“I don’t mind telling you,” said Philip Doyle, knocking the ashes out of
his pipe, “that, personally, His Acting Honour represents to me a number
of objectionable things. He is a Radical, and a Low Churchman, and a
Particularist. He’s that objectionable ethical mixture, a compound of
petty virtues. He believes this earth was created to give him an
atmosphere to do his duty in; and he does it with the invincible courage
of short-sightedness combined with the notion that the ultimate court of
appeal for eighty million Bengalis should be his precious Methodist
conscience. But the brute’s honest, and if he insists on putting this
University foolishness of his through, I’m sorry for him. He’s a dead
man, politically, the day it is announced.”
“He is,” replied Ancram, concentrating his attention on a match and the
end of his cigar. “There’s—no doubt—about that.”
The two men were smoking after dinner, with the table and a couple of
decanters between them. Roses drooped over the bowl of Cutch silver that
gleamed in the middle of the empty cloth, and a lemon leaf or two
floated in the finger-glass at Ancram’s elbow. He threw the match into
it, and looked across at Doyle with his cigar between his teeth in the
manner which invites further discussion.
“In point of political morality I suppose he’s right enough——”
“He generally is,” Ancram interrupted. “He’s got a scent for political
morality keen enough to upset every form of Government known to the
nineteenth century.”
“But they see political morality through another pair of spectacles in
England. To withdraw State aid from education anywhere at this end of
the century is as impracticable as it would be to deprive the British
workman of his vote. It’s retrogressive, and this is an age which will
admit anything except a mistake of its own.”
“He doesn’t intend to withdraw State aid from education. He means to
spend the money on technical schools.”
“A benevolent intention. But it won’t make the case any better with the
Secretary of State. He will say that it ought to be done without
damaging the sacred cause of higher culture.”
“Damn the sacred cause of higher culture!” replied Ancram, with an
unruffled countenance. “What has it done out here? Filled every
sweeper’s son of them with an ambition to sit on an office stool and be
a gentleman!—created by thousands a starveling class that find nothing
to do but swell mass-meetings on the Maidan and talk sedition that gets
telegraphed from Peshawur to Cape Comorin. I advertised for a baboo the
other day, and had four hundred applications—fifteen rupees a month,
poor devils! But the Dayes were a fortnight in getting a decent cook on
twenty.”
“Bentinck should have thought of that; it’s too late now. You can’t
bestow a boon on the masses in a spirit of progressiveness and take it
away sixty years later in a spirit of prudence. It’s decent enough of
Church to be willing to bear the consequences of somebody else’s
blunder; but blunders of that kind have got to take their place in the
world’s formation and let the ages retrieve them. It’s the only way.”
“Oh, I agree with you. Church is an ass: he ought not to attempt it.”
“Why do you fellows let him?”
Ancram looked in Doyle’s direction as he answered—looked near him, fixed
his eyes, with an effect of taking a view at the subject round a corner,
upon the other man’s tobacco-jar. The trick annoyed Doyle; he often
wished it were the sort of thing one could speak about.
“Nobody is less amenable to reason,” he said, “than the man who wants to
hit his head against a stone wall, especially if he thinks the world
will benefit by his inconvenience. And, to make matters worse, Church
has complicated the thing with an idea of his duty toward the people at
home who send out the missionaries. He doesn’t think it exactly
according to modern ethics that they should take up collections in
village churches to provide the salvation of the higher mathematics for
the sons of fat _bunnias_ in the bazar—who could very well afford to pay
for it themselves.”
“He can’t help that.”
Ancram finished his claret. “I believe he has some notion of advertising
it. And after he has eliminated the missionary who teaches the Georgics
instead of the Gospels, and devoted the educational grants to turning
the gentle Hindoo into a skilled artisan, he thinks the cause of higher
culture may be pretty much left to take care of itself. He believes we
could bleed Linsettiah and Pattore and some of those chaps for
endowments, I fancy, though he doesn’t say so.”
“Better try some of the smaller natives. A maharajah won’t do much for a
C. I. E. or an extra gun nowadays: it isn’t good enough. He knows that
all Europe is ready to pay him the honours of royalty whenever he
chooses to tie up his cooking-pots and go there. He’ll save his money
and buy hand-organs with it, or panoramas, or sewing-machines.
