His Honour, and a Lady

Sara Jeannette Duncan

His Honour, and a Lady

CHAPTER I

“The Sahib walks!” said Ram Prasannad, who dusted the office books and papers, to Bundal Singh the messenger, who wore a long red coat with a badge of office, and went about the business of the Queen-Empress on his two lean brown legs.

“What talk is that?” Bundal Singh shifted his betel quid to the other cheek and lunged upon his feet. This in itself was something. When one sits habitually upon one’s heels the process of getting up is not undertaken lightly. The men looked out together between the whitewashed stucco pillars of the long verandah that interposed between the Commissioner’s clerks and the glare and publicity of the outer world of Hassimabad. Overhead, in a pipal tree that threw sharp-cut patterns of its heart-shaped leaves about their feet, a crow stretched its grey-black throat in strenuous caws, since it was ten o’clock in the morning and there was no reason to keep silence. Farther away a chorus of other crows smote the sunlight, and from the direction of the bazar came a murmur of the life there, borne higher now and then in the wailing voice of some hawker of sweetmeats. Nevertheless there was a boundless stillness, a stillness that might have been commanded. The prodigal sun intensified it, and the trees stood in it, a red and dusty road wound through it, and the figure of a man, walking quickly down the road, seemed to be a concentration of it.

“That signifies,” continued Ram Prasannad, without emotion, “news that is either very good or very bad. The Government lât had but arrived, the sahib opened one letter only – which is now with him – and in a breath he was gone, walking, though the horse was still fast between the shafts. Myself, I think the news is good, for my cousin – he is a writing baboo in the Home Office, dost thou understand, thou, runner of errands! – has sent word to me that the sahib is much in favour with the Burra Lat, and that it would be well to be faithful to him.”

“I will go swiftly after with an umbrella, and from his countenance it will appear,” remarked Bundal Singh; “and look thou, worthy one, if that son of mud, Lal Beg, the grain dealer, comes again in my absence to try to make petition to the sahib, and brings a pice less than one rupee to me, do thou refuse him admission.”

Bundal Singh ran after his master, as he said. As John Church walked rapidly, and the habitual pace of a Queen’s messenger in red and gold is a dignified walk, the umbrella was tendered with a devoted loss of wind.

“It may be that your honour will take harm from the sun,” Bundal Singh suggested, with the privilege all the Commissioner’s people felt permitted to use. The Commissioner liked it – could be depended upon to appreciate any little savour of personal devotion to him, even if it took the form of a liberty. He had not a servant who was unaware of this or failed to presume upon it, in his place and degree. This one got a nod of acknowledgment as his master took the opened umbrella, and observed, as he fell behind, that the sahib was too much preoccupied to carry it straight. He went meditatively back to Ram Prasannad in the verandah, who said, “Well?”

“Simply it does not appear. The sahib’s forehead had twenty wrinkles, and his mind was a thousand miles hence. Yet it was as if he had lately smiled and would smile again. What will be, will be. Lal Beg has not been here?”

John Church walked steadily on, with his near-sighted eyes fixed always upon the wide space of sunlit road, its red dust thick-printed with bare feet and hoofs, that lay in front of him – seeing nothing, literally, but the way home. He met no one who knew him except people from the bazar, who regarded their vizier with serious wonder as they salaamed, the men who sat upon low bamboo carts and urged, hand upon flank, the peaceful-eyed cattle yoked to them, turning to stare as they jogged indolently past. A brown pariah, curled up in the middle of the road, lifted his long snout in lazy apology as Church stepped round him, trusting the sense that told him it would not be necessary to get out of the way. As he passed the last low wall, mossy and discoloured, that divided its brilliantly tangled garden from the highway, and turned in at its own gate, he caught himself out of his abstraction and threw up his head. He entered his wife’s drawing-room considerately, and a ray of light, slipping through the curtains and past the azaleas and across the cool duskness of the place, fell on his spectacles and exaggerated the triumph in his face.

The lady, who sat at the other end of the room writing, rose as her husband came into it, and stepped forward softly to meet him. If you had known her you would have noticed a slight elation in her step that was not usual, and made it more graceful, if anything, than it commonly was.

