fs 100%
.sp 1
it listened, with awakened interest, for a snub to
Dr. MacInnes and Professor Porter, and for a
rebuke, full of dignity and austerity, to Father
.bn 237.png
.pn +1
Ambrose; both of which were duly administered.
His Lordship’s views, supported by the
original Preacher, were doubtless more valuable
in his sermon than they would be here, but it
is due to him to say that they formed the happiest
combination of fealty and doctrine. The
Honourable Mr. Ancram said to Sir William
Scott on the Cathedral steps after the service—it
was like the exit of a London theatre, with
people waiting for their carriages—that while
his Lordship’s reference was very proper and
could hardly fail to be of use, public matters
looked serious when they came to be discussed
in the pulpit. To which Sir William gave a
deprecating agreement.
Returning to his somewhat oppressively
lonely quarters, Ancram felt the need of further
conversation. The Bishop had stirred him to
vigorous dissent, which his Lordship’s advantage
of situation made peculiarly irritating to so
skilled an observer of weak points. He bethought
himself that he might write to Philip
Doyle. He remembered that Doyle had not
answered the letter in which he had written of
.bn 238.png
.pn +1
his changed domestic future, frankly asking for
congratulation rather than for condolence; but
without resentment, for why should a man trouble
himself under Florentine skies with unnecessary
Calcutta correspondents? He consulted
only his own pleasure in writing again: Doyle
was so readily appreciative, he would see the
humour in the development of affairs with His
Honour. It was almost a week since Mr. Ancram
had observed at the ball, with acute annoyance,
what an unreasonable effect the matter was
having upon Judith Church, and he was again
himself able to see the humour of it. He finally
wrote with much facility a graphically descriptive
letter, in which the Bishop came in as a
mere picturesque detail at the end. He seemed
to pick his way, as he turned the pages, out of
an embarrassing moral quagmire; he was so
obviously high and dry when he could fix the
whole thing in a caricature of effective paragraphs.
He wrote:—
/#
“I don’t mind telling you privately that I have
no respect whatever for the scheme, and very little
for the author of it. He reminds one of nothing so
#/
.bn 239.png
.pn +1
/#
much as an elderly hen sitting, with the obstinacy of
her kind, on eggs out of which it is easy to see no
addled reform will ever step to crow. He is as blind
as a bat to his own deficiencies. I doubt whether
even his downfall will convince him that his proper
sphere of usefulness in life was that of a Radical
cobbler. He has a noble preference for the ideal of
an impeccable Indian administrator, which he goes
about contemplating, while his beard grows with the
tale of his blunders. The end, however, cannot be
far off. Bengal is howling for his retirement; and,
notwithstanding a fulsome habit he has recently
developed of hanging upon my neck for sympathy, I
own to you that, if circumstances permitted, I would
howl too.”
#/
Ancram’s first letter had miscarried, a peon in
the service of the Sirkar having abstracted the
stamps; and Philip Doyle, when he received the
second, was for the moment overwhelmed with
inferences from his correspondent’s silence regarding
the marriage, which should have been
imminent when he wrote. Doyle glanced
rapidly through another Calcutta letter that arrived
with Ancram’s for possible news; but the
brief sensation of Miss Daye’s broken engagement
had expired long before it was written, and it
.bn 240.png
.pn +1
contained no reference to the affair. The theory
of a postponement suggested itself irresistibly;
and he spent an absorbed and motionless twenty
minutes, sitting on the edge of his bed, while his
pipe went out in his hand, looking fixedly at the
floor of his room in the hotel, and engaged in
constructing the tissue of circumstances which
would make such a thing likely. If he did not
grow consciously lighter-hearted with this occupation,
at least he turned, at the end of it, to re-peruse
his letters, as if they had brought him
good news. He read them both carefully again,
and opened the newspaper that came with the
second. It was a copy of the Bengal Free Press,
and his friend of the High Court had called his
special attention to its leading article, as the most
caustic and effective attack upon the College
Grants Notification which had yet appeared.
Mr. Justice Shears wrote:—
/#
“As you will see, there is abundant intrinsic evidence
that no native wrote it. My own idea, which
I share with a good many people, is that it came from
the pen of the Director of Education, which is as facile
as it would very naturally be hostile. Let me know
#/
.bn 241.png
.pn +1
/#
what you think. Ancram is non-committal, but he
talks of Government’s prosecuting the paper, which
looks as if the article had already done harm.”
#/
Doyle went through the editorial with interest
that increased as his eye travelled down
the column. He smiled as he read; it was certainly
a telling and a forcible presentation of the
case against His Honour’s policy, adorned with
gibes that were more damaging than its argument.
Suddenly he stopped, with a puzzled
look, and read the last part of a sentence once
again:—
/#
“But he has a noble preference for the ideal of an
impeccable Indian administrator, which he goes
about contemplating, while his beard grows with the
tale of his blunders.”
#/
The light of a sudden revelation twinkled in
Doyle’s eyes—a revelation which showed the
Chief Secretary to the Bengal Government led
on by vanity to forgetfulness. He reopened
Ancram’s letter, and convinced himself that the
words were precisely those he had read there.
For further assurance, he glanced at the dates of
.bn 242.png
.pn +1
the letter and the newspaper: the one had been
written two days before the other had been
printed. Presently he put them down, and instinctively
rubbed his thumb and the ends of his
fingers together with the light, rapid movement
with which people assure themselves that they
have touched nothing soiling. He permitted
himself no characterisation of the incident—lofty
denunciation was not part of Doyle’s habit
of mind—beyond what might have been expressed
in the somewhat disgusted smile with
which he re-lighted his pipe. It was like him
that his principal reflection had a personal tinge,
and that it was forcible enough to find words.
“And I,” he said, with a twinkle at his own expense,
“lived nine months in the same house with
that skunk!”
.bn 243.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
CHAPTER XVI.
.sp 2
Every day at ten o’clock the south wind
came hotter and stronger up from the sea. The
sissoo trees on the Maidan trembled into delicate
flower, and their faint, fresh fragrance stood
like a spell about them. The teak pushed out its
awkward rags, tawdry and foolish, but divinely
green; and here and there a tamarind by the
roadside lifted its gracious head, like a dream-tree
in a billow of misty leaf. The days grew
long and lovely; the coolies going home at sunset
across the burnt grass of the Maidan joined
hands and sang, with marigolds round their
necks. The white-faced aliens of Calcutta
walked there too, but silently, for “exercise.”
The crows grew noisier than ever, for it was
young crow time; the fever-bird came and told
people to put up their punkahs. The Viceroy
and all that were officially his departed to Simla,
.bn 244.png
.pn +1
and great houses in Chowringhee were to let.
It was announced rather earlier than usual that
His Honour the Lieutenant-Governor would go
“on tour,” which had no reference to Southern
Europe, but meant inspection duty in remote
parts of the province. Mrs. Church would accompany
the Lieutenant-Governor. The local
papers, in making this known, said it was hoped
that the change of air would completely restore
“one of Calcutta’s most brilliant and popular
hostesses,” whose health for the past fortnight
had been regrettably unsatisfactory.
The Dayes went to Darjiling, and Dr.
MacInnes to England. Dr. MacInnes’ expenses
to England, and those of Shib Chunder Bhose,
who accompanied him, were met out of a fund
which had swelled astonishingly considering that
it was fed by Bengali sentiment—the fund established
to defeat the College Grants Notification.
Dr. MacInnes went home, as one of the
noble band of Indian missionaries, to speak to the
people of England, and to explain to them how
curiously the administrative mind in India became
perverted in its conceptions of the mother
.bn 245.png
.pn +1
country’s duty to the heathen masses who look to
her for light and guidance. Dr. MacInnes was
prepared to say that the cause of Christian missions
in India had been put back fifty years by
the ill-judged act, so fearful in its ultimate consequences,
of the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal.
Since that high official could not be brought to
consider his responsibility to his Maker, he
should be brought to consider his responsibility
to the people of England. Dr. MacInnes doubtless
did not intend to imply that the latter
tribunal was the higher of the two, but he certainly
produced the impression that it was the
more effective.
Shib Chunder Bhose, in fluent and deferential
language, heightened this impression, which did
no harm to the cause. Shib Chunder Bhose had
been found willing, in consideration of a second-class
passage, to accompany Dr. MacInnes in the
character of a University graduate who was also
a Christian convert. Shib Chunder’s father had
married a Mohamedan woman, and so lost his
caste, whereafter he embraced Christianity because
Father Ambrose’s predecessor had given
.bn 246.png
.pn +1
him four annas every time he came to catechism.
Shib Chunder inherited the paternal religion,
with contumely added on the score of his mother,
and, since he could make no other pretension,
figured in the College register as Christian. A
young man anxious to keep pace with the times,
he had been a Buddhist since, and afterwards
professed his faith in the tenets of Theosophy;
but whenever he fell ill or lost money he returned
irresistibly to the procedure of his youth, and
offered rice and marigolds to the Virgin Mary.
Dr. MacInnes therefore certainly had the facts
on his side when he affectionately referred to
his young friend as living testimony to the work
of educational missions in India, living proof
of the falsity of the charge that the majority
of mission colleges were mere secular institutions.
As his young friend wore a frock-coat
and a humble smile, and was able on occasion
to weep like anything, the effect in the provinces
was tremendous.
Dr. MacInnes gave himself to the work with
a zeal which entirely merited the commendation
he received from his conscience. Sometimes he
.bn 247.png
.pn +1
lectured twice a day. He was always freely
accessible to interviewers from the religious
press. He refrained, in talking to these gentlemen,
from all personal malediction of the Lieutenant-Governor—it
was the sin he had to do
with, not the distinguished sinner—and thereby
gained a widespread reputation for unprejudiced
views. Portraits of the reverend crusader and
Shib Chunder Bhose appeared on the posters
which announced Dr. MacInnes’ subject in large
letters—“Missions and Mammon. Shall a
Lieutenant-Governor Rob God?”—and in
all the illustrated papers. The matter arrived
regularly with the joint at Hammersmith Sunday
dinner-tables. Finally the Times gave it
almost a parochial importance, and solemnly, in
two columns, with due respect for constituted
authority, came to no conclusion at all from
every point of view.
The inevitable question was early asked in
Parliament, and the Under-Secretary of State
said he would “inquire.” Further questions
were asked on different and increasingly urgent
grounds, with the object of reminding and
.bn 248.png
.pn +1
hastening the Secretary of State. A popular
Nonconformist preacher told two thousand people
in Exeter Hall that they and he could no
longer conscientiously vote to keep a Government
in office that would hesitate to demand the
instant resignation of an official who had brought
such shame upon the name of England. Shortly
afterwards one hon. member made a departure
in his attack upon Mr. John Church, which completely
held the attention of the House while it
lasted. The effect was unusual, to be achieved
by this particular hon. member, and he did it by
reading aloud the whole of an extremely graphic
and able article criticising His Honour’s policy
from the Bengal Free Press.
“I put it to hon. members,” said he, weightily,
in conclusion, “whether any one of us, in our
boasted superiority of intellect, has the right to
say that people who can thus express themselves
do not know what they want!”
