His Honour, and a Lady

Mr. Ancram smiled down at his betrothed with distinct good-humour. He was under the impression that he had spontaneously given his soul an airing – an impression he was fond of. She listened, amused that she could evoke so much, and returned to the thing he had evaded.

“Between the Vedic Books and Mrs. Church,” she said, “our future seems assured.”

Ancram’s soul retired again, and shut the door with a click.

“That is quite a false note,” he said coolly: “Mrs. Church will have nothing to do with it.”

CHAPTER III

It became evident very soon after Miss Rhoda Daye’s appearance in Calcutta that she was not precisely like the other young ladies in sailor hats and cambric blouses who arrived at the same time. For one superficial thing, anybody could see that she had less colour; and this her mother mourned openly – a girl depended so entirely for the first season on her colour. As other differences became obvious Mrs. Daye had other regrets, one of them being that Rhoda had been permitted so absolutely to fashion her own education. Mrs. Daye had not foreseen one trivial result of this, which was that her daughter, believing herself devoid of any special talent, refused to ornament herself with any special accomplishment. This, in Mrs. Daye’s opinion, was carrying self-depreciation and reverence for achievement and all that sort of thing a great deal too far: a girl had no right to expect her parents to present her to the world in a state of artistic nudity. It was not in the nature of compensation that she understood the situation with the Amir and the ambitions of the National Congress; such things were almost unmentionable in Calcutta society. And it was certainly in the nature of aggravation that she showed, after the first month of it, an inexplicable indifference to every social opportunity but that of looking on. Miss Daye had an undoubted talent for looking on; and she would often exercise it – mutely, motionlessly, half hidden behind a pillar at a ball, or abandoned in a corner after dinner – until her mother was mortified enough to take her home. Presently it appeared that she had looked on sufficiently to know her ground. She made her valuation of society; she picked out the half-dozen Anglo-Indian types; it may be presumed that she classified her parents. She still looked on, but with less concentration: she began to talk. She developed a liking for the society of elderly gentlemen of eminence, and an abhorrence for that of their wives, which was considered of doubtful propriety, until the Head of the Foreign Office once congratulated himself openly upon sitting next her at dinner. After which she was regarded with indulgence, it was said in corners that she must be clever, subalterns avoided her, and her mother, taking her cue unerringly, figuratively threw up her hands and asked Heaven why she of all people should be given a fin-de-siècle daughter.