“I think I know what you have come to tell me,” she said. Her voice matched her personality so perfectly that it might have suggested her, to a few people, in her darkened drawing-room, as its perfume would betray some sweet-smelling thing in the evening. Not to John Church. “I think I know,” she said, as he hesitated for words that would not show extravagant or undignified gratification. “But tell me yourself. It will be a pleasure.”

“That Sir Griffiths Spence goes on eighteen months’ sick leave, and – ”

“And that you are appointed to officiate for him. Yes.”

“Somebody has written?”

“Yes – Mr. Ancram.”

His wife had come close to him, and he noticed that she was holding out her hands in her impulse of congratulation. He took one of them – it was all he felt the occasion required – and shook it lamely. She dropped the other with a little quick turn of her head and a dash of amusement at her own expense in the gentle gravity of her expression. “Do sit down,” she said, almost as if he had been a visitor, “and tell me all about it.” She dragged a comfortable chair forward out of its relation with a Burmese carved table, some pots of ferns and a screen, and sat down herself opposite, leaning forward in a little pose of expectancy. Church placed himself on the edge of it, grasping his hat with both hands between his knees.

“I must apologise for my boots,” he said, looking down: “I walked over. I am very dusty.”

“What does it matter? You are King of Bengal!”

“Acting King.”

“It is the same thing – or it will be. Sir Griffiths retires altogether in two years – Lord Scansleigh evidently intends you to succeed him.” The lady spoke with obvious repression, but her gray eyes and the warm whiteness of her oval face seemed to have caught into themselves all the light and shadow of the room.

“Perhaps – perhaps. You always invest in the future at a premium, Judith. I don’t intend to think about that.”

Such an anticipation, based on his own worth, seemed to him unwarrantable, almost indecent.

“I do,” she said, wilfully ignoring the clouding of his face. “There is so much to think about. First the pay – almost ten thousand rupees a month – and we are poor. It may be a material consideration, but I don’t mind confessing that the prospect of never having to cut the khansamah appeals to me. We shall have a palace and a park to live in, with a guard at the gates, and two outriders with swords to follow our carriage. We shall live in Calcutta, where there are trams and theatres and shops and people. The place carries knighthood if you are confirmed in it, and you will be Sir John Church – that gratifies the snob that is latent in me because I am a woman, John.” (She paused and glanced at his face, which had grown almost morose.) “Best of all,” she added lightly, “as Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal you will be practically sole ruler of eighty millions of people. You will be free to carry out your own theories, and to undertake reforms – any number of reforms! Mr. Ancram says,” she went on, after a moment’s hesitation, “that the man and the opportunity have come together.”

John Church blushed, through his beard which was gray, and over the top of his head which was bald, but his look lightened.

“Ancram will be one of my secretaries,” he said. “Does he speak at all – does he mention the way it has been taken in Calcutta?”

Mrs. Church went to her writing-table and came back with the letter. It was luxuriously written, in a rapid hand as full of curves and angles as a woman’s, and covered, from “Dear Lady” to “Always yours sincerely,” several broad-margined sheets.

“I think he does,” she said, deliberately searching the pages. “Yes: ‘Church was not thought precisely in the running – you are so remote in Hassimabad, and his work has always been so unostentatious – and there was some surprise when the news came, but no cavil. It is known that the Viceroy has been looking almost with tears for a man who would be strong enough to redeem a few of Sir Griffiths’ mistakes if possible while he is away – he has been, as you know, ludicrously weak with the natives – and Church’s handling of that religious uproar you had a year ago has not been forgotten. I need not expatiate upon the pleasure your friends feel, but it may gratify you to know that the official mob is less ready with criticism of His Excellency’s choice than usual.’”

John Church listened with the look of putting his satisfaction under constraint. He listened in the official manner, as one who has many things to hear, with his head bent forward and toward his wife, and his eyes consideringly upon the floor.

“I am glad of that,” he said nervously when she had finished – “I am glad of that. There is a great deal to be done in Bengal, and matters will be simplified if they recognise it.“

“I think you would find a great deal to do anywhere, John,” remarked Mrs. Church. It could almost be said that she spoke kindly, and a sensitive observer with a proper estimate of her husband might have found this irritating. During the little while that followed, however, as they talked, in the warmth of this unexpected gratification, of what his work had been as a Commissioner, and what it might be as a Lieutenant-Governor, it would have been evident even to an observer who was not sensitive, that here they touched a high-water mark of their intercourse, a climax in the cordiality of their mutual understanding.