That evening, before he went to bed, Lord
Strathell, Secretary of State for India, in Eaton
Square, London, wrote a note to Lord Scansleigh,
Viceroy and Governor-General of India,
.bn 249.png
.pn +1
in Viceregal Lodge, Simla. The note was
written on Lady Strathell’s letter-paper, which
was delicately scented and bore a monogram and
coronet. It was a very private and friendly
note, and it ran:—
.dv class='letter'
“Dear Scansleigh: I needn’t tell you how much
I regret the necessity of my accompanying official
letter asking you to arrange Church’s retirement. I
can quite understand that it will be most distasteful
to you, as I know you have a high opinion of him,
both personally and as an administrator. But the
Missionary Societies, etc., have got us into the
tightest possible place over his educational policy.
Already several Nonconformist altars—if there are
such things—are crying out for the libation of our
blood. Somebody must be offered up. I had a Commission
suggested, and it was received with rage and
scorn. Nothing will do but Church’s removal from
his present office—and the sooner the better. I suppose
we must find something else for him.
“Again assuring you of my personal regret, believe
me, dear Scansleigh, yours cordially,
.ll 68
.rj
”Strathell.
.ll
“P.S.—Thus Party doth make Pilates of us all.”
.dv-
.bn 250.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
CHAPTER XVII.
.sp 2
It was the first time in history that the town
of Bhugsi had been visited by a Lieutenant-Governor.
Bhugsi was small, but it had a reputation
for malodorousness not to be surpassed by any
municipality of Eastern Bengal. Though Bhugsi
was small it was full—full of men and children
and crones and monkeys, and dwarfed, lean-ribbed
cattle, and vultures of the vilest appetite.
The town squatted round a tank, very old, very
slimy, very sacred. Bhugsi bathed in the tank
and so secured eternal happiness, drank from the
tank and so secured it quickly. All such abominations
as are unnameable Bhugsi also preferred
to commit in the vicinity of the tank,
and it was possibly for this reason that the
highest death-rate of the last “year under report”
had been humbly submitted by Bhugsi.
Noting this achievement, John Church added
.bn 251.png
.pn +1
Bhugsi to his inspection list. The inspection list
was already sufficiently long for the time at his
disposal, but Church had a way of economising
his time that contributed much to the discipline
of provincial Bengal. He accomplished this by
train and boat and saddle; and his staff, with
deep inward objurgations, did its best to keep
up. He pressed upon Judith the advisability of
a more leisurely progress by easier routes, with
occasional meeting-places, but found her quietly
obstinate in her determination to come with him.
She declared herself the better for the constant
change and the stimulus of quick moves; and
this he could believe, for whenever they made a
stay of more than forty-eight hours anywhere it
was always she who was most feverishly anxious
to depart. She filled her waking moments
and dulled her pain in the natural way, with
actual physical exertion. While the servants
looked on in consternation she toiled instinctively
over packings and unpackings, and was
glad of the weariness they brought her. She
invented little new devotions to her husband—these
also soothed her—and became freshly solicitous
.bn 252.png
.pn +1
about his health, freshly thoughtful about
his comfort. Observing which, Church reflected
tenderly on the unselfishness of women, and said
to his wife that he could not have her throwing
herself, this way, before the Juggernaut of his
official progress.
There were no Europeans at all at Bhugsi,
so the Lieutenant-Governor’s party put up at the
dâk-bungalow, three miles outside the town.
Peter Robertson, the Commissioner of the Division,
and the district officer, who were in attendance
upon His Honour, were in camp near
by, as their custom is. The dâk-bungalow had
only three rooms, and this made the fact that
two of His Honour’s suite had been left at the
last station with fever less of a misfortune. By
this time, indeed, the suite consisted of Judith
and the private secretary and the servants; but
as John Church said, getting into his saddle at
six o’clock in the morning, there were quite
enough of them to terrify Bhugsi into certain
reforms.
He spent three hours inspecting the work of
the native magistrate, and came back to breakfast
.bn 253.png
.pn +1
with his brows well set together over that
official’s amiable tolerance of a popular way of
procuring confessions among the police, which
was by means of needles and the supposed criminal’s
finger-nails. It had been practised in Bhugsi,
as the native magistrate represented, for thousands
of years, but it made John Church angry.
He ate with stern eyes upon the table-cloth, and
when the meal was over rode back to Bhugsi.
There was only that one day, and beside the all-important
matter of the sanitation he had to
look at the schools, to inspect the gaol, to receive
an address and to make a speech. He
reflected on the terms of the speech as he
rode, improving upon their salutary effect. He
said to his private secretary, cantering alongside,
that he had never known it so hot in April—the
air was like a whip. It was borne in upon him
once that if he could put down the burden of
his work and of his dignity and stretch himself
out to sleep beside the naked coolies who lay on
their faces in the shadow of the pipal trees by
the roadside, it would be a pleasant thing, but
this he did not say to his private secretary.
.bn 254.png
.pn +1
It was half-past five, and the bamboos were
all alive with the evening twitter of hidden sparrows,
before the Lieutenant-Governor returned.
For an instant Judith, coming out at the sound
of hoofs, failed to recognise her husband, he
looked, with a thick white powder of dust over
his beard and eyebrows, so old a man. He
stooped in his saddle, too, and all the gauntness
of his face and figure had a deeper accent.
“Put His Honour to bed, Mrs. Church,”
cried the Commissioner, lifting his hat as he
rode on to camp. “He has done the work of
six men to-day.”
“You will be glad of some tea,” she said.
He tumbled clumsily out of his saddle and
leaned for a moment against his animal’s shoulder.
The mare put her head round whinnying,
but when Church searched in his pocket for her
piece of sugar-cane and offered it to her, she
snuffed it and refused it. He dropped the
sugar-cane into the dust at her feet and told
the syce to take her away.
“If she will not eat her gram give me word
of it,” he said. But she ate her gram.
.bn 255.png
.pn +1
“Will you change first, John?” Judith asked
with her hand on his coat-sleeve. “I think you
should—you are wet through and through.”
“Yes, I will change,” he said; but he dropped
into the first chair he saw. The chair stood on
the verandah, and the evening breeze had already
begun to come up. He threw back his
head and unfastened his damp collar and felt
its gratefulness. In the intimate neighbourhood
of the dâk-bungalow the private secretary could
be heard splashing in his tub.
“Poor Sparks!” said His Honour. “I’m
afraid he has had a hard day of it. Good
fellow, Sparks, thoroughly good fellow. I hope
he’ll get on. It’s very disheartening work, this
of ours in India,” he went on absently; “one
feels the depression of it always, more or less,
but to-night——” He paused and closed his
eyes as if he were too weary to finish the
sentence. A servant appeared with a wicker
table and another with a tray.
“A cup of tea,” said Judith cheerfully, “will
often redeem the face of nature”; but he waved
it back.
.bn 256.png
.pn +1
“I am too hungry for tea. Tell them to
bring me a solid meal: cold beef—no, make it
hot—that game pie we had at breakfast—anything
there is, but as soon as possible. How
refreshing this wind is!”
“Go and change, John,” his wife urged.
“Yes, I must, immediately: I shall be taking
a chill.” As he half rose from his chair he saw
the postman, turbaned, barefooted, crossing the
grass from the road, and dropped back again.
“Here is the dâk,” he said; “I must just
have a look first.”
Mrs. Church took her letters, and went into
the house to give orders to the butler. Five
minutes afterwards she came back, to find her
husband sitting where she had left him, but
upright in his chair and mechanically stroking
his beard, with his face set. He had grown
paler, if that was possible, but had lost every
trace of lassitude. He had the look of being
face to face with a realised contingency which
his wife knew well.
“News, John?” she asked nervously; “anything
important?”
.bn 257.png
.pn +1
“The most important—and the worst,” he
answered steadily, without looking at her. His
eyes were fixed on the floor, and on his course
of action.
“What do you mean, dear? What has happened?
May I see?”
For answer he handed her his private letter
from Lord Scansleigh. She opened it with shaking
fingers, and read the first sentence or two
aloud. Then instinctively her voice stopped,
and she finished it in silence. The Viceroy had
written:—
.dv class='letter'
“My dear Church: The accompanying official
correspondence will show you our position,
when the mail left England, with the Secretary of
State. I fear that nothing has occurred in the meantime
to improve it—in fact, one or two telegrams
seem rather to point the other way. I will not waste
your time and mine in idle regrets, if indeed they
would be justifiable, but write only to assure you
heartily in private, as I do formally in my official
letter, that if we go we go together. I have already
telegraphed this to Strathell, and will let you know
the substance of his reply as soon as I receive it.
I wish I could think that the prospect of my own
.bn 258.png
.pn +1
resignation is likely to deter them from demanding
yours, but I own to you that I expect our joint
immolation will not be too impressive a sacrifice for
the British Public in this connection.
“With kind regards to Mrs. Church, in which my
wife joins,
.ll 60
.rj
“Believe me, dear Church, yours sincerely,
.ll
.ll 68
.rj
“Scansleigh.”
.ll
.dv-
They spoke for a few minutes of the Viceroy’s
loyalty and consideration and appreciation.
She dwelt upon that with instinctive tact,
and then Church got up quickly.
“I must write to Scansleigh at once,” he
said. “I am afraid he is determined about
this, but I must write. There is a great deal
to do. When Sparks comes out send him to
me.” Then he went over to her and awkwardly
kissed her. “You have taken it very well,
Judith,” he said—“better than any woman I
know would have done.”
She put a quick detaining hand upon his
arm. “Oh, John, it is only for your sake that
I care at all. I—I am so tired of it. I should
be only too glad to go home with you, dear, and
.bn 259.png
.pn +1
find some little place in the country where we
could live quietly——”
“Yes, yes,” he said, hurrying away. “We
can discuss that afterwards. Don’t keep Sparks
talking.”
Sparks appeared presently, swinging an embossed
silver cylinder half a yard long. New
washed and freshly clad in garments of clean
country silk, with his damp hair brushed crisply
off his forehead, there was a pinkness and a
healthiness about Sparks that would have been
refreshing at any other moment. “Have you
seen this bauble, Mrs. Church?” he inquired:
“Bhugsi’s tribute, enshrining the address. It
makes the fifth.”
Judith looked at it, and back at Captain
Sparks, who saw, with a falling countenance,
that there were tears in her eyes.
“It is the last he will ever receive,” she said,
and one of the tears found its way down her
cheek. “They have asked him from England
to resign—they say he must.”
Captain Sparks, private secretary, stood for
a moment with his legs apart in blank astonishment,
.bn 260.png
.pn +1
while Mrs. Church sought among the folds
of her skirt for her pocket-handkerchief.
“By the Lord—impossible!” he burst out;
and then, as Judith pointed mutely to her husband’s
room, he turned and shot in that direction,
leaving her, as her sex is usually left, with
the teacups and the situation.
.tb
A few hours later Captain Sparks’ dreams of
the changed condition of things were interrupted
by a knock. It was Mrs. Church, sleepy-eyed,
in her dressing-gown, with a candle; and
she wanted the chlorodyne from the little travelling
medicine chest, which was among the private
secretary’s things.
“My husband seems to have got a chill,” she
said. “It must have been while he sat in the
verandah. I am afraid he is in for a wretched
night.”
“Three fingers of brandy,” suggested Sparks
concernedly, getting out the bottle. “Nothing
like brandy.”
