His Honour, and a Lady

“I don’t think you would have any right to do that, you know. You couldn’t be so dishonest with the artist. Who would sell the work of his hand to be burned!”

He was successful in provoking her appreciation. “You are quite right,” she said. “The patronage of my pity! You always see!”

“I have bought a picture,” Ancram went on, “by a fellow named Martin, who seems to have sent it out from England. It’s nothing great, but I thought it was a pity to let it go back. That narrow one, nearest to the corner.”

“It is good enough to escape getting a prize,” she laughed. “Yes, I like it rather – a good deal – very much indeed. I wish I were a critic and could tell you why. It will be a pleasure to you; it is so green and cool and still.”

Mr. Ancram’s purchase was of the type that is growing common enough at the May exhibitions – a bit of English landscape on a dull day towards evening, fields and a bank with trees on it, a pool with water-weeds in it, the sky crowding down behind and standing out in front in the quiet water. Perhaps it lacked imagination – there was no young woman leaning out of the canoe to gather water-lilies – but it had been painted with a good deal of knowledge.

Mr. James Springgrove at the moment was talking about it to another gentleman. Mr. Springgrove was one of Calcutta’s humourists. He was also a member of the Board of Revenue; and for these reasons, combined with his subscription, it was originally presumed that Mr. Springgrove understood Art. People generally thought he did, because he was a Director and a member of the Hanging Committee, but this was a mistake. Mr. Springgrove brought his head as nearly as possible into a line with the other gentleman’s head, from which had issued, in weak commendation, the statement that No. 223 reminded it of home.

“If you asked what it reminded me of,” said Mr. Springgrove, clapping the other on the back, “I should say verdigris, sir – verdigris.” Mrs. Church and the Honourable Mr. Lewis Ancram looked into each other’s eyes and smiled as long as there was any excuse for smiling.

“I am glad you are not a critic,” he said. She was verging toward the door. “What are you going to do now?”

“Afterward – we meant to drive to Hastings House. John thought there would be time. It is quite near Belvedere, you know. But – And I shall not have another free afternoon for a fortnight.”

They went out in silence, past the baboo who sat behind a table at the receipt of entrance money, and down the steps. The syce opened the carriage door, and Mrs. Church got in. There was a moment’s pause, while the man looked questioningly at Ancram, still holding open the door.

“If he invites himself,” said Judith inwardly, with the intention of self-discipline; and the rest was hope.

“Is there any reason – ?” he asked, with his foot on the step; and it was quite unnecessary that he should add “against my coming?”

“No – there is no reason.” Then she added, with a visible effort to make it the commonplace thing it was not, “Then you will drive out with me, and I shall see the place after all? How nice!”

They rolled out into the gold-and-green afternoon life of the Maidan, along wide pipal-shadowed roads, across a bridge, through a lane or two where the pariahs barked after the carriage and the people about the huts stared, shading their eyes. There seemed very little to say. They thought themselves under the spell of the pleasantness of it – the lifting of the burden and the heat of the day, the little wind that shook the fronds of the date palms and stole about bringing odours from where the people were cooking, the unyoked oxen, the hoarse home-going talk of the crows that flew city-ward against the yellow sky with a purple light on their wings.

“Let the carriage stay here,” Judith said, as they stopped beside a dilapidated barred gate. “I want to walk to the house.”

A salaaming creature in a dhoty hurried out of a clump of bamboos in the corner and flung open the gate. It seemed to close again upon the world. They were in an undulating waste that had once been a stately pleasure-ground, and it had a visible soul that lived upon its memories and was content in its abandonment. It was so still that the great teak leaves, twisted and discoloured and full of holes like battered bronze, dropping singly and slowly through the mellow air, fell at their feet with little rustling cracks.

“What a perfection of silence!” Judith exclaimed softly; and then some vague perception impelled her to talk of other things – of her dinner-party and Nellie Vansittart.