“By the way,” said John Church, getting up to go, “when is Ancram to be married?”

“I don’t know!” Mrs. Church threw some interest into the words. Her inflection said that she was surprised that she didn’t know. “He only mentions Miss Daye to call her a ‘study in femininity,’ which looks as if he might be submitting to a protracted process of education at her hands. Certainly not soon, I should think.”

“Ancram must be close on forty, with good pay, good position, good prospects. He shouldn’t put it off any longer: a man has no business to grow old alone in this country. He deteriorates.”

Church pulled himself together with a shake – he was a loose-hung creature – and put a nervous hand up to his necktie. Then he pulled down his cuffs, considered his hat with the effect of making quite sure that there was nothing more to say, and turned to go.

“You might send me over something,” he said, glancing at his watch. “I won’t be able to come back to breakfast. Already I’ve lost three-quarters of an hour from work. Government doesn’t pay me for that. You are pleased, then?” he added, looking round at her in a half shamefaced way from the door.

Mrs. Church had returned to the writing-table, and had again taken up her pen. She leaned back in her chair and lifted her delicate chin with a smile that had custom and patience in it.

“Very pleased indeed,” she said; and he went away. The intelligent observer, again, would have wondered how he refrained from going back and kissing her. Perhaps the custom and the patience in her smile would have lent themselves to the explanation. At all events, he went away.

He was forty-two, exactly double her age, when he married Judith Strange, eight years before, in Stoneborough, a small manufacturing town in the north of England, where her father was a Nonconformist minister. He was her opportunity, and she had taken him, with private congratulation that she could respect him and private qualms as to whether her respect was her crucial test of him – considered in the light of an opportunity. Not in any sordid sense; she would be more inclined perhaps to apologise for herself than I am to apologise for her. But with an inordinately hungry capacity for life she had the narrowest conditions to live in. She knew by intuition that the world was full of colour and passion, and when one is tormented with this sort of knowledge it becomes more than ever grievous to inhabit one of its small, dull, grimy blind alleys, with the single anticipation of enduring to a smoke-blackened old age, like one of Stoneborough’s lesser chimneys. There was nothing ideal about John Church except his honesty, – already he stooped, already he was grey, sallow and serious, with the slenderest interest in questions that could not express their utility in unquestionable facts, – but when he asked her to marry him, the wall at the end of the alley fell down, and a breeze stole in from the far East, with a vision of palms and pomegranates. She accepted him for the sake of her imagination, wishing profoundly that he was not so much like her father, with what her mother thought almost improper promptitude; and for a long time, although he still stood outside it, her imagination loyally rewarded her. She felt the East to her fingertips, and her mere physical life there became a thing of vivid experience, to be valued for itself. If her husband confounded this joy in her expansion with the orthodox happiness of a devoted wife, it cannot be said that he was particularly to blame for his mistake, for numbers of other people made it also. And when, after eight years of his companionship, and that of the sunburned policeman, the anæmic magistrate, the agreeable doctor, their wives, the odd colonel, and the stray subalterns that constituted society in the stations they lived in, she began to show a little lassitude of spirit, he put it down not unnaturally to the climate, and wished he could conscientiously take a few months’ leave, since nothing would induce her to go to England without him. By this time India had become a resource, India that lay all about her, glowing, profuse, mysterious, fascinating, a place in which she felt that she had no part, could never have any part, but that of a spectator. The gesture of a fakir, the red masses of the gold-mohur trees against the blue intensity of the sky, the heavy sweetness of the evening wind, the soft colour and curves of the homeward driven cattle, the little naked babies with their jingling anklets in the bazar – she had begun to turn to these things seeking their gift of pleasure jealously, consciously thankful that, in spite of the Amusement Club, she could never be altogether bored.

John Church went back to work with his satisfaction sweetened by the fact that his wife had told him that she was very pleased indeed, while Mrs. Church answered the Honourable Mr. Lewis Ancram’s letter.