“He has tried brandy. About twenty drops
of this, I suppose?”
.bn 261.png
.pn +1
“I should think so. Can I be of any use?”
Judith said No, thanks—she hoped her husband
would get some sleep presently. She
went away, shielding her flickering candle, and
darkness and silence came again where she had
been.
A quarter of an hour later she came back,
and it appeared that Captain Sparks could be of
use. The chill seemed obstinate; they must
rouse the servants and get fires made and water
heated. Judith wanted to know how soon one
might repeat the dose of chlorodyne. She was
very much awake, and had that serious, pale
decision with which women take action in emergencies
of sickness.
Later still they stood outside the door of his
room and looked at each other. “There is a
European doctor at Bhai Gunj,” said Captain
Sparks. “He may be here with luck by six
o’clock to-morrow afternoon—this afternoon.”
He looked at his watch and saw that it was past
midnight. “Bundal Singh has gone for him, and
Juddoo for the native apothecary at Bhugsi—but
he will be useless. Robertson will be over
.bn 262.png
.pn +1
immediately. He has seen cases of it, I
know.”
A thick sound came from the room they had
left, and they hurried back into it.
.tb
“Water?” repeated the Commissioner; “yes,
as much as he likes. I wish to God we had some
ice.”
“Then, sir, I may take leave?” It was the
unctuous voice of the native apothecary.
“No, you may not. Damn you, I suppose
you can help to rub him? Quick, Sparks; the
turpentine!”
.tb
Next day at noon arrived Hari Lal, who had
travelled many hours and many miles with a
petition to the Chota Lât Sahib, wherein he and
his village implored that the goats might eat the
young shoots in the forest as aforetime; for if not—they
were all poor men—how should the goats
eat at all? Hari Lal arrived upon his beast, and
saw from afar off that there was a chuprassie in
red and gold upon the verandah whose favour
would cost money. So he dismounted at a considerable
.bn 263.png
.pn +1
and respectful distance, and approached
humbly, with salaams and words that
were suitable to a chuprassie in red and gold.
The heat stood fiercely about the bungalow, and
it was so silent that a pair of sparrows scolding
in the verandah made the most unseemly
wrangle.
Bundal Singh had not the look of business.
He sat immovable upon his haunches, with his
hands hanging between his knees. His head fell
forward heavily, his eyes were puffed, and he
regarded Hari Lal with indifference.
“O most excellent, how can a poor man seeking
justice speak with the Lât Sahib? The matter
is a matter of goats——”
“Bus! The Lât Sahib died in the little
dawn. This place is empty but for the widow.
Mutti dani wasti gia—they have gone to give the
earth. It was the bad sickness, and the pain of
it lasted only five hours. When he was dead,
worthy one, his face was like a blue puggri
that has been thrice washed, and his hand was
no larger than the hand of my woman! What
talk is there of justice? Bus!”
.bn 264.png
.pn +1
Hari Lal heard him through with a countenance
that grew ever more terrified. Then he
spat vigorously, and got again upon his animal.
“And you, fool, why do you sit here?” he asked
quaveringly, as he sawed at the creature’s
mouth.
“Because the servant-folk of the Sirkar do
not run away. Who then would do justice and
collect taxes, budzat? Jao, you Bengali rice-eater!
I am of a country where those who are
not women are men!”
The Bengali rice-eater went as he was bidden,
and only a little curling cloud of white dust,
sinking back into the road under the sun, remained
to tell of him. Bundal Singh, hoarse
with hours of howling, lifted up his voice in the
silence because of the grief within him, and
howled again.
A little wind stole out from under a clump
of mango trees and chased some new-curled
shavings about the verandah, and did its best
to blow them in at the closed shutters of a
darkened room. The shavings were too substantial,
but the scent of the fresh-cut planks
.bn 265.png
.pn +1
came through, and brought the stunned woman
on the bed a sickening realisation of
one unalterable fact in the horror of great
darkness through which she groped, babbling
prayers.
.bn 266.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
CHAPTER XVIII.
.sp 2
“It was all very well for him, poor man, to
want to be buried in that hole-and-corner kind
of way—where he fell, I suppose, doing his duty:
very simple and proper, I’m sure; and I should
have felt just the same about it in his place—but
on her account he ought to have made it
possible for them to have taken him back to
Calcutta and given him a public funeral.”
Mrs. Daye spoke feelingly, gently tapping her
egg. Mrs. Daye never could induce herself to
cut off the top of an egg with one fell blow;
she always tapped it, tenderly, first.
“It would have been something!” she continued.
“Poor dear thing! I was so fond of
Mrs. Church.”
“I see they have started subscriptions to give
him a memorial of sorts,” remarked her husband
from behind his newspaper. “But whether it’s
.bn 267.png
.pn +1
to be put in Bhugsi or in Calcutta doesn’t seem
to be arranged.”
“Oh, in Calcutta, of course! They won’t get
fifty rupees if it’s to be put up at Bhugsi. Nobody
would subscribe!”
“Is there room?” asked Miss Daye meekly,
from the other side of the table. “The illustrious
are already so numerous on the Maidan.
Is there no danger of overcrowding?”
“How ridiculous you are, Rhoda! You’ll
subscribe, Richard, of course? Considering how
very kind they’ve been to us I should say—what
do you think?—a hundred rupees.” Mrs.
Daye buttered her toast with knitted brows.
“We’ll see. Hello! Spence is coming out
again. ‘By special arrangement with the India
Office.’ He’s fairly well now, it seems, and willing
to sacrifice the rest of his leave ‘rather than
put Government to the inconvenience of another
possible change of policy in Bengal.’ That
means,” Colonel Daye continued, putting down
the Calcutta paper and taking up his coffee-cup,
“that Spence has got his orders from Downing
Street, and is being packed back to reverse this
.bn 268.png
.pn +1
College Grants business. But old Hawkins
won’t have much of a show, will he? Spence
will be out in three weeks.”
“I’m very pleased,” Mrs. Daye remarked
vigorously. “Mrs. Hawkins was bad enough
in the Board of Revenue; she’d be unbearable at
Belvedere. And Mrs. Church was so perfectly
unaffected. But I don’t think we would be quite
justified in giving a hundred, Richard—seventy-five
would be ample.”
“One would think, mummie, that the hat
was going round for Mrs. Church,” said her
daughter.
“Hats have gone round for less deserving
persons,” Colonel Daye remarked, “and in cases
where there was less need of them, too. St.
George writes me that there was no insurances,
and not a penny saved. Church has always
been obliged to do so much for his people. The
widow’s income will be precisely her three hundred
a year of pension, and no more—bread and
butter, but no jam.”
“Talking of jam,” said Mrs. Daye, with an
effect of pathos, “if you haven’t eaten it all,
.bn 269.png
.pn +1
Richard, I should like some. Poor dear thing!
And if she marries again, she loses even that,
doesn’t she? Oh, no, she doesn’t, either: there
was that Madras woman that had three husbands
and three pensions; they came altogether
to nine hundred a year in the end. Of course,
money is out of the question; but a little offering
of something useful—made in a friendly way—she
might even be grateful for. I am thinking
of sending her a little something.”
“What, mummie?” Rhoda demanded, with
suspicion.
“That long black cloak I got when we all
had to go into mourning for your poor dear
grandmother, Rhoda. I’ve hardly worn it at
all. Of course, it would require a little alteration,
but——”
“Mummie! How beastly of you! You must
not dream of doing it.”
“It’s fur-lined,” said Mrs. Daye, with an injured
inflection. “Besides, she isn’t the wife of
the L.G. now, you know.”
“Papa——”
“What? Oh, certainly not! Ridiculous!
.bn 270.png
.pn +1
Besides, you’re too late with your second-hand
souvenir, my dear. St. George says that Mrs.
Church sails to-day from Calcutta. Awfully cut
up, poor woman, he says. Wouldn’t go back to
Belvedere; wouldn’t see a soul: went to a
boarding-house and shut herself up in two
rooms.”
“How unkind you are about news, Richard!
Fancy your not telling us that before! And I
think you and Rhoda are quite wrong about the
cloak. If you had died suddenly of cholera in a
a dâk-bungalow in the wilds and I was left
with next to nothing, I would accept little
presents from friends in the spirit in which they
were offered, no matter what my position had
been!”
“I daresay you would, my dear. But if I—hello!
Exchange is going up again—if I catch
you wearing cast-off mourning for me, I’ll come
and hang around until you burn it. By the way,
I saw Doyle last night at the Club.”
“The barrister? Did you speak to him?”
asked Mrs. Daye.
“Yes. ‘Hello!’ I said: ‘thought you were
.bn 271.png
.pn +1
on leave. What in the world brings you up
here?’ Seems that Pattore telegraphed askin’
Doyle to defend him in this big diamond case
with Ezra, and he came out. ‘Well,’ I said,
‘Pattore’s in Calcutta, Ezra’s in Calcutta, diamond’s
in Calcutta, an’ you’re in Darjiling.
When I’m sued for two lakhs over a stone
to dangle on my tummy I won’t retain you!’”
“And what did Mr. Doyle say to that,
papa?” his daughter inquired.
“Oh—I don’t remember. Something about
never having seen the place before or something.
Here, khansamah—cheroot!”
The man brought a box and lighted a match,
which he presently applied to one end of the
cigar while his master pulled at the other.
“Well,” said Mrs. Daye, thoughtfully dabbling
in her finger-bowl, “about this statue or
whatever it is to Mr. Church—if it were a mere
question of inclination—but as things are, Richard,
I really don’t think we can afford more than
fifty. It isn’t as if it could do the poor man
any good. Where are you going, Rhoda?
Wait a minute.”
.bn 272.png
.pn +1
Mrs. Daye followed her daughter out of the
room, shutting the door behind her, and put
an impressive hand upon Rhoda’s arm at the
foot of the staircase.
“My dear child,” she said, with a note of candid
compassion, “what do you think has happened?
Your father and I were discussing it as
you came down, but I said ‘Not a word before
Rhoda!’ They have made Lewis Ancram
Chief Commissioner of Assam!”
The colour came back into the girl’s face with
a rush, and the excitement went out of her eyes.
“Good heavens, mummie, how you—— Why
shouldn’t they? Isn’t he a proper person?”
“Very much so. That has nothing to do
with it. Think of it, Rhoda—a Chief Commissioner,
at his age! And you can’t say I
didn’t prophesy it. The rising man in the Civil
Service I always told you he was.”
“And I never contradicted you, mummie
dear! My own opinion is that when Abdur
Rahman dies they’ll make him Amir!” Rhoda
laughed a gay, irresponsible laugh, and tripped
.bn 273.png
.pn +1
on upstairs with singular lightness of step.
Mrs. Daye, leaning upon the end of the
banister, followed her with reproachful
eyes.
“You seem to take it very lightly, Rhoda,
but I must say it serves you perfectly right
for having thrown the poor man over in that
disgraceful way. Girls who behave like that
are generally sorry for it later. I knew of a
chit here in Darjiling that jilted a man in the
Staff Corps and ran away with a tea-planter.
The man will be the next Commander-in-Chief
of the Indian Army, everybody says, and I hope
she likes her tea-planter.”
“Mummie!” Rhoda called down confidentially
from the landing.
“Well?”
“Put your head in a bag, mummie. I’m going
out. Shall I bring you some chocolates or
some nougat or anything?”
