AFTER NINETEEN YEARS
A sharp judgment shall be to them that be in high places.
“Yes, dear. I have great news for you to take back to your mother. Jem
has got his commission--in a Goorkha regiment!”
The lady who spoke leant back in her chair, half turning her head, but
not looking entirely round in the direction of the only other occupant of
the room--a girl of nineteen.
“In a Goorkha regiment, Aunt Anna?” repeated the girl; “what is that? It
sounds as if he would have to black his face and wear a turban. It
suggests curry and gymkhanas (whatever they may be) and pyjamas and
bananas and other pickles. A Goorkha regiment.”
There was a faint drop in her tone--on the last three words, which to
very keen ears might have signified reproach, but the hearer was not
keen--merely cunning, which is quite a different matter.
“Yes, dear. They tell me that these Indian regiments are much the best
for a young man who is likely to get on. There are so many more chances
of promotions and--er--er--distinction.”
The girl was standing by the open window, and she turned her head without
otherwise moving, looking at the speaker with a pair of exceedingly
discriminating eyes.
“Bosh, my dear aunt!” she whispered confidingly to the blind-cord.
“Yes,” pursued the lady, with the eager credulity of her first mother,
ever ready to believe the last speaker when belief is convenient--“Yes.
Sister Cecilia tells me that all the great men began in the Indian
Service.”
“Oh! I wonder where they finished. Royal Academy--finishing Academy.
Regimentals and a gold frame--leaning heroically on a mild-looking cannon
with battles in the background.”
“Yes, dear,” replied Mrs. Agar, who only half understood Dora Glynde at
all times; “it is such a good thing for Jem. Such a splendid opportunity,
you know!”
“Yes,” echoed the girl, with a twist of her humorous lips. “Splendid!”
She had turned again, and was looking out of the window across a soft old
lawn where two Wellingtonians towered side by side like sentries. Without
glancing in the direction of her companion she knew the expression of
Mrs. Agar's face, the direction of her gaze; the very thought in her
shallow mind. She knew that Mrs. Agar was sitting with her arms on the
little davenport, gazing rapturously at the photograph of an insipid
young man with a silk-faced smoking jacket; with clean linen, clean
countenance, clean hands, immaculate hair, and a general air of being too
weak to be mean.
“Sister Cecilia,” went on the elder lady, “seems to know all about it.”
It is useless to attempt concealment of the fact that at this juncture
Dora Glynde made a face--an honest schoolgirl behind-your-back
Face--indicative of supreme scorn for some person or persons unspecified.
Hers was a countenance which lent itself admirably to the purpose, with
lips full of humour, and capable, as such lips are, of expressing a great
and wonderful tenderness. The face, _du reste_, was that of a healthy,
fair-skinned English girl, liable to honest change from pale to pink,
according to the dictates of an arbitrary climate. Her eyes were of a
dark grey-blue, straightforward and steady, with a shadow of thought in
them which made wise people respect her presence. She was not painfully
beautiful, like the heroine of a novel--nor abnormally plain, like the
antitype who has found her way into fiction, and there (alone) brings all
hearts to her feet.
“Is Jem glad?” she asked cheerfully. “Is he thirsting for gore and
glory?”
“Oh, delighted! Arthur will be so pleased too. Dear boy, _he_ is so
interested in soldiers, but of course he could not go into the army! He
is too delicate--besides, the life is rough, and the risks are very
great.”
Mrs. Agar was speaking with her head slightly inclined to one side, and
she never raised her adoring eyes from the photograph of the insipid
young man. Had she done so she would have seen a look of patient, if
comic, resignation come over the face of her youthful companion at the
mention of her son's name.
“I will tell mother,” said Dora Glynde, purposely ignoring Arthur Agar,
whose name was always dragged sooner or later into every conversation.
“Fancy Jem in a helmet, or a turban, with his face blacked! All the same,
if I were a man I should be a soldier. When does he go--to join his
regiment?”
“Oh, almost at once.”
The girl winced, quietly, between herself and the blind-cord.
“And in the meantime,” she said lightly, “I suppose he is fully engaged
in buying swords and guns and bomb-shells, or whatever the Goorkhas use
in warfare.”
“He is coming home to-morrow for Sunday,” replied Jem Agar's stepmother
absently. She was thinking of her own son, and therefore did not hear the
quick sigh which was almost a gasp; did not note the sudden light in the
girl's eyes.
Dora Glynde was rather a solitary-minded young person. The only child of
elderly parents, she had never learnt in the nursery to indulge in the
indiscretions of confiding girlhood. She had the good fortune to be
without a bosom-friend who related her most sacred secrets to other bosom
friends and so on, as is the way of maidens. From her father she had
inherited a discriminating mind and a most admirable habit of reserve.
She was quite happy when alone, which, according to La Bruyère, is a
great safeguard against all evil.
She wanted to be alone now, and therefore passed out of the open window
with a non-committing “Good-bye, Aunt Anna!”
“Good-bye, dear,” replied the lady, awaking suddenly from a reverie. But
by the time she had turned round in her chair, the girl was gone.
Dora crossed the lawn, passing between the sentinel pines and crossing
the moat by the narrow footbridge. She climbed the railing with all the
ease of nineteen years and struck a bee-line across the park. She never
raised her eyes from the ground, never paused in her swinging gait, until
she reached the brown hush of the beechwood which divided the Rectory
garden from the southern extremity of the park.
Having climbed the railing again she sat on a mossy mound at the foot of
a huge beech tree. Her manner of doing so subtly indicated that she did
not only know the spot, but was in the habit of sitting there, possibly
to think. A youthful privilege of doubtful value, for, as we get busier
in life we have to do the thinking as we go along.