“I have been making my own acquaintance this morning,” she said among other things, “as an ambitious woman. It is intoxicating, after this idle, sun-filled, wondering life, with the single supreme care that John does not wear ragged collars to church – as a Commissioner he ought to be extravagant in collars – to be confronted with something to assume and carry out, a part to play, with all India looking on. Don’t imagine a lofty intention on my part to inspire my husband’s Resolutions. I assure you I see myself differently. Perhaps, after all, it is the foolish anticipation of my state and splendour that has excited my vain imagination as much as anything. Already, prospectively, I murmur lame nothings into the ear of the Viceroy as he takes me down to dinner! But I am preposterously delighted. To-morrow is Sunday – I have an irreverent desire for the prayers of all the churches.”

CHAPTER II

“Here you are at last!” remarked Mrs. Daye with vivacity, taking the three long, pronounced and rustling steps which she took so very well, toward the last comer to her dinner party, who made his leisurely entrance between the portières, pocketing his handkerchief. “Don’t say you have been to church,” she went on, holding out a condoning hand, “for none of us will believe you.”

Although Mr. Ancram’s lips curved back over his rather prominent teeth in a narrow smile as he put up his eyeglass and looked down at his hostess, Mrs. Daye felt the levity fade out of her expression: she had to put compulsion on herself to keep it in her face. It was as if she, his prospective mother-in-law, had taken the least of liberties with Mr. Ancram.

“Does the only road to forgiveness lie through the church gate?” he asked. His voice was high and agreeable; it expressed discrimination; his tone implied that, if the occasion had required it, he could have said something much cleverer easily – an implication no one who knew him would have found unwarrantable.

“The padres say it does, as a rule, Ancram,” put in Colonel Daye. “In this case it lies through the dining-room door. Will you take my wife in?”

In a corner of the room, which she might have chosen for its warm obscurity, Rhoda Daye watched with curious scrutiny the lightest detail of Mr. Lewis Ancram’s behaviour. An elderly gentleman, with pulpy red cheeks and an amplitude of white waistcoat, stood beside her chair, swaying out of the perpendicular with well-bred rigidity now and then, in tentative efforts at conversation; to which she replied, “Really?” and “Yes, I know,” while her eyes fixed themselves upon Ancram’s face, and her little white features gleamed immobile under the halo which the tall lamp behind her made with her fuzz of light-brown hair. “Mother’s respect for him is simply outrageous,” she reflected, as she assured the elderly gentleman that even for Calcutta the heat was really extraordinary, considering that they were in December. “I wonder – supposing he had not made love to me – if I could have had as much!” She did not answer herself definitely – not from any lack of candour, but because the question presented difficulties. She slipped past him presently on the arm of the elderly gentleman, as Ancram still stood with bent head talking to her mother. His eyes sought hers with a significance that flattered her – there was no time for further greeting – and the bow with which he returned her enigmatic little nod singled her out for consideration. As she went in to dinner the nape of Mr. Lewis Ancram’s neck and the parting of his hair remained with her as pictorial facts.

Mrs. Daye always gave composite dinner-parties, and this was one of them. “If you ask nobody but military people to meet each other,” she was in the habit of saying, “you hear nothing but the price of chargers and the prospects of the Staff Corps. If you make your list up of civilians, the conversation consists of abuse of their official superiors and the infamous conduct of the Secretary of State about the rupee.” On this occasion Mrs. Daye had reason to anticipate that the price of chargers would be varied by the grievances of the Civil Service, and that a touring Member of Parliament would participate in the discussion who knew nothing about either; and she felt that her blend would be successful. She could give herself up to the somewhat fearful enjoyment she experienced in Mr. Ancram’s society. Mrs. Daye was convinced that nobody appreciated Mr. Ancram more subtly than she did. She saw a great deal of jealousy of him in Calcutta society, whereas she was wont to declare that, for her part, she found nothing extraordinary in the way he had got in – a man of his brains, you know! And if Calcutta resented this imputation upon its own brains in ever so slight a degree, Mrs. Daye saw therein more jealousy of the fact that her family circle was about to receive him. When it had once opened for that purpose and closed again, Mrs. Daye hoped vaguely that she would be sustained for the new and exacting duty of living up to Mr. Ancram.

“Please look at Rhoda,” she begged, in a conversational buzz that her blend had induced.

Mr. Ancram looked, deliberately, but with appreciation. “She seems to be sufficiently entertained,” he said.