“I shall tell your father to whip you. Yes,
chocolates if they’re fresh—insist upon that.
Those crumbly Neapolitan ones, in silver-and-gold
paper.”
.bn 274.png
.pn +1
“All right. And mummie!”
“What?”
“Write and congratulate Mr. Ancram. Then
he’ll know there’s no ill-feeling!”
Which Mrs. Daye did.
.bn 275.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
CHAPTER XIX.
.sp 2
Ten minutes later Rhoda stood fastening her
glove at her father’s door and looking out upon
a world of suddenly novel charm. The door
opened, as it were, upon eternity, with a patch
of garden between, but eternity was blue and
sun-filled and encouraging. The roses and
sweet-williams stood sheer against the sky, with
fifty yellow butterflies dancing above them.
Over the verge of the garden—there was not
more than ten feet of it in any direction—she
saw tree-tops and the big green shoulders of
the lower hills, and very far down a mat of
fleecy clouds that hid the flanks of some of
these. The sunlight was tempting, enticing.
It made the rubble path warm beneath her
feet and drew up the scent of the garden
until the still air palpitated with it. Rhoda
took little desultory steps to the edge of the
.bn 276.png
.pn +1
ledge the house was built on, and down the
steep footway to the road. The white oaks met
over her head, and far up among the tree-ferns
she heard a cuckoo. Its note softened and accented
her unreasoned gladness, seemed to
give it a form and a metre. She looked up
into the fragrant leafy shadows and listened
till it came again, vaguely aware that it was
enough to live for. If she had another
thought it was that Philip Doyle had come
too late to see the glory of the rhododendrons,
there was only, here and there, a red
rag of them left.
She stepped with a rattle of pebbles into the
wide main road round the mountain, and there
stood for a moment undecided. It was the chief
road, the Mall; and if she turned to the right it
would lead her past the half-dozen tiny European
shops that clung to the side of the hill, past the
hotels and the club, and through the expansion
where the band played in the afternoon, where
there were benches and an admirable view, and
where new-comers to Darjiling invariably sat for
two or three days and contentedly occupied
.bn 277.png
.pn +1
themselves with processes of oxygenation. This
part of the Mall was frequented and fashionable;
even at that hour she would meet her acquaintances
on hill ponies and her mother’s friends in
dandies and her mother’s friends’ babies in perambulators,
with a plentiful background of
slouching Bhutia coolies, their old felt hats
tied on with their queues, and red-coats from
a recuperating regiment, and small black-and-white
terriers. It was not often that this
prospect attracted her; she had discovered a
certain monotony in its cheerfulness some time
before; but to-day she had to remind herself
of that discovery before she finally decided to
turn to the left instead. She had another
reason: if she went that way it might look
to Philip Doyle as if she wanted to meet him.
Why this gentleman should have come to so
extraordinary a conclusion on the data at his
disposal Miss Daye did not pause to explain.
She was quite certain that he would, so she
turned to the left.
It suited her mood, when once she had taken
that direction, to walk very fast. She had an
.bn 278.png
.pn +1
undefined sense of keeping pace with events;
her vigorous steps made a rhythm for her
buoyant thought, and helped it out. She was
entirely occupied with the way in which she
would explain to Mr. Doyle how it was that
she was not married to Lewis Ancram. She
anticipated a pleasure in this, and she thought
it was because Doyle would be gratified, on his
friend’s account. He had never liked the match—she
clung to that impression in all humility—he
would perhaps approve of her breaking it off.
Rhoda felt a little excited satisfaction at the
idea of being approved of by Philip Doyle.
She put the words with which she would tell
him into careful phrases as she walked, constructing
and reconstructing them, while Buzz
kept an erratic course before her with inquisitive
pauses by the wayside and vain chasing of
little striped squirrels that whisked about the
boles of the trees. Buzz, she thought, had never
been more idiotically amusing.
The road grew boskier and lonelier. Miss
Daye met a missionary lady in a jinricksha, and
then a couple of schoolboys sprinting, and then
.bn 279.png
.pn +1
for a quarter of a mile nobody at all. The little
white houses stopped cropping out on ledges
above her head, the wall of rock or of rubble
rose solidly up, wet and glistening, and tapestried
thick with tiny ferns and wild begonias.
All at once, looking over the brink, she saw
that the tin roofs of the cottages down the
khud-side no longer shone in the sun; the
clouds had rolled between it and them—very
likely down there it was raining. Presently
the white mist smoked up level with the road,
and she and the trees and the upper mountain
stood in dappled sunlight for a moment alone
above a phantasmally submerged world. Then
the crisp leaf-shadows on the road grew indistinct
and faded, the sunlight paled and went
out, and in a moment there was nothing near
or far but a wandering greyness, and here and
there perhaps the shadowed hole of an oak-tree
or the fantastic outline of a solitary nodding
fern.
“It’s going to rain, Buzz,” she said, as the
little dog mutely inquired for encouragement
and direction, “and neither of us have got an
.bn 280.png
.pn +1
umbrella. So we’ll both get wet and take our
death of cold. Sumja,[E] Buzz?”
.fm
.fn E
“Do you understand?”
.fn-
.fm
As she spoke they passed the blurred figure
of a man, walking rapidly in the other direction.
“Buzz!” Rhoda cried, as the dog turned and
trotted briskly after: “Come back, sir!” Buzz
took no notice whatever, and immediately she
heard him addressed in a voice which made a
sudden requirement upon her self-control. She
had a divided impulse—to betake herself on as
fast as she could into remote indistinguishability,
and to call the dog again. With a little effort of
hardihood she turned and called him, turned
with a thumping heart, and waited for his restoration
and for anything else that might happen.
The mist drifted up for a moment as Philip
Doyle heard her and came quickly back; and
when they shook hands they stood in a little
white temple with uncertain walls and a ceiling
decoration of tree-ferns in high relief.
She asked him when he had come, although
she knew that already, and he inquired for her
.bn 281.png
.pn +1
mother, although he was quite informed as to
Mrs. Daye’s well-being. He explained Buzz’s
remembering him, as if he had taken an unfair
advantage of it, and they announced simultaneously
that it was going to rain. Then conversation
seemed to fail them wholly, and Rhoda
made a movement of departure.
“I suppose you are going to some friend in
the neighbourhood,” he said, lifting his hat, “if
there is any neighbourhood—which one is inclined
to doubt.”
“Oh, no, I’m only walking.”
“All alone?”
“Buzz,” she said, with a downcast smile.
“Buzz is such an effective protection that I’m
inclined to ask you to share him.” His voice
was even more tentative than his words. He
fancied he would have made a tremendous advance
if she allowed him to come with her.
“Oh, yes,” she said foolishly, “you may have
half.”
“Thank you. I am three miles from my
club, twenty-four hours from my office, and four
thousand feet above sea-level—and I don’t mind
.bn 282.png
.pn +1
confessing that I’m very frightened indeed.
How long, I wonder, does it take to acquire
the magnificent indifference to the elements
which you display? But the storm is indubitably
coming: don’t you think we had better turn
back?”
“Yes,” she said again, and they turned back;
but they sauntered along among the clouds at
precisely the pace they might have taken in the
meadows of the world below.
She asked him where he had spent his leave
and how he had enjoyed it, and she gathered
from his replies that one might stay too long in
India to find even Italy wholly paradisaical,
although Monte Carlo had always its same old
charm. “You should see Monte Carlo before
some cataclysm overtakes it,” he said. “You
would find it amusing. I spent a month at
Homburg,” he went on humorously, “with what
I consider the greatest possible advantage to my
figure. Though my native friends have been
openly condoling with me on my consequent loss
of prestige, and I have no doubt my sylph-like
condition will undermine my respectability.”
.bn 283.png
.pn +1
He felt, as he spoke, deplorably middle-aged, and
to mention these things seemed to be a kind of
apology for them.
Rhoda looked at him with the conviction
that he had left quite ten years in Europe, but
she found herself oddly reluctant to say so.
“Mummie will tell you,” she said. “Mummie
always discovers the most wonderful changes in
people when they have been home. And why
did you come back so soon?”
“Why?” he repeated, half facing round, and
then suddenly dropping back again. “I came
to see about something.”
“Oh, yes, of course you did. I know about
it. And do you think you will win?”
She looked at him with a smile of timid intelligence.
Under it she was thinking that she
had never had such a stupid conversation with
Mr. Doyle before. He smiled back gravely, and
considered for a moment.
“I don’t in the least know,” he said with courageous
directness; “but I mean to try—very hard.”
If he had thought, he might have kept the
suggestion out of his voice—it was certainly a
.bn 284.png
.pn +1
little premature—but he did not think, and the
suggestion was there. Rhoda felt her soul leap
up to catch its full significance; then she grew
very white, and shivered a little. The shiver
was natural enough: two or three big drops had
struck her on the shoulders, and others were
driving down upon the road, with wide spaces
between them, but heavily determined, and making
little splashes where they struck.
“It is going to pour,” she said; and, as they
walked on with a futile quickening of pace, she
heard him talk of something else, and called herself
a fool for the tumult in her heart. The rain
gathered itself together and pelted them. She
was glad of the excuse to break blindly into a
run, and Doyle needed all his newly acquired
energy to keep up with her. The storm was
behind them, and as it darkened and thickened
and crashed and drove them on, Rhoda’s blood
tingled with a wild sweet knowledge that she
fled before something stronger and stranger
than the storm, and that in the end she would
be overtaken, in the end she would cede. Her
sense of this culminated when Philip Doyle put
.bn 285.png
.pn +1
a staying hand upon her arm—she could not
have heard him speak—and she sped on faster,
with a little frightened cry.
“Come back!” he shouted; and, without
knowing why, she did as he bade her, struggling
at every step, it seemed, into a chaos out of
which the rain smote her on both cheeks, with
only one clear sensation—that he had her hand
very closely pressed to his side, and that somewhere
or other, presently, there would be
shelter. They found it not ten yards behind—one
of those shallow caves that Sri Krishna
scooped out long ago to lodge his beggar priests
in. Some Bhutia coolies had been cooking a
meal there; a few embers still glowed on a heap
of ashes in the middle of the place. Doyle explained,
as he thrust her gently in, that these had
caught his eye.
“You won’t mind my leaving you here,” he
said, “while I go on for a dandy and wraps and
things? I shall not be a moment longer than I
can help. You won’t be afraid?”
“In this rain! It would be wicked. Yes, I
shall—I shall be horribly afraid! You must stay
.bn 286.png
.pn +1
here too, until it is over. Please come inside at
once.”
The little imperious note thrilled Doyle; but
he stayed where he was.
“My dear child,” he said, “this may last for
hours, and, if you don’t get home somehow, you
are bound to get a chill. Besides, I must let
your mother know.”
“It will probably be over by the time you
reach the house. And my mother is always
quite willing to entrust me to Providence, Mr.
Doyle. And if you go I’ll come, too.”
She looked so resolute that Doyle hesitated.
“Won’t you be implored to stay here?”
he asked.
She shook her head. “Not if you go,” she
said. And, without further parley, he stooped
and came in.