Privately Mrs. Daye tried to make herself believe, in the manner of the Parisian playwright, that a succès d’estime was infinitely to be preferred to the plaudits of the mob. I need hardly say that she was wholly successful in doing so, when Mr. Lewis Ancram contributed to the balance in favour of this opinion. Mr. Ancram was observing too: he observed in this case from shorter and shorter distances, and finally allowed himself to be charmed by what he saw. Perhaps that is not putting it quite strongly enough. He really encouraged himself to be thus charmed. He was of those who find in the automatic monotony of the Indian social machine, with its unvarying individual – a machine, he was fond of saying, the wheels of which are kept oiled with the essence of British Philistinism – a burden and a complaint. In London he would have lived with one foot in Mayfair and the other in the Strand; and there had been times when he talked of the necessity of chaining his ambition before his eyes to prevent his making the choice of a career over again, though it must be said that this violent proceeding was carried out rather as a solace to his defrauded capacity for culture than in view of any real danger. He had been accustomed to take the annually fresh young ladies in straw hats and cambric blouses who appeared in the cold weather much as he took the inevitable functions at Government House – to be politely avoided, if possible; if not, to be submitted to with the grace which might be expected from a person holding his office and drawing his emoluments. When he found that Rhoda Daye was likely to break up the surface of his blank indifference to evening parties he fostered the probability. Among all the young ladies in sailor hats and cambric blouses he saw his single chance for experience, interest, sensation; and he availed himself of it with an accumulated energy which Miss Daye found stimulating enough to induce her to exert herself, to a certain extent, reciprocally. She was not interested in the Hon. Mr. Lewis Ancram because of his reputation: other men had reputations – reputations almost as big as their paybills – who did not excite her imagination in the smallest degree. It would be easy to multiply accounts upon which Mr. Ancram did not interest Miss Daye, but it is not clear that any result would be arrived at that way, and the fact remains that she was interested. From this quiet point – she was entirely aware of its advantage – she contemplated Mr. Ancram’s gradual advance along the lines of attraction with a feeling very like satisfaction. She had only to contemplate it. Ancram contributed his own impetus, and reached the point where he believed his affections involved with an artistic shock which he had anticipated for weeks as quite divinely enjoyable. She behaved amusingly when they were engaged: she made a little comedy of it, would be coaxed to no confessions and only one vow – that, as they were to go through life together, she would try always to be agreeable. If she had private questionings and secret alarms, she hid them with intrepidity; and if it seemed to her to be anything ridiculous that the wayward god should present himself behind the careful countenance and the well-starched shirt-front of early middle-age, holding an eyeglass in attenuated fingers, and mutely implying that he had been bored for years, she did not betray her impression. The thrall of their engagement made no change in her; she continued to be the same demure, slender creature, who said unexpected things, that she had been before. That he had covetable new privileges did not seem to make much difference; her chief value was still that of a clever acquaintance. She would grow more expensive in time, he thought vaguely; but several months had passed, as we have seen, without this result. On the other hand, there had been occasions when he fancied that she deliberately disassociated herself from him in that favourite pursuit of observation, in order to obtain a point of view which should command certain intellectual privacies of his. He wondered whether she would take this liberty with greater freedom when they were one and indivisible; and, while he felt it absurd to object, he wished she would be a little more communicative about what she saw.

They were to be married in March, when Ancram would take a year’s furlough, and she would help him to lave his stiffened powers of artistic enjoyment in the beauties of the Parthenon and the inspirations of the Viennese galleries and the charms of Como and Maggiore. They talked a great deal of the satisfaction they expected to realise in this way. They went over it in detail, realising again and again that it must represent to him compensation for years of aridity and to her a store against the future likely to be drawn upon largely. Besides, it was a topic upon which they were quite sure of finding mutual understanding, even mutual congratulation – an excellent topic.

Meanwhile Ancram lived with Philip Doyle in Hungerford Street under the ordinary circumstances which govern Calcutta bachelors. Doyle was a barrister. He stood, in Calcutta, upon his ability and his individuality, and as these had been observed to place him in familiar relations with Heads of Departments, it may be gathered that they gave him a sufficient elevation. People called him a “strong” man because he refused their invitations to dinner, but the statement might have had a more intelligent basis and been equally true. It would have surprised him immensely if he could have weighed the value of his own opinions, or observed the trouble which men who appropriated them took to give them a tinge of originality. He was a survival of an older school, certainly – people were right in saying that. He had preserved a courtliness of manner and a sincerity of behaviour which suggested an Anglo-India that is mostly lying under pillars and pyramids in rank Calcutta cemeteries now. He was hospitable and select – so much of both that he often experienced ridiculous annoyance at having asked men to dinner who were essentially unpalatable to him. His sensitiveness to qualities in personal contact was so great as to be a conspicuous indication, to the discerning eye, of Lewis Ancram’s unbounded tact.

Circumstances had thrown the men under one roof, and even if the younger of them had not made himself so thoroughly agreeable, it would have been difficult to alter the arrangement.

It could never be said of Lewis Ancram that he did not choose his friends with taste, and in this case his discrimination had a foundation of respect which he was in the habit of freely mentioning. His admiration of Doyle was generous and frank, so generous and frank that one might have suspected a virtue in the expression of it. Notwithstanding this implication, it was entirely sincere, though he would occasionally qualify it.

