His Honour, and a Lady

“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.”

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 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.”

“All right. And mummie!”

“What?”

“Write and congratulate Mr. Ancram. Then he’ll know there’s no ill-feeling!”

Which Mrs. Daye did.

CHAPTER XIX

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 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 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 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 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 umbrella. So we’ll both get wet and take our death of cold. Sumja,[5 - “Do you understand?”] Buzz?”

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 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 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.” 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 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 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 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.