His Honour, and a Lady

CHAPTER X

The opinion was a united one on board the Annie Laurie the next Sunday afternoon that Nature had left nothing undone to make the occasion a success. This might have testified to less than it did; for a similar view has been expressed as unanimously, and adhered to as firmly, on board the Annie Laurie when the banks of the Hooghly have been grey with deluge and the ladies have saved their skirts by sitting on one another’s knees in her tiny cabin. The Annie Laurie being the Lieutenant-Governor’s steam-launch, nobody but the Lieutenant-Governor presumes to be anything but complimentary as to the weather experienced aboard her. And this in India is natural. It could not be said, however, that there was anything necessarily diplomatic even in Mrs. Daye’s appreciation of this particular afternoon. The air – they all dilated on the air – blew in from the sea, across the salt marshes, through the plantains and the cocoanut-trees of the little villages, and brought a dancing crispness, softened by the sun. The brown river hurtled outwards past her buoys, and a great merchant ship at anchor in midstream swung slowly round with the tide. A vague concourse of straight masts and black hulls and slanting funnels stretched along the bank behind them with the indefiniteness that comes of multitude, for every spar and line stood and swung clear cut in the glittering sun; and the point they were bound for elbowed itself out into the river two miles farther down, in the grey greenness of slanting, pluming palms. Already the water was growing more golden where the palms toppled over the river: there would not be more than two good hours of daylight. As Mrs. Daye remarked to the Lieutenant-Governor, life was all too short in the cold weather really to absorb, to drink in, the beauties of nature – there was so much going on.

“Then,” said His Honour, “we must make the most of our time.” But he did not prolong his gaze at Mrs. Daye by way of emphasising his remark, as another man, and especially another lieutenant-governor, might have done. He fixed it instead on the dilapidated plaster façade on the left bank of the river, formerly inhabited by the King of Oudh and his relatives, and thought of the deplorable sanitation there.

Not that John Church was by any means unappreciative of the beauties of nature. It was because he acknowledged the moral use of them that he came on these Sunday afternoon picnics. He read the poets, and would pay a good price for a bronze or a picture, for much the same reason. They formed part of his system of self-development; he applied them to his mind through the medium which nature has provided, and trusted that the effect would be good. He did it, however, as he did everything, with the greatest possible economy of time, and sometimes other considerations overlapped. That very afternoon he meant to speak to the Superintendent of the Botanical Gardens – the green elbow of the river crooked about this place – concerning the manufacture and distribution of a new febrifuge, and he presently edged away from Mrs. Daye with the purpose of finding out her husband’s views concerning the silting up of river-beds in Bengal and the cost of preventive measures. Life with John Church could be measured simply as an area for effort.

Notwithstanding these considerations, it was gay enough. Captain Thrush, A.D.C., sat on the top of the cabin, and swung his legs to the accompaniment of his amusing experiences the last time he went quail shooting. The St. Georges were there, and the St. Georges were proverbial in Calcutta for lightheartedness. Sir William Scott might have somewhat overweighted the occasion; but Sir William Scott had taken off his hat, the better to enjoy the river-breeze, and this reduced him to a name and a frock coat. In the general good spirits the abnegation and the resolution with which Lewis Ancram and Judith Church occupied themselves with other people might almost have passed unnoticed. Rhoda Daye found herself wondering whether it would be possible for Ancram to be pathetic under the most moving circumstances, so it may be presumed that she perceived it; but the waves of mirth engendered by Captain Thrush and the St. Georges rolled over it so far as the rest were concerned, as they might over a wreck of life and hope. This pretty simile occurred to Miss Daye, who instantly dismissed it as mawkish, but nevertheless continued, for at least five minutes, to reflect on the irony of fate, as, for the moment, she helped to illustrate it. A new gravity fell upon her for that period, as she sat there and watched Judith Church talking to Sir William Scott about his ferns. For the first time she became aware that the situation had an edge to it – that she was the edge. She was the saturnine element in what she had hitherto resolutely regarded as a Calcutta comedy; she was not sure that she could regard it as a comedy any longer, even from the official point of view. Ancram evidently had it in mind to make an exhibition to the world in general, and to Mrs. Church in particular, of devotion to his betrothed. She caught him once or twice in the act of gratefully receiving Mrs. Church’s approving glance. Nevertheless she had an agreeable tolerance for all that he found to do for her. She forbade herself, for the time being, any further analysis of a matter with which she meant to have in future little concern. In that anticipation she became unaccountably light-hearted and talkative and merry. So much so, that Captain Thrush, A.D.C., registered his conviction that she was really rather a pretty girl – more in her than he thought; and the Honourable Mr. Lewis Ancram said to himself that she was enjoying, in anticipation, the prestige she would have a month later, and that the cleverest of women were deplorably susceptible to social ambition.