“I often tell Doyle,” he said once to Rhoda, “that his independence is purely a matter of circumstance. If he had the official yoke upon his neck he would kow-tow like the rest of us.”

“I don’t believe that,” she answered quickly.

“Ah well, now that I think of it I don’t particularly believe it myself. Doyle’s the salt of the earth anyhow. He makes it just possible for officials like myself to swallow officialdom.”

“Did it ever occur to you,” she asked slowly, “to wonder what he thinks of you?”

“Oh, I daresay he likes me well enough. Irishmen never go in for analysing their friends. At all events we live together, and there are no rows.”

They were driving, and the dogcart flew past the ships along the Strand – Ancram liked a fast horse – for a few minutes in silence. Then she had another question.

“Have you succeeded in persuading Mr. Doyle to – what do the newspapers say? – support you at the altar, yet?”

“No, confound him. He says it would be preposterous at his age – he’s not a year older than I am! I wonder if he expects me to ask Baby Bramble, or one of those little boys in the Buffs! Anyway it won’t be Doyle, for he goes to England, end of February – to get out of it, I believe.”

“I’m not sorry,” Rhoda answered; but it would have been difficult for her to explain, at the moment, why she was not sorry.

CHAPTER IV

“I don’t mind telling you,” said Philip Doyle, knocking the ashes out of his pipe, “that, personally, His Acting Honour represents to me a number of objectionable things. He is a Radical, and a Low Churchman, and a Particularist. He’s that objectionable ethical mixture, a compound of petty virtues. He believes this earth was created to give him an atmosphere to do his duty in; and he does it with the invincible courage of short-sightedness combined with the notion that the ultimate court of appeal for eighty million Bengalis should be his precious Methodist conscience. But the brute’s honest, and if he insists on putting this University foolishness of his through, I’m sorry for him. He’s a dead man, politically, the day it is announced.”

“He is,” replied Ancram, concentrating his attention on a match and the end of his cigar. “There’s – no doubt – about that.”

The two men were smoking after dinner, with the table and a couple of decanters between them. Roses drooped over the bowl of Cutch silver that gleamed in the middle of the empty cloth, and a lemon leaf or two floated in the finger-glass at Ancram’s elbow. He threw the match into it, and looked across at Doyle with his cigar between his teeth in the manner which invites further discussion.

“In point of political morality I suppose he’s right enough – ”

“He generally is,” Ancram interrupted. “He’s got a scent for political morality keen enough to upset every form of Government known to the nineteenth century.”

“But they see political morality through another pair of spectacles in England. To withdraw State aid from education anywhere at this end of the century is as impracticable as it would be to deprive the British workman of his vote. It’s retrogressive, and this is an age which will admit anything except a mistake of its own.”

“He doesn’t intend to withdraw State aid from education. He means to spend the money on technical schools.”

“A benevolent intention. But it won’t make the case any better with the Secretary of State. He will say that it ought to be done without damaging the sacred cause of higher culture.”

“Damn the sacred cause of higher culture!” replied Ancram, with an unruffled countenance. “What has it done out here? Filled every sweeper’s son of them with an ambition to sit on an office stool and be a gentleman! – created by thousands a starveling class that find nothing to do but swell mass-meetings on the Maidan and talk sedition that gets telegraphed from Peshawur to Cape Comorin. I advertised for a baboo the other day, and had four hundred applications – fifteen rupees a month, poor devils! But the Dayes were a fortnight in getting a decent cook on twenty.”

“Bentinck should have thought of that; it’s too late now. You can’t bestow a boon on the masses in a spirit of progressiveness and take it away sixty years later in a spirit of prudence. It’s decent enough of Church to be willing to bear the consequences of somebody else’s blunder; but blunders of that kind have got to take their place in the world’s formation and let the ages retrieve them. It’s the only way.”

“Oh, I agree with you. Church is an ass: he ought not to attempt it.”

