Arundel

"Again I should talk nonsense if I agreed with you," he said. "Eagerness is a sword, my dear; but it is not armour."

"I don't want armour," she said quickly. "I am not afraid of being hurt."

"Ah, don't get hurt, my darling!" he said.

"Not I. And if I do get hurt, daddy, I shall come crying to you, and you will have to comfort me. Oh, oh – look at all those tired men, with no beds to lie on, and no pillows and no tooth powder or sponges! Don't you envy them? They will wake up in the morning, and find themselves there, and, after all, nothing else can matter. I don't want to be bothered with possessions. I want to be – " Elizabeth suddenly broke off, interrupting her speech and thought alike.

"Daddy, that darling Sir Henry has had soup, and now he is eating unleavened cakes, and a peculiarly murderous-looking Pathan is tempting him with a pomegranate. Do stop him; he is dining with us in an hour's time, and mamma will be so vexed if he doesn't eat the most enormous dinner."

Colonel Fanshawe, with Elizabeth still on his arm, stepped over a couple of sleeping prostrate forms.

"Yes, we will go to him," he said, "and you shall tell me more about the simple life afterwards. It is getting late."

Sir Henry had just cracked a pomegranate in his enormous beefy hands.

"God bless me!" he was saying. "I never saw anything look so good. Fanshawe, be kind enough to tell this man in your best Pushtoo, that there's a fortune in pomegranates. Why, it's quite delicious; never tasted such a fine fruit."

Colonel Fanshawe made some amiable equivalent of all this in Pushtoo, and spoke to Sir Henry again.

"He says that his trees will bear in greater abundance than ever now, sir. But it is rather late. I think we ought to be getting home. You won't have more than time to eat your dinner in comfort before the train – "

Sir Henry rejected a mass of seeds.

"Yes, yes; we'll go," he said. "Why, here's my Miss Elizabeth come to insist. I always obey the ladies, Colonel; you obey the ladies always, and you'll have a confoundedly pleasant time. Now, Miss Elizabeth, quick march, is it?"

A sleepless day following on a dancing night, had produced in Mrs. Fanshawe that uncertainty of temper which, when it exhibits itself in children, is called fractiousness. The Commander-in-Chief, who dined with them en famille, had been obliged to leave in order to catch his train before dinner was over, and in consequence the very expensive strawberries which she had designed to form an exceptional dessert were eaten by herself and Elizabeth, while the Colonel went to the station to speed his parting chief. The chief also during dinner had paid, according to her estimate of what was proper, insufficient attention to his hostess, and more than sufficient to Elizabeth, on whom he rained showers of robust gallantries. In addition, some vague story of a dead man found in the garden had agitated her, while not a single soul from the rest of the station had called to tell her how complete was the eclipse that all other women suffered at the ball last night in consequence of her effulgence. This was enough to start a promising crop of grievances and gloomy forebodings in Mrs. Fanshawe's mind, which she served up, so to speak, young, succulent, and tender like mustard and cress. The crop was of extremely varied growth – a perfect macedoine of mixed and bitter vegetables, among which her habitual helplessness and childlike manner had been completely volatilized.

"I think it is no wonder," she said, "that the military future of India gives politicians grave anxiety at home, when there is such a doddering old goose at the head of affairs."

"Oh, mamma, it's rather a telling sort of doddering!" said Elizabeth. "They gave him a tremendous reception at Jamrud."

"And laughed at him behind his back, I know," said Mrs. Fanshawe, with decision. "And his conduct at dinner, too, with his absurd jokes. I had hoped, Elizabeth, that your good sense would have enabled you to see through them, and for my part, the most charitable explanation I can think of is that he had had too much wine, which I am sure I hope he will sleep off before he makes another laughing-stock of himself at Lahore. Stuffing himself with soup and pomegranates, too, like a school-boy at a confectioner's!"

Elizabeth forebore to suggest that a school confectioner who sold soup and pomegranates would be a unique species of tradesman, and proceeded to eat strawberries one by one from the dish. Her stepmother did not often spout with vinegar, when she did the wisest thing was not to attempt to staunch the flow, but merely wait till it ran dry. But it appeared that her silence acted as spur sufficient.

"And as you have nothing to tell me about the pleasures of your expedition," observed Mrs. Fanshawe, "I must be content with picturing it to myself, as, indeed, I have been doing all day, thinking that now you had got to Landi Kotal, and now to the other place, the name of which I forget."

"We started at eight," began Elizabeth.