They could not stand upright against the shelving
sides and roof of the place, so perforce they
sat upon the ground—she, with her feet tucked
under her, leaning upon one hand, in the way
of her sex, he hugging his knees. There might
have been thirty cubic feet of space in the cave,
.bn 287.png
.pn +1
but it was not comfortably apportioned, and he
had to crouch rather awkwardly to keep himself
at what he considered a proper distance. It was
warm and dry there, and the dull fire of the embers
in the middle gave a centre and a significance
to the completeness of their shelter. The
clouds hung like a grey curtain before the entrance,
bordered all round with trailing vines
and drooping ferns; the beat of the rain came
in to them in a heavy distant monotone, and even
the thunder seemed to be rolling in a muffled
way among the valleys below. Doyle felt that
nothing could be more perfect than their solitude.
He would not speak, lest his words should
people it with commonplaces; he almost feared
to move, lest he should destroy the accident that
gave him the privilege of such closeness to her.
The little place was filled, it seemed to him, with
a certain divine exhalation of her personality,
of her freshness and preciousness; he breathed
it, and grew young again, and bold. In the
moments of silence that fell their love arose
before them like a presence. The girl saw how
beautiful it was without looking, the man asked
.bn 288.png
.pn +1
himself how long he could wait for its realisation.
“Are you very wet?” he asked her at last.
“No; only my jacket.”
“Then you ought to take it off, oughtn’t you?
Let me help you.”
He had to lean closer to her for that. The
wet little coat came off with difficulty; and then
he put an audacious hand upon the warm shoulder
in its cambric blouse underneath, with a
suddenly taught confidence that it would not
shrink away.
“Only a little damp,” he said. It was the
most barefaced excuse for his caressing fingers.
“Tell me, darling, when a preposterously venerable
person like me wishes to make a proposal of
marriage to somebody who is altogether sweet
and young and lovable like you, has he any business
to take advantage of a romantic situation to
do it in?”
She did not answer. The lightness of his
words somewhat disturbed her sense of their
import. Then she looked into his face, and saw
the wonderful difference that the hope of her
.bn 289.png
.pn +1
had written there, and, without any more questioning,
she permitted herself to understand.
“Think about it for a little while,” he said,
and came a good deal nearer, and drew her head
down upon his breast. He knew a lifetime of
sweet content in the space it rested there,
while he laid his lips softly upon her hair and
made certain that no other woman’s was so
sweet-scented.
“Well?” he said at last.
“But——”
“But?”
“But you never did approve of me.”
“Didn’t I? I don’t know. I have always
loved you.”
“I have never loved anybody—before.”
That was as near as she managed to get, then
or for long thereafter, to the matter of her previous
engagement.
“No. Of course not. But for the future?”
Without taking her head from his shoulder,
she lifted her eyes to his; and he found the
pledge he sought in them.
And that upturning of her face brought her
.bn 290.png
.pn +1
lips, her newly grave, sweet, submissive lips,
very near, and the gladness within him was newborn
and strong. And so the storm swept itself
away, and the purple-necked doves cooed and
called again where the sunlight glistened through
the dripping laurels, and these two were hardly
aware. Then suddenly a Bhutia girl with a
rose behind her ear came and stood in the
door of the cave and regarded them. She
was muscular and red-cheeked and stolid; she
wore many strings of beads as well as the rose
behind her ear, and as she looked she comprehended,
with a slow and foolish smile.
“It is her tryst!” Rhoda cried, jumping up.
“Let us leave it to her.”
Then they went home through a world of
their own, which the piping birds and the wild
roses and the sun-decked mosses reflected fitly.
The clouds had gone to Thibet; all round about,
in full sunlight, the great encompassing, gleaming
Snows rose up and spoke of eternity, and
made a horizon not too solemn and supreme for
the vision of their happiness.
.tb
.bn 291.png
.pn +1
“My dearest child.” said Mrs. Daye that
night—she had come late to her daughter’s
room with her hair down—“don’t think I’m
not as pleased as possible, because I am. I’ve
always had the greatest admiration for Mr.
Doyle, and you couldn’t have a better—unofficial—position
in Calcutta. But I must warn
you, dear—I’ve seen such misfortune come of it,
and I knew I shouldn’t sleep if I didn’t—before
this engagement is announced——”
“I’ll go to church in a cotton blouse and a
serge skirt this time, if that’s what you’re thinking
of, mummie.”
“There! I was sure of it! Do think seriously,
Rhoda, of the injustice to poor Mr. Doyle,
if you’re merely marrying him for pique!”
.bn 292.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
CHAPTER XX.
.sp 2
The Honourable Mr. Ancram found himself
gratified by Mrs. Church’s refusal to see him in
Calcutta. It filled out his idea of her, which
was a delicate one, and it gave him a pleasurable
suggestive of the stimulus which he should
always receive from her in future toward the
alternative which was most noble and most satisfying.
Mr. Ancram had the clearest perception
of the value of such stimulus; but the
probability that he was likely to be able to
put it permanently at his disposal could
hardly be counted chief among the reasons
which made him, at this time, so exceedingly
happy. His promotion had even less to do
with it. India is known to be full of people
who would rather be a Chief Commissioner
than Rudyard Kipling or Saint Michael, but
this translation had been in the straight line
.bn 293.png
.pn +1
of Mr. Ancram’s intention for years; it offered
him no fortuitous joy, and if it made a basis
for the more refined delight which had entered
his experience, that is as much as it can
be credited with. Life had hitherto offered him
no satisfaction that did not pale beside the prospect
of possessing Judith Church. He gave
dreamy half-hours to the realisation of how
the sordidness of existence would vanish when
he should regard it through her eyes, of how
her goodness would sweeten the world to him,
and her gaiety brighten it, and her beauty etherealise
it. He tried to analyse the completeness
of their fitness for each other, and invariably
gave it up to fall into a little trance of longing
and of anticipation.
He could not be sufficiently grateful to John
Church for dying—it was a circumstance upon
which he congratulated himself frankly, an accident
by which he was likely to benefit so vastly
that he could indulge in no pretence of regretting
it on any altruistic ground. It was so decent of
Church to take himself out of the way that
his former Chief Secretary experienced a
.bn 294.png
.pn +1
change of attitude toward him. Ancram still
considered him an ass, but hostility had faded
out of the opinion, which, when he mentioned
it, dwelt rather upon that animal’s power of
endurance and other excellent qualities. Ancram
felt himself distinctly on better terms
with the late Lieutenant-Governor, and his feeling
was accented by the fact that John Church
died in time to avoid the necessity for a more
formal resignation. His Chief Secretary felt
personally indebted to him for that, on ethical
grounds.
In the long, suggestive, caressing letters
which reached Judith by every mail, he made an
appearance of respecting her fresh widowhood
that was really clever, considering the fervency
which he contrived to imply. As the weeks went
by, however, he began to consider this attitude
of hers, the note she had struck in going six thousand
miles away without seeing him, rather an
extravagant gratification of conscience, and if she
had been nearer it may be doubted whether
his tolerance would have lasted. But she was
in London and he was in Assam, which made
.bn 295.png
.pn +1
restraint easier; and he was able always to
send her the assurance of his waiting passion
without hurting her with open talk of the
day when he should come into his own.
Judith, seeing that his pen was in a leash,
watered her love anew with the thought of his
innate nobility, and shortened the time that lay
between them.
In spite of her conscience, which was a good
one, there were times when Mrs. Church was
shocked by the realisation that she was only
trying to believe herself unhappy. In spite of
other things, too, of a more material sort.
Misfortune had overtaken the family at Stoneborough:
ill-health had compelled her father
to resign the pulpit of Beulah Church, and to
retire upon a microscopic stipend from the
superannuation fund. There was a boy of
fourteen, much like his sister, who wanted to
be a soldier, and did not want to wear a
dirty apron and sell the currants of the leading
member of his father’s congregation. For
these reasons Judith’s three hundred a year
shrank to a scanty hundred and fifty. The boy
.bn 296.png
.pn +1
went to Clifton, and she to an attic in that
south side of Kensington where they are astonishingly
cheap. Here she established herself,
and grew familiar with the devices of poverty.
It was not picturesque Bohemian poverty; she
had little ladylike ideals in gloves and shoes
that she pinched herself otherwise to attain,
and it is to be feared that she preferred looking
shabby-genteel with eternal limitations to
looking disreputable with spasmodic extravagances.
But neither the sordidness of her life
nor the discomfort she tried to conjure out of
the past made her miserable. Rather she extracted
a solace from them—they gave her a
vague feeling of expiation; she hugged her little
miseries for their purgatorial qualities, and
felt, though she never put it into a definite
thought, that they made a sort of justification
for her hope of heaven.
Besides, except once a week, on Indian mail
day, her life was for the time in abeyance. She
had a curious sense occasionally, in some sordid
situation to which she was driven for the
lack of five shillings, of how little anything
.bn 297.png
.pn +1
mattered during this little colourless period;
and she declined kindly invitations from old
Anglo-Indian acquaintances in more expensive
parts of Kensington with almost an ironical appreciation
of their inconsequence. She accepted
existence without movement or charm for the
time, since she could not dispense with it altogether.
She invented little monotonous duties
and occupied herself with , and waited,
always with the knowledge that just beyond her
dingy horizon lay a world, her old world, of full
life and vivid colour and long dramatic days, if
she chose to look.
On mail days she did look, over Ancram’s
luxurious pages with soft eyes and a little participating
smile. They made magic carpets for
her—they had imaginative touches. They took
her to the scent of the food-stuff in the chaffering
bazar; she saw the white hot sunlight sharp-shadowed
by dusty palms, and the people, with
their gentle ways and their simplicity of guile,
the clanking silver anklets of the coolie women,
the black kol smudges under the babies’ eye-lashes—the
dear people! She remembered how
.bn 298.png
.pn +1
she had seen the oxen treading out the corn in
the warm leisure of that country, and the women
grinding at the mill. She remembered their
simple talk; how the gardener had told her in
his own tongue that the flowers ate much earth;
how a syce had once handed her a beautiful
bazar-written letter, in which he asked for more
wages because he could not afford himself. She
remembered the jewelled Rajahs, and the ragged
magicians, and the coolies’ song in the evening,
and the home-trotting little oxen painted in pink
spots in honour of a plaster goddess, and realised
how she loved India. She realised it even more
completely, perhaps, when November came and
brought fogs which were always dreary in that
they interfered with nothing that she wanted to
do, and neuralgia that was especially hard to
bear for being her only occupation. The winter
dragged itself away. Beside Ancram’s letters
and her joy in answering them, she had one
experience of pleasure keen enough to make
it an episode. She found it in the Athenian,
which she picked up on a news-stall, where she
had dropped into the class of customers who
.bn 299.png
.pn +1
glance over three or four weeklies and buy one
or two. It was a review, a review of length and
breadth and weight and density, of the second
volume of the “Modern Influence of the Vedic
Books,” by Lewis Ancram, I.C.S. She bought
the paper and took it home, and all that day
her heart beat higher with her woman’s ambition
for the man she loved, sweetened with
the knowledge that his own had become as
nothing to the man who loved her.
.bn 300.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
CHAPTER XXI.
.sp 2
It was a foregone conclusion in Calcutta that
the name of the Chief Commissioner of Assam
should figure prominently in the Birthday Honours
of the season. On the 24th of that very
hot May people sat in their verandahs in early
morning dishabille, and consumed tea and toast
and plantains, and read in the local extras that
a Knight Commandership of the Star of India
had fluttered down upon the head of Mr.
