His Honour, and a Lady

“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 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 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 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 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 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.

“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!”

CHAPTER XXIII

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 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.”

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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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.

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.

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.