“Why do you fellows let him?”

Ancram looked in Doyle’s direction as he answered – looked near him, fixed his eyes, with an effect of taking a view at the subject round a corner, upon the other man’s tobacco-jar. The trick annoyed Doyle; he often wished it were the sort of thing one could speak about.

“Nobody is less amenable to reason,” he said, “than the man who wants to hit his head against a stone wall, especially if he thinks the world will benefit by his inconvenience. And, to make matters worse, Church has complicated the thing with an idea of his duty toward the people at home who send out the missionaries. He doesn’t think it exactly according to modern ethics that they should take up collections in village churches to provide the salvation of the higher mathematics for the sons of fat bunnias in the bazar – who could very well afford to pay for it themselves.”

“He can’t help that.”

Ancram finished his claret. “I believe he has some notion of advertising it. And after he has eliminated the missionary who teaches the Georgics instead of the Gospels, and devoted the educational grants to turning the gentle Hindoo into a skilled artisan, he thinks the cause of higher culture may be pretty much left to take care of itself. He believes we could bleed Linsettiah and Pattore and some of those chaps for endowments, I fancy, though he doesn’t say so.”

“Better try some of the smaller natives. A maharajah won’t do much for a C. I. E. or an extra gun nowadays: it isn’t good enough. He knows that all Europe is ready to pay him the honours of royalty whenever he chooses to tie up his cooking-pots and go there. He’ll save his money and buy hand-organs with it, or panoramas, or sewing-machines. Presently, if this adoration of the Eastern potentate goes on at home, we shall have the maharajah whom we propose to honour receiving our proposition with his thumb applied to his nose and all his fingers out!”

Ancram yawned. “Well, it won’t be a question of negotiating for endowments: it will never come off. Church will only smash himself over the thing if he insists; and,” he added, as one who makes an unprejudiced, impartial statement on fatalistic grounds, “he will insist. I should find the whole business rather amusing if, as Secretary, I hadn’t to be the mouthpiece for it.” He looked at his watch. “Half-past nine. I suppose I ought to be off. You’re not coming?”

“Where?”

“To Belvedere. A ‘walk-round,’ I believe.”

“Thanks: I think not. It would be too much bliss for a corpulent gentleman of my years. I remember – the card came last week, and I gave it to Mohammed to take care of. I believe Mohammed keeps a special almirah for the purpose; and in it,” Mr. Doyle continued gravely, “are the accumulations of several seasons. He regards them as a trust only second to that of the Director of Records, and last year he made them the basis of an application for more pay.”

“Which you gave him,” laughed Ancram, getting into his light overcoat as the brougham rolled up to the door. “I loathe going; but for me there’s no alternative. There seems to be an Act somewhere providing that a man in my peculiar position must show himself in society.”

“So long as you hover on the brink of matrimony,” said the other, “you must be a butterfly. Console yourself: after you take the plunge you can turn ascidian if you like.”

The twinkle went out of Philip Doyle’s eyes as he heard the carriage door shut and the wheels roll crunching toward the gate. He filled his pipe again and took up the Saturday Review. Half an hour later he was looking steadily at the wall over the top of that journal, considering neither its leading articles nor its reviews nor its advertisements, but Mr. Lewis Ancram’s peculiar position.