Lewis Ancram, without surprise. Doubtless the
“Modern Influence of the Vedic Books” was to
be reckoned with to some extent in the decorative
result, but the general public gave it less importance
than Sir Walter Besant, for example,
would be disposed to do. The general public
reflected rather upon the Chief Commissioner’s
conspicuous usefulness in Assam, especially the
dexterity with which he had trapped border
.bn 301.png
.pn +1
raids upon tea-plantations. The general public
remembered how often it had seen Mr. Lewis
Ancram’s name in the newspapers, and in what
invariably approved connections. So the men in
pyjamas on the verandahs languidly regarded the
wide flat spreading red-and-yellow bouquets of
the gold mohur trees where the crows were
gasping and swearing on the Maidan, and declared,
with unanimous yawns, that Ancram was
“just the fellow to get it.”
The Supreme Government at Simla was
even better acquainted with Lewis Ancram’s
achievements and potentialities than the general
public, however. There had been occasions,
when Mr. Ancram was a modest Chief Secretary
only, upon which the Supreme Government had
cause to congratulate itself privately as to Mr.
Ancram’s extraordinary adroitness in political
moves affecting the “advanced” Bengali. Since
his triumph over the College Grants Notification
the advanced Bengali had become increasingly
outrageous. An idea in this connection so far
emerged from official representations at headquarters
as to become almost obvious, as to
.bn 302.png
.pn +1
leave no alternative—which is a very remarkable
thing in the business of the Government of India.
It was to the effect that the capacity to outwit
the Bengali should be the single indispensable
qualification of the next Lieutenant-Governor of
Bengal.
“No merely straightforward chap will do,”
said Lord Scansleigh, with a sigh, “however able
he may be. Of course,” he added, “I don’t mean
to say that we want a crooked fellow, but our
man must understand crookedness and be equal
to it. That, poor Church never was.”
The Viceroy delivered himself thus because
Sir Griffiths Spence’s retirement was imminent,
and he had his choice for Bengal to make over
again. Simplicity and directness apparently disqualified
a number of gentleman of seniority and
distinction, for ten days later it was announced
that the appointment had fallen to Sir Lewis
Ancram, K.C.S.I. Again the little world of
Calcutta declined to be surprised: nothing, apparently,
exceeded the popular ambition for the
Chief Commissioner of Assam. Hawkins, of the
Board of Revenue, was commiserated for a day
.bn 303.png
.pn +1
or two, but it was very generally admitted that
men like Hawkins of the Board of Revenue,
solid, unpretentious fellows like that, were extremely
apt, somehow, to be overlooked. People
said generally that Scansleigh had done the right
thing—that Ancram would know how to manage
the natives. It was perceived that the new King
of Bengal would bring a certain picturesqueness
to the sceptre, he was so comparatively young
and so superlatively clever. In view of this the
feelings of Hawkins of the Board of Revenue
were lost sight of. And nothing could have
been more signal than the approbation of the
native newspapers. Mohendra Lal Chuckerbutty,
in the Bengal Free Press, wept tears of joy
in leading articles every day for a week. “Bengal,”
said Mohendra, editorially, “has been given
a man after her own heart.” By which Sir
Lewis Ancram was ungrateful enough to be
annoyed.
Judith grew very white over the letter which
brought her the news, remembering many
things. It was a careful letter, but there was a
throb of triumph in it—a suggestion, just perceptible,
.bn 304.png
.pn +1
of the dramatic value of the situation.
She told herself that this was inevitable and
natural, just as inevitable and natural as all the
rest; but at the same time she felt that her philosophy
was not quite equal to the remarkable completeness
of Ancram’s succession. With all her
pride in him, in her heart of hearts she would infinitely
have preferred to share some degradation
with him rather than this; she would have liked
the taste of any bitterness of his misfortune
better than this perpetual savour of his usurpation.
It was a mere phase of feeling, which
presently she put aside, but for the moment her
mind dwelt with curious insistence upon one or
two little pictorial memories of the other master
of Belvedere, while tears stood in her eyes and a
foolish resentment at this fortunate turn of
destiny tugged at her heart-strings. In a little
while she found herself able to rejoice for
Ancram with sincerity, but all day she involuntarily
recurred, with deep, gentle irritation, to
the association of the living idea and the dead
one.
Perhaps the liveliest pang inflicted by Sir
.bn 305.png
.pn +1
Lewis Ancram’s appointment was experienced
by Mrs. Daye. Mrs. Daye confided to her husband
that she never saw the Belvedere carriage,
with its guard of Bengal cavalry trotting behind,
without thinking that if things had turned out
differently she might be sitting in it, with His
Honour her son-in-law. From which the constancy
and keenness of Mrs. Daye’s regrets may
be in a measure inferred. She said to privileged
intimate friends that she knew she was a silly,
worldly thing, but really it did bring out
one’s silliness and worldliness to have one’s
daughter jilt a Lieutenant-Governor, in a way
that nobody could understand whose daughter
hadn’t done it. Mrs. Daye took what comfort
she could out of the fact that this limitation excluded
every woman she knew. She would add,
with her brow raised in three little wrinkles of
deprecation, that of course they were immensely
pleased with Rhoda’s ultimate choice: Mr. Doyle
was a dear, sweet man, but she, Mrs. Daye, could
not help having a sort of sisterly regard for him,
which towards one’s son-in-law was ridiculous.
He certainly had charming manners—the very
.bn 306.png
.pn +1
man to appreciate a cup of tea and one’s poor
little efforts at conversation—if he didn’t happen
to be married to one’s daughter. It was ludicrously
impossible to have a seriously enjoyable
tête-à-tête with a man who was married to one’s
daughter!
.bn 307.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
CHAPTER XXII.
.sp 2
Calcutta, when the Doyles came down from
Darjiling, chased by the early rains, was prepared
to find the marriage ridiculous. Calcutta
counted on its fingers the years that lay between
Mr. and Mrs. Doyle, and mentioned, as a condoning
fact, that Philip Doyle’s chances for the next
High Court Judgeship were very good indeed.
Following up this line of fancy, Calcutta pictured
a matron growing younger and younger and a
dignitary of the Bench growing older and older,
added the usual accessories of jewels and balls
and Hill captains and the private entrée, and
figured out the net result, which was regrettably
vulgar and even more regrettably common. It
is perhaps due to Calcutta rather than to the
Doyles to say that six weeks after their arrival
these prophecies had been forgotten and people
went about calling it an ideal match. One or
.bn 308.png
.pn +1
two ladies went so far as to declare that Rhoda
Daye had become a great deal more tolerable
since her marriage; her husband was so much
cleverer than she was, and that was what she
needed, you know. In which statement might
occasionally be discerned a gleam of satisfaction.
It shortly became an item of gossip that very
few engagements were permitted to interfere
with Mrs. Philip Doyle’s habit of driving to her
husband’s office to pick him up at five o’clock in
the afternoon, and that very few clients were
permitted to keep him there after she had arrived.
People smiled in indulgent comment on
it, as the slender, light, tasteful figure in the
cabriolet drove among the thronging carriages in
the Red Road towards Old Post-Office Street,
and looked again, with that paramount interest
in individuals which is almost the only one where
Britons congregate in exile. Mrs. Doyle, in the
picturesque exercise of the domestic virtues, was
generally conceded to be even more piquant than
Miss Daye in the temporary possession of a Chief
Secretary.
.bn 309.png
.pn +1
I have no doubt that on one special Wednesday
afternoon she was noted to look absent and
a trifle grave, as the Waler made his own pace to
bring his master. There was no reason for this
in particular, except that His Honour the Lieutenant-Governor
was leaving for England by the
mail train for Bombay that evening. Perhaps
this in itself would hardly have sufficed to make
Mrs. Doyle meditative, but there had been a
great clamour of inquiry and suggestion as to
why Sir Lewis Ancram was straining a point to obtain
three months’ leave under no apparent emergency: people
said he had never looked better—and
Mrs. Doyle believed she knew precisely
why. The little cloud of her secret knowledge
was before her eyes as the crows pecked hoarsely
at the street offal under the Waler’s deliberate
feet, and she was somewhat impatient at being
burdened with any acquaintance with Sir Lewis
Ancram’s private intentions. Also she remembered
her liking for the woman he was going
home to marry; and, measuring in fancy Judith
Church’s capacity for happiness, she came to the
belief that it was likely to be meagrely filled. It
.bn 310.png
.pn +1
was the overflowing measure of her own, perhaps,
that gave its liveliness to her very real pang
of regret. She knew Lewis Ancram so much
better than Mrs. Church did, she assured herself;
was it not proof enough, that the other woman
loved him while she (Rhoda) bowed to him? As
at that moment, when he passed her on horseback,
looking young and vigorous and elate.
Rhoda fancied a certain significance in his smile;
it spoke of good-fellowship and the prospect of
an equality of bliss and the general expediency of
things as they were rather than as they might
have been. She coloured hotly under it, and
gathered up the reins and astonished the Waler
with the whip.
As she turned into Old Post-Office Street, a
flanking battalion of the rains—riding up dark
and thunderous behind the red-brick turrets
of the High Court—whipped down upon the
Maidan, and drove her, glad of a refuge, up the
dingy stairs to her husband’s office. Her custom
was to sit in the cabriolet and despatch the syce
with a message. The syce would deliver it in
his own tongue—“The memsahib sends a salutation”—and
.bn 311.png
.pn +1
Doyle would presently appear.
But to-day it was raining and there was no
alternative.
A little flutter of consideration greeted her
entrance. Two or three native clerks shuffled to
their feet and salaamed, and one ran to open the
door into Doyle’s private room for her. Her
husband sat writing against time at a large desk
littered thick with papers. At another table a
native youth in white cotton draperies sat making
quill pens, with absorbed precision. The
punkah swung a slow discoloured petticoat
above them both. The tall wide windows were
open. Through them little damp gusts came
in and lifted the papers about the room;
and beyond them the grey rain slanted down,
and sobered the vivid green of everything,
and turned the tilted palms into the likeness
of draggled plumes waving against the
sky.
“You have just escaped the shower,” said
Doyle, looking up with quick pleasure at her
step. “I’ll be another twenty minutes, I’m afraid.
And I have nothing for you to play with,” he
.bn 312.png
.pn +1
added, glancing round the dusty room—“not
even a novel. You must just sit down and be
good.”
“Mail letters?” asked Rhoda, with her hand
on his shoulder.
The clerk was looking another way, and she
dropped a foolish, quick little kiss on the top of
his head.
“Yes. It’s this business of the memorial to
Church. I’ve got the newspaper reports of the
unveiling together, and the Committee have
drafted a formal letter to Mrs. Church, and
there’s a good deal of private correspondence—letters
from big natives sending subscriptions,
and all that—that I thought she would like to
see. As Secretary to the Committee, it of course
devolves upon me to forward everything. And
at this moment,” Doyle went on, glancing ruefully
at the page under his hand, “I am trying
to write to her privately, poor thing.”
Rhoda glanced down at the letter. “I know
you will be glad to have these testimonials,
which are as sincere as they are spontaneous, to
the unique position Church held in the regard of
.bn 313.png
.pn +1
many distinguished people,” she read deliberately,
aloud.