The Superintendent met them at the wharf, and John Church led the way up the great central avenue of palms, whose grey, shaven polls look as if they had been turned by some giant lathe, with his hand on the arm of this gentleman. The others arranged themselves with a single eye to avoiding the stupidity of walking with their own wives and trooped after.

“We are going to the orchid-houses, John,” Mrs. Church called after her husband, as Sir William Scott brought them to a halt at a divergent road he loved; and Church took off his hat in hurried acquiescence.

“Notice my new Dendrobium!” cried the Superintendent, turning a rueful countenance upon them. “The only one in Asia!” Then his head resumed its inclination of respectful attention, and the pair disappeared.

Mrs. Church laughed frankly. “Poor Dr. James!” she exclaimed. “My husband is double-dyed in febrifuge to-day.”

Ancram took the privilege – it was one he enjoyed – of gently rebuking her. “It is one of those common, urgent needs of the people,” he said, “that His Honour so intimately understands.”

Judith looked at him with a sudden sweet humility in her eyes. “You are quite right,” she returned. “I sometimes think that nobody knows him as you do. Certainly,” she added, in a lower tone, as the two fell back, “nobody has more of his confidence, more of his dependence.”

“I don’t know,” Ancram answered vaguely. “Do you really think so? I don’t know.”

“I am sure of it.”

He looked straight before him in silence, irritated in his sensitive morality – the morality which forbade him to send a Government chuprassie on a private errand, or to write to his relations in England on office paper. A curve in the walk showed them Rhoda Daye, standing alone on the sward, beside a bush in crimson-and-orange flower, intently examining a spray. Almost involuntarily they paused, and Ancram turned his eyes upon Mrs. Church with the effect of asking her what he should do, what he must do.

“Go!” she said; and then, as if it were a commonplace: “I think Miss Daye wants you. I will overtake the others.”

She thought he left her very willingly, and hurried on with the conviction that, like everything else, it would come right – quite right – in the end. She was very happy if in any way she had helped it to come right – so happy that she longed to be alone with her sensations, and revolted with all her soul against the immediate necessity of Sir William Scott and the St. Georges. To be for a few hours quite alone, unseen and unknown, in the heart of some empty green wilderness like this, would help her, she knew, to rationalise her satisfaction. “My dear boy,” she said, with nervous patience, as Captain Thrush appeared in search of her, “did you think I had fallen into a tank? Do go and take care of the other people.” An aide-de-camp was not a serious impediment to reflection, but at the moment Judith would have been distressed by the attendance of her own shadow, if it were too perceptible.

Ancram crossed over to Rhoda, with his antipathy to the Lieutenant-Governor sensibly aggravated by the fact that his wife took an interest in him – an appreciative interest. It was out of harmony, Ancram felt vaguely, that she should do this – it jarred. He had so admired her usual attitude of pale, cool, sweet tolerance toward John Church – had so approved it. That attitude had been his solace in thinking about her in her unique position and with her rare temperament. To suppose her counting up her husband’s virtues, weighing them, doing justice to them, tinged her with the commonplace, and disturbed him.

“That’s a curious thing,” he said to Rhoda.

She let go her hold of the twig, and the red-and-gold flower danced up like a flame.

“It belongs to the sun and the soil; so it pleases one better than any importation.”

“An orchid is such a fairy – you can’t expect it to have a nationality,” he returned.

She stood, with her head thrown back a little, looking at the sprays that swung above the line of her lips. Her wide-brimmed hat dropped a soft shadow over the upper part of her face; her eyes shone through it with a gleam of intensely feminine sweetness, and the tender curve of her throat gave him an unreasoned throb of anticipation. In six weeks he would be married to this slender creature; it would be an excursion into the unknown, not unaccompanied by adventures. Tentatively, it might be agreeable; it would certainly be interesting. He confessed to a curiosity which was well on the way to become impatient.