At that moment Ancram leaned against the wall in a doorway of the drawing-room at Belvedere, one leg lightly crossed over the other, his right hand in his pocket, dangling his eyeglass with his left. It was one of the many casual attitudes in which the world was informed that a Chief Secretary, in Mr. Ancram’s opinion, had no prescriptive right to give himself airs. He had a considering look: one might have said that his mind was far from the occasion – perhaps upon the advisability of a tobacco tax; but this would not have been correct. He was really thinking of the quantity and the quality of the people who passed him, and whether as a function the thing could be considered a success. With the white gleam on the pillars, and the palms everywhere, and the moving vista of well-dressed women through long, richly-furnished rooms arranged for a large reception, it was certainly pretty enough; but there was still the question of individuals, which had to be determined by such inspection as he was bestowing upon them. It would have been evident to anybody that more people recognised Ancram than Ancram recognised; he had by no means the air of being on the look-out for acquaintances. But occasionally some such person as the Head of the Telegraph Department looked well at him and said, “How do, Ancram?” with the effect of adding “I defy you to forget who I am!” or a lady of manner gave him a gracious and pronounced inclination, which also said, “You are the clever, the rising Mr. Ancram. You haven’t called; but you are known to despise society. I forgive you, and I bow.” One or two Members of Council merely vouchsafed him a nod as they passed; but it was noticeably only Members of Council who nodded to Mr. Ancram. An aide-de-camp to the Viceroy, however – a blue-eyed younger son with his mind seriously upon his duty – saw Ancram in his path, and hesitated. He had never quite decided to what extent these fellows in the Bengal Secretariat, and this one in particular, should be recognised by an aide-de-camp; and he went round the other way. Presently there was a little silken stir and rustle, a parting of the ladies’ trains, and a lull of observation along both sides of the lane which suddenly formed itself among the people. His Excellency the Viceroy had taken his early leave and was making his departure. Lord Scansleigh had an undisguised appreciation of an able man, and there was some definiteness in the way he stopped, though it was but for a moment, and shook hands with Ancram, who swung the eyeglass afterwards more casually than he had done before. The aide-de-camp, following after, was in no wise rebuked. What the Viceroy chose to do threw no light on his difficulty. He merely cast his eyes upon the floor, and his fresh coloured countenance expressed a respectfully sad admiration for the noble manner in which his lord discharged every obligation pertaining to the Viceregal office.

The most privileged hardly cares to make demands upon his hostess as long as she has a Viceroy to entertain, and Ancram waited until their Excellencies were well on their way home, their four turbaned Sikhs trotting after them, before he made any serious attempt to find Mrs. Church. A sudden and general easefulness was observable at the same time. People began to look about them and walk and talk with the consciousness that it was no longer possible that they should be suspected of arranging themselves so that Lord Scansleigh must bow. The Viceroy having departed, they thought about other things. She was standing, when presently he made his way to her, talking to Sir William Scott of the Foreign Department, and at the moment, to the Maharajah of Pattore. Ancram paused and watched her unperceived. It was like the pleasure of looking at a picture one technically understands. He noted with satisfaction the subtle difference in her manner toward the two men, and how, in her confidence with the one and her condescending recognition of the other’s dignity, both were consciously receiving their due. He noticed the colour of her heliotrope velvet gown, and asked himself whether any other woman in the room could possibly wear that shade. Mentally he dared the other women to say that its simplicity was over-dramatic, or that by the charming arrangement of her hair and her pearls and the yellowed lace, that fell over her shoulders Judith Church had made herself too literal a representation of a great-grandmother who certainly wore none of these things. He paused another second to catch the curve of her white throat as she turned her head with a little characteristic lifting of her chin; and then he went up to her. The definite purpose that appeared in his face was enough of itself to assert their intimacy – to this end it was not necessary that he should drop his eyeglass.

“Oh,” she said, with a step forward, “how do you do! I began to think – Maharajah, when you are invited to parties you always come, don’t you? Well, this gentleman does not always come, I understand. I beg you will ask a question about it at the next meeting of the Legislative Council. The Honourable the Chief Secretary is requested to furnish an explanation of his lamentable failure to perform his duties toward society.”

The native smiled uncomfortably, puzzled at her audacity. His membership of the Bengal Legislative Council was a new toy, and he was not sure that he liked any one else to play with it.

“His Highness of Pattore,” said Ancram, slipping a hand under the fat elbow in its pink-and-gold brocade, “would be the very last fellow to get me into a scrape. Wouldn’t you, Maharaj!”