“Do you think that is the right kind of thing
to say? It strikes me as rather formal. But
one is so terribly afraid of hurting her by some
stupidity.”
“Oh, I don’t think so at all, Philip. I mean—it
is quite the proper thing, I think. After all,
it’s—it’s more than a year ago, you know.”
“The wives of men like Church remember
them longer than that, I fancy. But if you will
be pleased to sit down, Mrs. Doyle, I’ll finish it
in some sort of decency and get it off.”
Rhoda sat down and crossed her feet and
looked into dusty vacancy. The recollection of
Ancram’s expression as he passed her in the road
came back to her, and as she reflected that the
ship which carried him to Judith Church would
also take her the balm respectfully prepared by
the Committee, her sense of humour curved her
lips in an ironical smile. The grotesqueness of
the thing made it seem less serious, and she
found quite five minutes’ interested occupation
in considering it. Then she regarded the baboo
.bn 314.png
.pn +1
making pens, and picked up a “Digest” and put
it down again, and turned over the leaves of a
tome on the “Hindu Law of Inheritance,” and
yawned, and looked out of the window, and observed
that it had stopped raining.
“Philip, aren’t you nearly done? Remember
me affectionately to Mrs. Church—no, perhaps
you’d better not, either.”
Doyle was knitting his brows over a final
sentiment, and did not reply.
“Philip, is that one of your old coats hanging
on the nail? Is it old enough to give away? I
want an old coat for the syce to sleep in: he had
fever yesterday.”
Mrs. Doyle went over to the object of
her inquiries, took it down, and daintily
shook it.
“Philip! Pay some attention to me. May I
have this coat? There’s nothing in the pockets—nothing
but an old letter and a newspaper.
Oh!”
Her husband looked up at last, noting a
change in the tone of her exclamation. She
stood looking in an embarrassed way at the
.bn 315.png
.pn +1
address on the envelope she held. It was in
Ancram’s handwriting.
“What letter?” he asked.
She handed it to him, and at the sight of it he
frowned a little.
“Is the newspaper the Bengal Free Press?”
“Yes,” she said, glancing at it. “And it’s
marked in one or two places with red pencil.”
“Then read them both,” Doyle replied.
“They don’t tell a very pretty story, but it may
amuse you. I thought I had destroyed them
long ago. I can’t have worn that coat since I
left Florence.”
Rhoda sat down, with a beating curiosity, and
applied herself to understand the story that was
not very pretty. It sometimes annoyed her that
she could not resist her interest in things that
concerned Ancram, especially things that exemplified
him. She brought her acutest intelligence
to bear upon the exposition of the letter
and the newspaper; but it was very plain and
simple, especially where it was underscored in
red pencil, and she comprehended it at once.
She sat thinking of it, with bright eyes, fitting it
.bn 316.png
.pn +1
into relation with what she had known and
guessed before, perhaps unconsciously pluming
herself a little upon her penetration, and, it
must be confessed, feeling a keen thrill of unregretting
amusement at Ancram’s conviction.
Then suddenly, with a kind of mental gasp, she
remembered Judith Church.
“Ah!” she said to herself, and her lips almost
moved. “What a complication!” And
then darted up from some depth of her moral
consciousness the thought, “She ought to know,
and I ought to tell her.”
She tried to look calmly at the situation, and
analyse the character of her responsibility. She
sought for its pros and cons; she made an effort
to range them and to balance them. But, in
spite of herself, her mind rejected everything
save the memory of the words she had overheard
one soft spring night on the verandah at
Government House:
“You ask me if I am not to you what I ought to
be to my husband, who is a good man, and who loves
me and trusts you.”
“And trusts you! and trusts you!” Remembering
.bn 317.png
.pn +1
the way her own blood quickened
when she heard Judith Church say that, Rhoda
made a spiritual bound towards the conviction
that she could not shirk opening such deplorably
blind eyes and respect herself in future. Then
her memory insisted again, and she heard Judith
say, with an inflection that precluded all mistake,
all self-delusion, all change:
“But you ask me if I have come to love you, and
perhaps in a way you have a right to know; and
the truth is better, as you say. And I answer you
that I have. I answer you, Yes, it is true; and
I know it will always be true.”
Did that make no difference? And was there
not infinitely too much involved for any such casual,
rough-handed interference as hers would be?
At that moment she saw that her husband
was putting on his hat. His letter to Mrs.
Church lay addressed upon the desk, the papers
that were to accompany scattered about it, and
Doyle was directing the clerk with regard to
them.
“You will put all these in a strong cover,
Luteef,” said he, “and address it as I have addressed
.bn 318.png
.pn +1
that letter. I would like you to take
them to the General Post Office yourself, and see
that they don’t go under-stamped.”
“Yessir. All thee papers, sir? And I am to
send by letter-post, sir?”
“Yes, certainly. Well, Rhoda? That was a
clever bit of trickery, wasn’t it? I heard afterwards
that the article was quoted in the House,
and did Church a lot of damage.”
Doyle spoke with the boldness of embarrassment.
These two were not in the habit of
discussing Ancram; they tolerated him occasionally
as an object, but never as a subject. Already
he regretted the impulse that put her in
possession of these facts. It seemed to his
sensitiveness like taking an unfair advantage of
a man when he was down, which, considering to
what Lewis Ancram had risen, was a foolish and
baseless scruple. Rhoda looked at her husband,
and hesitated. For an instant she played with
the temptation to tell him all she knew, deciding,
at the end of the instant, that it would entail
too much. Even a reference to that time had
come to cost her a good deal.
.bn 319.png
.pn +1
“I am somehow not surprised,” she said,
looking down at the letter and paper in her hand.
“But—I think it’s a pity Mrs. Church doesn’t
know.”
“Poor dear lady! why should she? I am
glad she is spared that unnecessary pang. We
should all be allowed to think as well of the
world as we can, my wife. Come; in twenty
minutes it will be dark.”
“Do you think so?” his wife asked doubtfully.
But she threw the letter and the newspaper
upon the desk. She would shirk it; as a
duty it was not plain enough.
“Then you ought to burn those, Philip,” she
said, as they went downstairs together. “They
wouldn’t make creditable additions to the records
of the India Office.”
“I will,” replied her husband. “I don’t
know why I didn’t long ago. How deliciously
fresh it is after the rain!”
.bn 320.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
CHAPTER XXIII.
.sp 2
There was a florist’s near by—in London
there always is a florist’s near by—and Judith
stood in the little place, among the fanciful straw
baskets and the wire frames and the tin boxes of
cut flowers and the damp pots of blooming ones,
and made her choice. In her slenderness and her
gladness she herself had somewhat the poise of a
flower, and the delicate flush of her face, with its
new springing secret of life, did more to suggest
one—a flower just opened to the summer and
the sun.
She picked out some that were growing in
country lanes then—it was the middle of July—poppies
and cornbottles and big brown-hearted
daisies. They seemed to her to speak in a simple
way of joy. Then she added a pot of ferns and
some clustering growing azaleas, pink and white
and very lovely. She paid the florist’s wife ten
.bn 321.png
.bn 322.png
.bn 323.png
.pn +1
shillings, and took them all with her in a cab.
This was not a day for economies. She drove
back to her rooms, the azaleas beside her on the
seat making a picture of her that people turned
to look at. In her hand she carried a folded
brown envelope. On the form inside it was
written, in the generically inexpressive characters
of the Telegraph Department, “Arrive London
2.30. Will be with you at five. Ancram.”
.il id=i304a fn=i_304a.jpg w=550px ew=90%
.ca She drove back.
It was ten o’clock in the morning, but she
felt that the day would be too short for all
there was to do. There should be nothing sordid
in her greeting, nothing to make him remember
that she was poor. Her attic should
be swept and garnished: women think of these
little things. She had also with her in the cab
a pair of dainty Liberty muslin curtains to keep
out the roof and the chimneys, and a Japanese
tea-set, and tea of a kind she was not in the
habit of drinking. She had only stopped buying
pretty fresh decorative things when it occurred
to her that she must keep enough
money to pay the cabman. As she hung the
curtains, and put the ferns on the window-seat
.bn 324.png
.pn +1
and the azaleas in the corners, and the
plump, delicate-coloured silk cushions in the
angles of her small hard sofa, her old love of
soft luxurious things stirred within her. Instinctively
she put her poverty away with
impatience and contempt. What in another
woman might have been a calculating thought
came to her as a hardly acknowledged sense
of relief and repose. There would be no more
of that!
A knock at the door sent the blood to her
heart, and her hand to her dusty hair, before
she remembered how impossible it was that
this should be any but an unimportant knock.
Yet she opened the door with a thrill—it
seemed that such a day could have no trivial
incidents. When she saw that it was the
housemaid with the mail, the Indian mail, she
took it with a little smile of indifference and
satisfaction. It was no longer the master of
her delight.
She put it all aside while she adjusted the
folds of the curtains and took the step-ladder
out of the room. Then she read Philip Doyle’s
.bn 325.png
.pn +1
letter. She read it, and when she had
finished she looked gravely, coldly, at the
packet that came with it, carefully addressed
in the round accurate hand of the clerk who
made quill pens in Doyle’s office. She was
conscious of an unkindness in this chance; it
might so well have fallen last week or next.
There was no ignoring it—it was there, it had
been delivered to her, it seemed almost as
urgent a demand upon her time and thought
and interest as if John Church himself had
put it into her hand. With an involuntary
movement she pushed the packet aside and
looked round the room. There were still several
little things to do. She got up to go
about them; but she moved slowly, and the
glow had gone out of her face, leaving her
eyes shadowed as they were on other days.
She made the cornbottles and the daisies up
into little bouquets, but she let her hands drop
into her lap more than once, and thought
about other things.
Suddenly, with a quick movement, she went
over to where the packet lay and took it up.
.bn 326.png
.pn +1
It was as if she turned her back upon something;
she had a resolute look. As she broke
the wax and cut the strings, any one might
have recognised that she confronted herself
with a duty which she did not mean to postpone.
It would have been easy to guess her
unworded feeling—that, however differently her
heart might insist, she could not slight John
Church. This was a sensitive and a just
woman.
She opened letter after letter, reading slowly
and carefully. Every word had its due, every
sentence spoke to her. Gradually there came
round her lips the look they wore when she
knelt upon her hassock in St. Luke’s round the
corner, and repeated, with bent head,
/*
“But Thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders:
Spare Thou them, O Lord, which confess their faults.”
*/
It seemed to her that in not having loved John
Church while he lived nor mourned him in sackcloth
when he was dead she had sinned indeed.
.bn 327.png
.pn +1
She was in the midst of preparations that were
almost bridal, yet it is quite true that for this
man whose death had wrought her deliverance
and her joy, her eyes were full of a tender,
reverent regret. Presently she came upon a
letter which she put aside, with a pang, to be
read last of all. It was like Ancram, she
thought, to have borne witness to her husband’s
worth—he could never have guessed
that his letter would hurt her a little one
day. She noticed that it was fastened together
with a newspaper, by a narrow rubber
circlet, and that the newspaper was marked in
red pencil. She remembered Ancram’s turn
for journalism—he had acknowledged many a
clever article to her—and divined that this was
some tribute from his pen. The idea gave her
a realising sense that her lover shared her penance
and was vaguely comforting.