“Oh!” she muttered, “oh, how awful!”
A new expression had come over her face. She looked older, and all the
vivacity had suddenly left her lips.
While she was still sitting there the crisp sound of footsteps on the
fallen leaves approached through the wood. Looking up she saw her father,
following the winding path through the spinney towards his home.
A grave man was the Rector of Stagholme in his declining years;
hopelessly, wisely pessimistic, with sudden youthful returns of interest
in matters literary and theological. As he came he read a book.
Instantly the expression of Dora's face changed. She rose and went
towards him, smiling contemptuously towards his lowering gravity. He
looked up, gave a little grunt of recognition, and closed his book.
“Father,” she said, “I've just heard a piece of news.”
“Bad, I suppose.”
She laughed.
“Well,” she answered, “I suppose we shall survive it. Jem has got his
commission, in a Goorkha regiment.”
“Goorkha regiment? Nonsense!”
“Aunt Anna has just told me so. She is very pleased, and seems prepared
for the--best.”
“That is the custom of fools, to be prepared for the best--only.”
The Rector gave a despairing shrug of the shoulders. He was a man who
allowed himself, after the manner of the ancients with whom he lived
mentally, a few gestures. He smoked a very expressive cigarette. He was
smoking one at this moment, and threw it away half consumed. This divine
was possessed of a rooted conviction that the Almighty made a great
mistake whenever He invested temporal power in a woman, whom he was
ungallantly inclined to classify under a celebrated dictum of Mr.
Carlyle's respecting the population of these happy Isles, who, truth to
tell, care not one jot what Mr. Carlyle may think of them.
The Reverend Thomas Glynde and his daughter walked all the way home
without exchanging another word. In the Rectory drawing-room they found
Mrs. Glynde, small, nervous, worried. She had evidently devoted
considerable thought and attention to the preservation of the hot
buttered toast. Poor humble little soul, she was quite content to
minister to the bodily requirements of her spouse, having long been
convinced of the inferiority of her own sex in every respect except a
certain limited knowledge of housekeeping matters.
She was vaguely conscious of inferiority to Dora from a literary point of
view, and talked with abject humility to her own daughter of all things
appertaining to books. But on all other points connected with the child
of her old age this quiet little woman was absolute mistress. Years
before the Rector had made a great mistake; he had, as the plain-spoken
East Burgen doctor put it, made an ass of himself on the matter of a
childish illness, thereby imperilling Dora's half-fledged little life.
Mrs. Glynde had then, like a diminutive tigress, stood up boldly before
her awesome lord and master, saying such things to him that the
remembrance of them made her catch her breath even now. From that time
forth the Rector was allowed to hold forth on symptoms to his heart's
content, to take down from his library shelf a stout misguided book of
medical short-cuts to the grave, but nothing more.
He never referred to the asinine business, and in the course of
years he forgave the doctor (having in view the fact that that
practitioner had been carried away by a right and proper sense of the
importance of the case), but he tacitly acknowledged that in the practice
of home-administered medical assistance, his knowledge was second to a
mother's instinct.
“It appears,” he said sharply, while he was stirring his tea, “that Jem
Agar has got his commission in a Goorkha regiment.”
Now Mrs. Glynde knew more about the organisation of the heavenly bands
than of the administration of the Indian army. She did not know whether
to rejoice or lament, and having been sharply pulled up--any time during
the last twenty years--for doing one or the other in the wrong place, she
meekly took soundings.
“What is that, dear?” she inquired.
“The Goorkhas are native Indian soldiers,” explained the Rector. “Very
good fellows, no doubt. They get all the hard knocks in small frontier
wars and none of the half-pence. What the woman can have been thinking
of, I don't know.”
Mrs. Glynde was anxiously glancing towards Dora, who was nicking the nose
of a sportive kitten with the tassel of the tea-cosy.
“And will he go to India?” she asked, with laudable mental grovellings in
the mire of her own ignorance.
“Course he will.”
“And,” added Dora cheerfully, “he will come home covered with glory and
medals, with a weakness for strong pickles and hot language--I mean hot
pickles and strong language.”
“But,” said Mrs. Glynde rather breathlessly, “are they never stationed in
England?”
“No--never,” replied her husband snappishly.
Mrs. Glynde had a pink patch on each cheek--precisely on the spot whore
two such patches had appeared years ago when the doctor spoke so
strongly. Those patches were maternal, and only appeared when Dora's
affairs, spiritual or temporal, were concerned.
“I don't know,” put in Dora again, “but I have a sort of lurking
conviction that Jem will have to wear a turban and red morocco boots.”
“But,” pursued Mrs. Glynde, with that courage which cometh with a red
patch on either cheek, “I always thought these Indian regiments were
meant for people who are badly off.”
The Rector gave a short laugh.
“You are not so very far wrong, my dear,” he admitted. “And no one can
say that Jem is badly off. He will be very rich some day.”
The Rector assumed an air of superior discretion, to which he usually
treated his women-folk when he thought fit to consider that they were
touching on matters beyond their jurisdiction.
“Some more tea, please, mother,” put in Dora appropriately. “Excuse my
appetite. I suppose it is the autumn air.”
There was a short silence, during which Mrs. Glynde sought to propitiate
her angered spouse with sodden toast and a second brew of tea.
“I always said,” observed the Rector at last, “that your cousin was a
fool.”
And in some indefinite way Mrs. Glynde felt that she was once more
responsible.