Ancram looked on, as it were, at her conversation for a moment or two with his charming smile. Then, “Oh, dear lady,” he broke in, “let them go – those people. They are the vulgar considerations of the time which has been – which will be again. But this is a pause – made for us.”

She looked down at the rusty teak-leaves, and he almost told her, as he knocked them aside, how poetic a shadow clung round her eyelids. The curve of the drive brought them to the old stucco mansion, dreaming quietly and open-eyed over its great square porch of the Calcutta of Nuncomar and Philip Francis.

“It broods, doesn’t it?” said Judith Church, standing under the yellow honeysuckle of the porch. “Don’t you wish you could see the ghost!”

The gatekeeper reappeared, and stood offering them each a rose.

“This gentleman,” replied Ancram, “will know all about the ghost. He probably makes his living out of Warren Hastings, in the tourist season. Without doubt, he says, there is a bhut, a very terrible bhut, which lives in the room directly over our heads and wears iron boots. Shall we go and look for it?”

Half way up the stairs Ancram turned and saw the gatekeeper following them. “You have leave to go,” he said in Hindustani.

At the top he turned again, and found the man still salaaming at their heels. “Jao!” he shouted, with a threatening movement, and the native fled.

“It is preposterous,” he said apologetically to Mrs. Church, “that one should be dogged everywhere by these people.”

They explored the echoing rooms, and looked down the well of the ruined staircase, and decided that no ghost with the shadow of a title to the property could let such desirable premises go unhaunted. They were in absurdly good spirits. They had not been alone together for a fortnight. The sky was all red in the west as they stepped out upon the wide flat roof, and the warm light that was left seemed to hang in mid-air. The spires and domes of Calcutta lay under a sulphur-coloured haze, and the palms on the horizon stood in filmy clouds. The beautiful tropical day was going out.

“We must go in ten minutes,” said Judith, sitting down on the low mossy parapet.

“Back into the world.” He reflected hastily and decided. Up to this time Rhoda Daye had been a conventionality between them. He had a sudden desire to make her the subject of a confidence – to explain, perhaps to discuss, anyhow to explain.

“Tell me, my friend,” he said, making a pattern on the lichen of the roof with his stick, “what do you think of my engagement?”

She looked up startled. It was as if the question had sprung at her. She too felt the need of a temporary occupation, and fell upon her rose.

“You had my congratulations a long time ago,” she said, carefully shredding each petal into three.

“Don’t!” he exclaimed impatiently: “I’m serious!”

“Well, then – it is not a fair thing that you are asking me. I don’t know Miss Daye. I never shall know her. To me she is a little marble image with a very pretty polish.”

“And to me also,” he repeated, seizing her words: “she is a little marble image with a very pretty polish.” He put an unconscious demand for commiseration into his tone. Doubtless he did not mean to go so far, but his inflection added, “And I’ve got to marry her!”

“To you – to you!” She plucked aimlessly at her rose, and searched vainly for something which would improve the look of his situation. But the rush of this confidence had torn up commonplaces by the roots. She felt it beating somewhere about her heart; and her concern, for the moment, in hearing of his misfortune, was for herself.

“The ironical part of it is,” he went on, very pale with the effort of his candour, “that I was blindly certain of finding her sympathetic. You know what one means by that in a woman. I wanted it, just then. I seemed to have arrived at a crisis of wanting it. I made ludicrously sure of it. If you had been here,” he added with conviction, “it would never have happened.”

She opened her lips to say “Then I wish I had been here,” but the words he heard were, “People tell me she is very clever.”

“Oh,” he said bitterly, “she has the qualities of her defects, no doubt. But she isn’t a woman – she’s an intelligence. Conceive, I beg of you, the prospect of passing one’s life in conjugal relations with an intelligence!”

Judith assured herself vaguely that this brutality of language had its excuse. She could have told him very fluently that he ought not to marry Rhoda Daye under any circumstances, but something made it impossible that she should say anything of the sort. She strove with the instinct for a moment, and then, as it overthrew her, she looked about her shivering. The evening chill of December had crept in and up from the marshes; one or two street lamps twinkled out in the direction of the city; light white levels of mist had begun to spread themselves among the trees in the garden below them.