She went through all the rest, as I have
said, conscientiously, seriously, and with a
troubled heart. Philip Doyle had not been
mistaken in saying that they were sincere, and
spontaneous. The tragedy of Church’s death
.bn 328.png
.pn +1
had brought out his motives in high relief;
it was not likely he could ever have lived to
be so appreciated. These were impressions of
him struck off as it were in a white heat of
feeling. His widow sat for a moment silent
before the revelation they made of him, even
to her.
Then, to leave nothing undone, Judith opened
Ancram’s letter. Her startled eyes went
through it once without comprehending a line
of its sequence, though here and there words
struck her in the face and made it burn. She
put her hand to her head to steady herself;
she felt giddy, and sickeningly unable to comprehend.
She fastened her gaze upon the
page, seeing nothing, while her brain worked
automatically about the fact that she was the
victim of some terribly untoward circumstance—what
and why it refused to discover for her.
Presently things grew simpler and clearer; she
realised the direction from which the blow had
come. Her power to reason, to consider, to
compare, came back to her; and she caught
up her misfortune eagerly, to minimise it. The
.bn 329.png
.pn +1
lines of Ancram’s hostility and contempt traced
themselves again upon her mind, and this time
it quivered under their full significance.
“Happily for Bengal,” she read, “a fool is
invariably dealt with according to his folly.”
Then she knew that no mollifying process of
reasoning could alter the fact which she had
to face.
Her mind grew acute in its pain. She began
to make deductions, she looked at the date.
The corroboration of the newspaper flashed
upon her instantly, and with it came a keen
longing to tell her husband who had written
that article—he had wondered so often and so
painfully. All at once she found herself framing
a charge.
A clock struck somewhere, and as if the
sound summoned her she got up from her seat
and opened a little lacquered box that stood
upon the mantel. It contained letters chiefly,
but from among its few photographs she drew
one of her husband. With this in her hand
she went into her bedroom and shut the door
and locked it.
.bn 330.png
.pn +1
When the maid brought Sir Lewis Ancram’s
card up at five o’clock she found the door open.
Mrs. Church was fitting a photograph into a
little frame. She looked thoughtful, but charming;
and she said so unhesitatingly, “Bring
the gentleman up, Hetty,” that Hetty, noticing
the curtains and the cushions in Mrs. Church’s
sitting-room, brought the gentleman up with a
smile.
At his step upon the stair her eyes dilated,
she took a long breath and pulled herself together,
her hand tightening on the corner of
the table. He came in quickly and stood before
her silent; he seemed to insist upon his
presence and on his outstretched hands. His
face was almost open and expansive in its
achieved happiness; one would have said he
was a fellow-being and not a Lieutenant-Governor.
It looked as if to him the moment
were emotional, but Mrs. Church almost immediately
deprived it of that character. She
gave him the right hand of ordinary intercourse
and an agreeable smile.
“You are looking surprisingly well,” she said.
.bn 331.png
.pn +1
If this struck Ancram as inadequate he hesitated
about saying so. The words upon his
own lips were “My God! how glad I am
to see you!” but he did not permit these
to escape him either. Her friendliness was
too cheerful to chill him, but he put his
eyeglass into his eye, which he generally
did when he wanted to reflect, behind a
pause.
“And you are just the same,” he said. “A
little more colour, perhaps.”
“I am not really, you know,” she returned,
slipping her hand quickly out of his. “Since
I saw you I am older—and wiser. Nearly
two years older and wiser.”
The smile which he sent into her eyes was
a visible effort to bring himself nearer to
her.
“Where have you found so much instruction?”
he asked, with tender banter.
Her laugh accepted the banter and ignored
its quality. “In ‘The Modern Influence of
the Vedic Books,’ among other places,” she
said, and rang the bell. “Tea, Hetty.”
.bn 332.png
.pn +1
“I must be allowed to congratulate you upon
that,” she went on pleasantly. “All the wise
people are talking about it, aren’t they? And
upon the rest of your achievements. They
have been very remarkable.”
“They are very incomplete,” he hinted;
“but I am glad you are disposed to be kind
about them.”
They had dropped into chairs at the usual
conversational distance, and he sat regarding
her with a look which almost confessed that
he did not understand.
“I suppose you had an execrable passage,”
Judith volunteered, with sociable emphasis. “I
can imagine what it must have been, as far as
Aden, with the monsoon well on.”
“Execrable,” he repeated. He had come to
a conclusion. It was part of her moral conception
of their situation that he should begin
his love-making over again. She would not
tolerate their picking it up and going on with
it. At least that was her attitude. He wondered,
indulgently, how long she would be able
to keep it.
.bn 333.png
.pn +1
“And Calcutta? I suppose you left it steaming?”
“I hardly know. I was there only a couple
of days before the mail left. Almost the whole
of July I have been on tour.”
“Oh—really?” said Mrs. Church. Her face
assumed the slight sad impenetrability with
which we give people to understand that they
are trespassing upon ground hallowed by the
association of grief. Ancram observed, with
irritation, that she almost imposed silence upon
him for a moment. Her look suggested to him
that if he made any further careless allusions she
might break into tears.
“Dear me!” Judith said softly at last, pouring
out the tea, “how you bring everything back
to me!”
He thought of saying boldly that he had
come to bring her back to everything, but for
some reason he refrained.
“Not unpleasantly, I hope?” He had an
instant’s astonishment at finding such a commonplace
upon his lips. He had thought of this in
poems for months.
.bn 334.png
.pn +1
She gave him his tea, and a pathetic smile.
It was so pathetic that he looked away from it,
and his eye fell upon the portrait of John
Church, framed, near her on the table.
“Do you think it is a good one?” she asked
eagerly, following his glance. “Do you think it
does him justice? It was so difficult,” she added
softly, “to do him justice.”
Sir Lewis Ancram stirred his tea vigorously.
He never took sugar, but the manipulation of his
spoon enabled him to say, with candid emphasis,
“He never got justice.”
For the moment he would abandon his
personal interest, he would humour her conscience;
he would dwell upon the past, for the
moment.
“No,” she said, “I think he never did. Perhaps,
now——”
Ancram’s lip curled expressively.
“Yes, now,” he said—“now that no appreciation
can encourage him, no applause stimulate
him, now that he is for ever past it and them,
they can find nothing too good to say of him.
What a set of curs they are!”
.bn 335.png
.pn +1
“It is the old story,” she replied. Her eyes
were full of sadness.
“Forgive me!” Ancram said involuntarily.
Then he wondered for what he had asked to be
forgiven.
“He was a martyr,” Judith went on calmly—“‘John
Church, martyr,’ is the way they ought
to write him down in the Service records. But
there were a few people who knew him great
and worthy while he lived. I was one——”
“And I was another. There were more than
you think.”
“He used to trust you. Especially in the
matter that killed him—that educational matter—he
often said that without your sympathy
and support he would hardly know where to
turn.”
“His policy was right. Events are showing
now how right it was. Every day I find what
excellent reason he had for all he did.”
“Yes,” Judith said, regarding him with a kind
of remote curiosity. “You have succeeded to
his difficulties. I wonder if you lie awake over
them, as he used to do! And to all the rest.
.bn 336.png
.pn +1
You have taken his place, and his hopes, and the
honours that would have been his. How strange
it seems!”
“Why should it seem so strange, Judith?”
She half turned and picked up a letter and
a newspaper that lay on the table behind her.
“This is one reason,” she said, and handed
them to him. “Those have reached me to-day,
by some mistake in Mr. Doyle’s office, I suppose.
One knows how these things happen in India.
And I thought you might like to have them
again.”
Ancram’s face fell suddenly into the lines of
office. He took the papers into his long nervous
hands in an accustomed way, and opened the
pages of the letter with a stroke of his finger and
thumb which told of a multitude of correspondence
and a somewhat disregarding way of dealing
with it. His eyes were riveted upon Doyle’s
red pencil marks under “his beard grows with the
tale of his blunders” in the letter and the newspaper,
but his expression merely noted them
for future reference.
“Thanks,” he said presently, settling the
.bn 337.png
.pn +1
papers together again. “Perhaps it is as well
that they should be in my possession. It was
thoughtful of you. In other hands they might
be misunderstood.”
She looked at him full and clearly, and something
behind her eyes laughed at him.
“Oh, I think not!” she said. “Let me give
you another cup of tea.”
“No more, thank you.” He drew his feet
together in a preliminary movement of departure,
and then thought better of it.
“I hope you understand,” he said, “that in—in
official life one may be forced into hostile
criticism occasionally, without the slightest personal
animus.” His voice was almost severe—it
was as he were compelled to reason with a subordinate
in terms of reproof.
Judith smiled acquiescently.
“Oh, I am sure that must often be the case,”
she said; and he knew that she was beyond all
argument of his. She had adopted the official
attitude; she was impersonal and complaisant
and non-committal. Her comment would reach
him later, through the authorised channels of the
.bn 338.png
.pn +1
empty years. It would be silent and negative in
its nature, the denial of promotion, but he would
understand. Even in a matter of sentiment the
official attitude had its decencies, its conveniences.
He was vaguely aware of them as he rose,
with a little cough, and fell back into his own.
Nevertheless it was with something like an inward
groan that he abandoned it, and tried, for
a few lingering minutes, to remind her of the
man she had known in Calcutta.
“Judith,” he said desperately at the door,
after she had bidden him a cheerful farewell, “I
once thought I had reason to believe that you
loved me.”
She was leaning rather heavily on the back of
a chair. He had made only a short visit, but he
had spent five years of this woman’s life since he
arrived.
“Not you,” she said: “my idea of you. And
that was a long time ago.”
She kept her tone of polite commonplace;
there was nothing for it but a recognisant bow,
which Ancram made in silence. As he took his
way downstairs and out into Kensington, a
.bn 339.png
.pn +1
malignant recollection of having heard something
very like this before took possession of him
and interfered with the heroic quality of his
grief. If he had a Nemesis, he told himself, it
was the feminine idea of him. But that was
afterward.
.tb
One day, a year later, Sir Lewis Ancram
paused in his successful conduct of the affairs
of Bengal long enough to state the case with
ultimate emphasis to a confidentially inquiring
friend.
“As the wife of my late honoured chief,” he
said, “I have the highest admiration and respect
for Mrs. Church; but the world is wrong in
thinking that I have ever made her a proposal of
marriage; nor have I the slightest intention of
doing so.”
.ce
THE END.
.pb
.bn 341.png
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THE CHRONICLES OF COUNT ANTONIO.
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THE REDS OF THE MIDI. An Episode of the
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TWO REMARKABLE AMERICAN NOVELS.
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IN DEFIANCE OF THE KING. A Romance of
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.dv class='tnotes'
.ce
Transcriber’s Note
Errors deemed most likely to be the printer’s have been corrected, and
are noted here. The references are to the page and line in the original.
.ta l:8 l:46 l:12 w=90%
| she [give] that young lady | sic
| the Free Press[,] the Hindu Patriot, the Bengalee | Added.
| afternoo[o]n still hung mellow in mid air | Removed.
| as lovely, a[s] embarrassing as divine. | Added.
| and occupied herself with the[n/m] | Replaced.
.ta-
.dv-