His Honour, and a Lady

“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.”

“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.

“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.

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!”

“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. 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 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 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 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.

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.”

THE END

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