His Honour, and a Lady

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, 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 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 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 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.

“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!”

CHAPTER XX

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 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 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 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 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 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 them, 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 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 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.

CHAPTER XXI

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 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 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 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, 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 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 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!

CHAPTER XXII

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 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.

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 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 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 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 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.”