His Honour, and a Lady

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 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, 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.

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?”

“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 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.

“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!”

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 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!”

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 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.

CHAPTER XVIII

“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 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 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, 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! 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 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!’”