Presently, if this adoration of the Eastern potentate goes on at home,
we shall have the maharajah whom we propose to honour receiving our
proposition with his thumb applied to his nose and all his fingers out!”
Ancram yawned. “Well, it won’t be a question of negotiating for
endowments: it will never come off. Church will only smash himself over
the thing if he insists; and,” he added, as one who makes an
unprejudiced, impartial statement on fatalistic grounds, “he will
insist. I should find the whole business rather amusing if, as
Secretary, I hadn’t to be the mouthpiece for it.” He looked at his
watch. “Half-past nine. I suppose I ought to be off. You’re not coming?”
“Where?”
“To Belvedere. A ‘walk-round,’ I believe.”
“Thanks: I think not. It would be too much bliss for a corpulent
gentleman of my years. I remember—the card came last week, and I gave it
to Mohammed to take care of. I believe Mohammed keeps a special
_almirah_ for the purpose; and in it,” Mr. Doyle continued gravely, “are
the accumulations of several seasons. He regards them as a trust only
second to that of the Director of Records, and last year he made them
the basis of an application for more pay.”
“Which you gave him,” laughed Ancram, getting into his light overcoat as
the brougham rolled up to the door. “I loathe going; but for me there’s
no alternative. There seems to be an Act somewhere providing that a man
in my peculiar position must show himself in society.”
“So long as you hover on the brink of matrimony,” said the other, “you
must be a butterfly. Console yourself: after you take the plunge you can
turn ascidian if you like.”
The twinkle went out of Philip Doyle’s eyes as he heard the carriage
door shut and the wheels roll crunching toward the gate. He filled his
pipe again and took up the _Saturday Review_. Half an hour later he was
looking steadily at the wall over the top of that journal, considering
neither its leading articles nor its reviews nor its advertisements, but
Mr. Lewis Ancram’s peculiar position.
At that moment Ancram leaned against the wall in a doorway of the
drawing-room at Belvedere, one leg lightly crossed over the other, his
right hand in his pocket, dangling his eyeglass with his left. It was
one of the many casual attitudes in which the world was informed that a
Chief Secretary, in Mr. Ancram’s opinion, had no prescriptive right to
give himself airs. He had a considering look: one might have said that
his mind was far from the occasion—perhaps upon the advisability of a
tobacco tax; but this would not have been correct. He was really
thinking of the quantity and the quality of the people who passed him,
and whether as a function the thing could be considered a success. With
the white gleam on the pillars, and the palms everywhere, and the moving
vista of well-dressed women through long, richly-furnished rooms
arranged for a large reception, it was certainly pretty enough; but
there was still the question of individuals, which had to be determined
by such inspection as he was bestowing upon them. It would have been
evident to anybody that more people recognised Ancram than Ancram
recognised; he had by no means the air of being on the look-out for
acquaintances. But occasionally some such person as the Head of the
Telegraph Department looked well at him and said, “How do, Ancram?” with
the effect of adding “I defy you to forget who I am!” or a lady of
manner gave him a gracious and pronounced inclination, which also said,
“You are the clever, the rising Mr. Ancram. You haven’t called; but you
are known to despise society. I forgive you, and I bow.” One or two
Members of Council merely vouchsafed him a nod as they passed; but it
was noticeably only Members of Council who nodded to Mr. Ancram. An
aide-de-camp to the Viceroy, however—a blue-eyed younger son with his
mind seriously upon his duty—saw Ancram in his path, and hesitated. He
had never quite decided to what extent these fellows in the Bengal
Secretariat, and this one in particular, should be recognised by an
aide-de-camp; and he went round the other way. Presently there was a
little silken stir and rustle, a parting of the ladies’ trains, and a
lull of observation along both sides of the lane which suddenly formed
itself among the people. His Excellency the Viceroy had taken his early
leave and was making his departure. Lord Scansleigh had an undisguised
appreciation of an able man, and there was some definiteness in the way
he stopped, though it was but for a moment, and shook hands with Ancram,
who swung the eyeglass afterwards more casually than he had done before.
The aide-de-camp, following after, was in no wise rebuked. What the
Viceroy chose to do threw no light on his difficulty. He merely cast his
eyes upon the floor, and his fresh coloured countenance expressed a
respectfully sad admiration for the noble manner in which his lord
discharged every obligation pertaining to the Viceregal office.