“We must go,” she said, rising hurriedly: “how suddenly it has grown cold!” And as she passed before him into the empty house he saw that her face was so drawn that even he could scarcely find it beautiful.

CHAPTER VI

“Mummie,” remarked Miss Daye, as she pushed on the fingers of a new pair of gloves in the drawing-room, “the conviction grows upon me that I shall never become Mrs. Ancram.”

“Rhoda, if you talk like that you will certainly bring on one of my headaches, and it will be the third in a fortnight that I’ll have to thank you for. Did I or did I not send home the order for your wedding dress by last mail?”

“You did, mummie. But you could always advertise it in the local papers, you know. Could you fasten this? ‘By Private Sale – A Wedding Dress originally intended for the Secretariat. Ivory Satin and Lace. Skirt thirty-nine inches, waist twenty-one. Warranted never been worn.’ Thanks so much!”

“Rhoda! you are capable of anything – ”

“Of most things, mummie, I admit. But I begin to fear, not of that!”

“Are you going to break it off? There he is this minute! Don’t let him come in here, dear – he would know instantly that we had been discussing him. You have upset me so!”

“He shan’t.” Miss Daye walked to the door. “You are not to come any farther, my dear sir,” said she to the Honourable Mr. Ancram among the Japanese pots on the landing: “mummie’s going to have a headache, and doesn’t want you. I’m quite ready!” She stood for a moment in the doorway, her pretty shoulders making admirably correct lines, in a clinging grey skirt and silver braided zouave, that showed a charming glimpse of blue silk blouse underneath, buttoning her second glove. Ancram groaned within himself that he must have proposed to her because she was chic. Then she looked back. “Don’t worry, mummie. I’ll let you know within a fortnight. You won’t have to advertise it after all – you can countermand the order by telegraph!” Mrs. Daye, on the sofa, threw up her hands speechlessly, and her eyes when her daughter finally left the room were round with apprehension.

Ancram had come to take his betrothed for a drive in his dog-cart. It is a privilege Calcutta offers to people who are engaged: they are permitted to drive about together in dog-carts. The act has the binding force of a public confession. Mr. Ancram and Miss Daye had taken advantage of it in the beginning. By this time it would be more proper to say that they were taking refuge in it.

He had seen Mrs. Church several times since the evening on which he had put her into her carriage at the gates of Hastings House, and got into his own trap and driven home with a feeling which he analysed as purified but not resigned. She had been very quiet, very self-contained, apparently content to be gracious and effective in the gown of the occasion; but once or twice he fancied he saw a look of waiting, a gleam of expectancy, behind her eyes. It was this that encouraged him to ask her, at the first opportunity, whether she did not think he would be perfectly justified in bringing the thing to an end. She answered him, with an unalterable look, that she could not help him in that decision; and he brought away a sense that he had not obtained the support on which he had depended. This did not prevent him from arriving very definitely at the decision in question unaided. Nothing could be more obvious than that the girl did not care for him; and, granting this, was he morally at liberty, from the girl’s own point of view, to degrade her by a marriage which was, on her side, one of pure ambition? If her affections had been involved in the remotest degree – but he shrugged his shoulders at the idea of Rhoda Daye’s affections. He wished to Heaven, like any schoolboy, that she would fall in love with somebody else, but she was too damned clever to fall in love with anybody. The thing would require a little finessing; of course the rupture must come from her. There were things a man in his position had to be careful about. But with a direct suggestion – Nothing was more obvious than that she did not care for him. He would make her say so. After that, a direct suggestion would be simple – and wholly justifiable. These were Mr. Lewis Ancram’s reflections as he stood, hat in hand, on Mrs. Daye’s landing. They were less involved than usual, but in equations of personal responsibility Mr. Ancram liked a formula. By the intelligent manipulation of a formula one could so often eliminate the personal element and transfer the responsibility to the other side.