"I am quite aware of that, dear," said Mrs. Fanshawe. "I had lain awake till then after the ball, and was just beginning to think I should get to sleep, when I heard you laughing and calling so merrily. I only thought, 'Now my dear ones are starting on their expedition,' nothing more at all. Except to look out of my window, though the light hurt my eyes, to see if you were likely to have a fine day. But, since you have nothing to tell me – "

"Indeed, mamma, we all talked about our day at dinner," said Elizabeth. "I should have thought you had heard enough of it."

Mrs. Fanshawe closed her eyes until Elizabeth ceased speaking, and then went on exactly where she had left off.

"What you have been doing," she said. "I must try to entertain you with what happened last night. The room was very hot and full, and indeed, with Sir Henry bouncing about, there was little space for anybody else to dance at all. Such an elephant I have never yet seen outside a menagerie or at the Durbar, and I should not wonder if when he retired next year, as I am told he does, Barnum offered something handsome for him. But it would be a risky purchase; he might burst any day and cover the place with pomegranate seeds."

Elizabeth gave a little inward gurgle of laughter at this picturesque phrasing. A peculiarity of Mrs. Fanshawe, and one which she shared with many of the human race, was that, when vexed, her sense of humour entirely deserted her, though her humour itself indulged in admirable touches. There was, for instance, humour in her swift thumbnail sketch of an exploding warrior in a menagerie, but her perception of her own felicity failed to recognize it. Under these circumstances it was not diplomatic for others to greet it; their amusement was not wanted. Mrs. Fanshawe proceeded in her inimitable way, in a rather faint voice.

"Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday," she said. "I hope, Elizabeth, you will be able to let me see a little of you before you bury yourself in your trunks. I hope, too, you will keep a hand on your natural exuberance during your voyage. You must not be carried away by such foolish sallies and witticisms as seemed to amuse you during dinner, and make undesirable acquaintances. There is sure to be a number of skylarking young men on board going home, who will want to romp with any girl handy. And be careful to dress very plainly and quietly. You will earn in respect what you will lose in being stared at. Of course you will chiefly sit in the ladies' saloon, especially after dark, and not play any of those foolish games with buckets and bits of rope, which occasion so much silly shouting and giggling, unless there are one or two elderly women playing!"

She observed, with a shaded glance, that Elizabeth had finished the strawberries.

"Perhaps you would pass me the strawberries, dear," she said. "They are quite excellent."

"Oh, I'm so sorry!" began Elizabeth.

"Ah, you have eaten them all, have you? It is not of the slightest consequence. I only wanted one or two, and no doubt I am quite as well without them. Indeed, I am only glad that you have enjoyed them so much, and wish for your sake there were more. Ah, here is your father back from seeing poor Sir Henry off. Take the dish off the table, darling, so that he shall not see we have had strawberries, for they are his favourite fruit."

The goaded Elizabeth turned.

"Daddy," she said, "I have eaten all the strawberries, so that there are none for you and mamma."

Mrs. Fanshawe gave her a reproachful glance.

"Really, Elizabeth!" she said. "So you are back, Bob. Did you see the poor old man into his train? I was saying to Elizabeth that I hoped it was only wine, but I am afraid his brain must be going. I should not wonder if he became quite childish."

Colonel Fanshawe lifted his eyebrows in mild surprise.

"Sir Henry?" he said. "I hope neither conjecture is true, my dear. By the way, he sent his warmest thanks to you and hoped so much that when you went up to Simla you would stay with him a week or two. He will be there all next month. But of course if you are afraid of his being sent for to go to the asylum – "

Mrs. Fanshawe did not waste time over her transitions; she did not modulate from key to key, but, without sequence of transitional chords, put her finger firmly down on the notes she intended to play.

"My darling, how literally you take my little joke!" she said. "Dear Sir Henry! He is like a great boy, is he not, with his jokes and high spirits! I declare he made me feel a hundred years old. I must say that it is very civil of him, and of course I shall go. I regard the invitations of the Commander-in-Chief as a royal command, when one is in India."

An unusual impulse of candour took possession of her.

"Besides," she said, "it will be much more amusing and comfortable than at the hotel."

Elizabeth, as had now been settled, was to start for England the next week, and since, after the visit of the Commander-in-Chief, a quiet reaction settled down on Peshawar, Mrs. Fanshawe was at liberty to work herself to the bone, as she herself phrased it, to make preparations for her departure. As a matter of strict fact, her labours in this regard were to order her ayah to wash out a Thermos flask of hers, the possession of which, she declared, would make "all the difference" to Elizabeth's comfort on her journey down to Bombay, and to determine to finish a woollen crochet scarf for her, which would make "all the difference" when she was on the boat. The necessity of finishing this – for her determination was invincible on the point – caused her to insist on a good deal of reading aloud in the evening, which she always enjoyed, while the breaking of the Thermos flask – quite irreplaceable in Peshawar – by her ayah gave her an excuse, which she had long been wanting, for dismissing her, since it was quite impossible to trust a woman who could be careless over such a treasure, and to keep a servant whom she could not trust, was to violate one of her most sound household laws. Under the stress of these duties it was only prudent to rest for rather longer hours than usual after lunch, with the crochet scarf put on a table by her sofa, in case her afternoon insomnia was persistent, and except for lunch, she was practically invisible until evening. Under these circumstances, though she continued to plan long quiet days for herself and Elizabeth before the wrench of parting came, the girl saw more than usual of her father, for, to speak frankly, it was impossible to have the sense of seeing anybody else when Mrs. Fanshawe was present. She was obtrusive in the faint but shrill trumpeting manner of a mosquito.