“Then do you want to go and see the Dendrobium?” she asked.

“Not if you prefer to do anything else.”

“I think I would enjoy the cranes more, or the pink water-lilies. The others will understand, won’t they, that we two might like to take a little walk?”

Her coquetry, he said to himself, was preposterously pretty. They took another of the wide solitary paths that led under showery bamboos and quivering mahogany trees to where a stretch of water gave back the silence of the palms against the evening sky, and he dropped unconsciously into the stroll which is characterised everywhere as a lover’s. She glanced at him once or twice corroboratively, and said to herself that she had not been mistaken: he had real distinction – he was not of the herd. Then she picked up broad, crisp leaves with the point of her parasol and pondered while he talked of a possible walking tour in the Tyrol. Presently she broke in irrelevantly, hurriedly.

“I like to do a definite thing in a definite way: don’t you?”

“Certainly; yes, of course.”

“Well; and that is why I waited till this afternoon to tell you – to tell you – ”

“To tell me – ”

“My dear Mr. Ancram, that I cannot possibly marry you.”

She had intended to put it differently, more effectively – perhaps with a turn that would punish him for his part in making the situation what it was. But it seemed a more momentous thing than she thought, now that she came to do it; she had a sense that destiny was too heavy a thing to play with.

He gave her an official look, the look which refuses to allow itself to be surprised, and said “Really?” in a manner which expressed absolutely nothing except that she had his attention.

“I do not pretend,” she went on, impaling her vanity upon her candour, “that this will give you the slightest pain. I have been quite conscious of the relation between us” (here she blushed) “for a very long time; and I am afraid you must understand that I have reached this decision without any undue distress —moi aussi.”

She had almost immediately regained her note; she was wholly mistress of what she said. For an instant Ancram fancied that the bamboos and the mahogany trees and the flaming hibiscus bushes were unreal, that he was walking into a panorama, and it seemed to him that his steps were uncertain. He was carrying his silk hat, and he set himself mechanically to smooth it round and round with his right hand as he listened.

When she paused he could find nothing better to say than “Really?” again; and he added, “You can’t expect me to be pleased.”

“Oh, but I do,” she returned promptly. “You are, aren’t you?”

It seemed a friendly reminder of his best interests. It brought the bamboos back to a vegetable growth, and steadied Ancram’s nerves. He continued to smooth his hat; but he recovered himself sufficiently to join her, at a bound, in the standpoint from which she seemed inclined to discuss the matter without prejudice.

“Since we are to be quite candid with each other,” he said, smiling, “I’m not sure.”

“Your candour has – artistic qualities – which make it different from other people’s. At all events, you will be to-morrow: to-morrow you will thank Heaven fasting.”

He looked at her with some of the interest she used to inspire in him before his chains began to gall him.

“Prickly creature!” he said. “Are you quite sure? Is your determination unalterable?”

“I acknowledge your politeness in asking me,” she returned. “It is.”

“Then I suppose I must accept it.” He spoke slowly. “But for the soulagement you suggest I am afraid I must wait longer than to-morrow.”

They walked on in silence, reached the rank edge of the pond, and turned to go back. The afternoon still hung mellow in mid air, and something of its tranquillity seemed to have descended between them. In their joint escape from their mutual burden they experienced a reciprocal good feeling, something like comradeship, not untouched by sentiment. Once or twice he referred to their broken bond, asking her, with the appetite of his egotism, to give him the crystal truth of the reason she had accepted him.

“I accepted my idea of you,” she said simply, “which was not altogether an accurate one. Besides, I think a good deal about – a lot of questions of administration. I thought I would like to have a closer interest, perhaps a hand in them. Such fools of women do.”

After which they talked in a friendly way (it has been noted that Ancram was tolerant) about how essential ambition was to the bearableness of life in India.

“I see that you will be a much more desirable acquaintance,” Rhoda said once, brightly, “now that I am not going to marry you.” And he smiled in somewhat unsatisfied acquiescence.

Ancram grew silent as they drew near the main avenue and the real parting. The dusk had fallen suddenly, and a little wind brought showers of yellow leaves out of the shivering bamboos. They were quite alone, and at a short distance almost indistinguishable from the ixora bushes and the palmettos.

“Rhoda,” he said, stopping short, “this is our last walk together – we who were to have walked together always. May I kiss you?”