“Oh, she is! She’s got a globe-trotter. Haven’t you found out that Rhoda simply loves globe-trotters? She declares that she renews her youth in them.”

“Her first impressions, I suppose she means?”

“Oh, as to what she means– ”

Mrs. Daye broke off irresolutely, and thoughtfully conveyed a minute piece of roll to her lips. The minute piece of roll was Mr. Ancram’s opportunity to complete Mrs. Daye’s suggestion of a certain interesting ambiguity in her daughter; but he did not take it. He continued to look attentively at Miss Daye, who appeared, as he said, to be sufficiently entertained, under circumstances which seemed to him inadequate. Her traveller was talking emphatically, with gestures of elderly dogmatism, and she was deferentially listening, an amusement behind her eyes with which the Chief Secretary to the Government at Bengal was not altogether unfamiliar. He had seen it there before, on occasions when there was apparently nothing to explain it.

“It would be satisfactory to see her eating her dinner,” he remarked, with what Mrs. Daye felt to be too slight a degree of solicitude. She was obliged to remind herself that at thirty-seven a man was apt to take these things more as matters of fact, especially – and there was a double comfort in this reflection – a man already well up in the Secretariat and known to be ambitious. “Is it possible,” Mr. Ancram went on, somewhat absently, “that these are Calcutta roses? You must have a very clever gardener.”

“No” – and Mrs. Daye pitched her voice with a gentle definiteness that made what she was saying interesting all round the table – “they came from the Viceroy’s place at Barrackpore. Lady Emily sent them to me: so sweet of her, I thought! I always think it particularly kind when people in that position trouble themselves about one; they must have so many demands upon their time.”

The effect could not have been better. Everybody looked at the roses with an interest that might almost be described as respectful; and Mrs. Delaine, whose husband was Captain Delaine of the Durham Rifles, said that she would have known them for Their Excellencies’ roses anywhere – they always did the table with that kind for the Thursday dinners at Government House – she had never known them to use any other.

Mrs. St. George, whose husband was the Presidency Magistrate, found this interesting. “Do they really?” she exclaimed. “I’ve often wondered what those big Thursday affairs were like. Fancy – we’ve been in Calcutta through three cold weathers now, and have never been asked to anything but little private dinners at Government House – not more than eight or ten, you know!”

“Don’t you prefer that?” asked Mrs. Delaine, taking her quenching with noble equanimity.

“Well, of course one sees more of them,” Mrs. St. George admitted. “The last time we were there, about a fortnight ago, I had a long chat with Lady Emily. She is a sweet thing, and perfectly wild at being out of the school-room!” Mrs. St. George added that it was a charming family, so well brought up; and this seemed to be a matter of special congratulation as affecting the domestic arrangements of a Viceroy. There was a warmth and an emphasis in the corroboration that arose which almost established relations of intimacy between Their Excellencies and Mrs. Daye’s dinner-party. Mrs. Daye’s daughter listened in her absorbed, noting manner; and when the elderly gentleman remarked with a certain solemnity that they were talking of the Scansleighs, he supposed, the smile with which she said “Evidently” was more pronounced than he could have had any right to expect.

“They seem to be delightful people,” continued the elderly gentleman, earnestly.

“I daresay,” Miss Daye replied, with grave deliberation. “They’re very decorative,” she added absently. “That’s a purely Indian vegetable, Mr. Pond. Rather sticky, and without the ghost of a flavour; but you ought to try it, as an experience, don’t you think?”

It occurred to Mrs. Daye sometimes that Mr. Ancram was unreasonably difficult to entertain, even for a Chief Secretary. It occurred to her more forcibly than usual on this particular evening, and it was almost with trepidation that she produced the trump card on which she had been relying to provoke a lively suit of amiabilities. She produced it awkwardly too; there was always a slight awkwardness, irritating to so habile a lady, in her manner of addressing Mr. Ancram, owing to her confessed and painful inability to call him “Lewis” – yet. “Oh,” she said finally, “I haven’t congratulated you on your ‘Modern Influence of the Vedic Books.’ I assure you, in spite of its being in blue paper covers and printed by Government I went through it with the greatest interest. And there were no pictures either,” Mrs. Daye added, with the ingenuousness which often clings to Anglo-Indian ladies somewhat late in life.