To Elizabeth, therefore, and, though loyalty prevented his ever forming such a thought to himself, perhaps to her father, too, these days had a recaptured charm. It was now a couple of years since her stepmother had made the third – not shadowy – in her home; before that, for her mother had died in her infancy, she and her father had been inseparable companions. And in these two years Elizabeth had grown up; from the high romantic mists of childhood, she had stepped down into the level plains, and saw womanhood stretching out in front of her. As was natural, that expanse had come slowly and gradually into sight, and it was not till these few days of companionship with her father brought back the habit of earlier years that she began to realize how far she had travelled. She found, too, that the adequacy of the prattling companionship of childhood no longer satisfied her; her heart needed a more mature diet, her brain was awake and tingling with a hundred questions and surmises such as a few days before had inspired her wondering conjectures when she found him at work in his garden. Then, for the first time quite consciously, she had asked herself that momentous question as to the meaning, the principle that lay behind all the phenomena which she had taken for granted; then, too, she had realized that to her father the explanation lay in, or, at any rate, was bound up with, something inherent in the prayers and hymns at church. There to him was the finality which she had been consciously seeking, about which for the first time she felt any real curiosity.

But she was as diffident about putting any question to him about it as he, all these years, had been of initiating any speech on the subject. A man's religious convictions necessarily take the colour and texture, so to speak, of his mind, and this quiet, unassertive man was no more in the habit of speaking about them than about his loyalty to the King or his habits of personal cleanliness. Such subjects as these, rightly or wrongly, are the last to find vocal expression; he would have found it as difficult and as unnatural to speak to Elizabeth on religious topics as to discourse on the meaning of the National Anthem, or ask her at breakfast if she had performed her ablutions with thoroughness. In his own case, his conduct, his work, and his immaculate appearance bore witness to the reality of his convictions on these three respects, and, though he shared with no mother the responsibility of parentage, he assumed her welfare in these regards. It was not because the reality of them was faint to him that he was reticent, it was because the reality was a matter of instinct, deeply felt and inwardly imperative. Throughout the reigns of various governesses, he had from time to time reminded those ladies of his wish that a Bible lesson should inaugurate the labours of the day, and, having thus provided for the material of religious instruction, he believed that the child's nature would, out of that pabulum, secrete, in the manner of well-nourished bodily glands, the secret essences that sustained and built. But there had resulted from this method of reticence, a symptom which should have troubled him if he wanted confirmation of its success, for Elizabeth, so open, so garrulous with him on all other subjects, had never spoken to him on this one. This he set down to the same instinct that made himself shy of speech on such subjects, namely, the inherent conviction that does not care to discuss matters like loyalty and cleanliness. It had never occurred to him that her silence was due to indifference, to incuriousness, and that religious instruction was to her no more than a part of the curriculum of the week-day church, an hour's slightly distasteful feature of Sunday morning.

But now Elizabeth's curiosity was aroused. "The scheme of things entire" had begun to make audible to her its first faint flute-like call, a call that, before there has fallen on the spirit any experience of agony, of darkness, of loneliness, is as fascinating as the music of Pan or the voice of Sirens, and she longed to know how it sounded in the ears of others. For herself, she was confused, bewildered by the remote uncapturable melody, that at present only gave hints in broken phrases to her untrained ear.

The two were riding back one day from a horseback saunter along the lanes among the fruit orchards. The blossom was beginning to fall, and when a puff of wind disturbed its uncertain clinging the ground below would be showered with snowy pear-blossom or pink with the flower of the peach. Elizabeth, in tune with the spring, was inclined to lament this.

"I would almost go without peaches," she said, "if that would save the blossom from falling."

He laughed.

"Yet it would be a hard choice," he said, "to determine whether one would look at a tree covered with blossom, instead of having dessert. I think I should let Nature take its course, Lizzie, after all."

"Is it meant that the blossom has to fall before the fruit comes?" she asked.

"Well, yes. To want it otherwise would be parallel to wanting girls and boys not to grow up."