The most privileged hardly cares to make demands upon his hostess as
long as she has a Viceroy to entertain, and Ancram waited until their
Excellencies were well on their way home, their four turbaned Sikhs
trotting after them, before he made any serious attempt to find Mrs.
Church. A sudden and general easefulness was observable at the same
time. People began to look about them and walk and talk with the
consciousness that it was no longer possible that they should be
suspected of arranging themselves so that Lord Scansleigh _must_ bow.
The Viceroy having departed, they thought about other things. She was
standing, when presently he made his way to her, talking to Sir William
Scott of the Foreign Department, and at the moment, to the Maharajah of
Pattore. Ancram paused and watched her unperceived. It was like the
pleasure of looking at a picture one technically understands. He noted
with satisfaction the subtle difference in her manner toward the two
men, and how, in her confidence with the one and her condescending
recognition of the other’s dignity, both were consciously receiving
their due. He noticed the colour of her heliotrope velvet gown, and
asked himself whether any other woman in the room could possibly wear
that shade. Mentally he dared the other women to say that its simplicity
was over-dramatic, or that by the charming arrangement of her hair and
her pearls and the yellowed lace, that fell over her shoulders Judith
Church had made herself too literal a representation of a
great-grandmother who certainly wore none of these things. He paused
another second to catch the curve of her white throat as she turned her
head with a little characteristic lifting of her chin; and then he went
up to her. The definite purpose that appeared in his face was enough of
itself to assert their intimacy—to this end it was not necessary that he
should drop his eyeglass.
“Oh,” she said, with a step forward, “how do you do! I began to
think——Maharajah, when you are invited to parties you always come, don’t
you? Well, this gentleman does not always come, I understand. I beg you
will ask a question about it at the next meeting of the Legislative
Council. The Honourable the Chief Secretary is requested to furnish an
explanation of his lamentable failure to perform his duties toward
society.”
The native smiled uncomfortably, puzzled at her audacity. His membership
of the Bengal Legislative Council was a new toy, and he was not sure
that he liked any one else to play with it.
“His Highness of Pattore,” said Ancram, slipping a hand under the fat
elbow in its pink-and-gold brocade, “would be the very last fellow to
get me into a scrape. Wouldn’t you, Maharaj!”
His Highness beamed affectionately upon Ancram. There was, at all
events, nothing but flattery in being taken by the elbow by a Chief
Secretary. “Certainlie,” he replied—“the verrie last”; and he laughed
the unctuous, irresponsible laugh of a maharajah, which is accompanied
by the twinkling of pendant emeralds and the shaking of personal
rotundities which cannot be indicated.
Sir William Scott folded his arms and refolded them, balanced himself
once or twice on the soles of his shoes, pushed out his under-lip, and
retreated in the gradual and surprised way which would naturally be
adopted by the Foreign Department when it felt itself left out of the
conversation. The Maharajah stood about uneasily on one leg for a
moment, and then with a hasty double salaam he too waddled away. Mrs.
Church glanced after his retreating figure—it was almost a perfect
oval—with lips prettily composed to seemly gravity. Then, as her eyes
met Ancram’s, she laughed like a schoolgirl.
“Oh,” she said, “go away! I mustn’t talk to you. I shall be forgetting
my part.”
“You are doing it well. Lady Spence, at this stage of the proceedings,
was always surrounded by bank-clerks and policemen. I do not observe a
member of either of those interesting species,” he said, glancing round
through his eyeglass, “within twenty yards. On the contrary, an
expectant Member of Council on the nearest sofa, the Commander-in-Chief
hovering in the middle distance, and a fringe of Departmental Heads on
the horizon.”
“I do not see any of them,” she laughed, looking directly at Ancram. “We
are going to sit down, you and I, and talk for four or six minutes, as
the last baboo said who implored an interview with my husband”; and Mrs.
Church sank, with just a perceptible turning of her shoulder upon the
world, into the nearest armchair. It was a wide gilded arm-chair,
cushioned in deep yellow silk. Ancram thought, as she crossed her feet
and leaned her head against the back of it, that the effect was
delicious.
“And you really think I am doing it well!” she said. “I have been dying
to know. I really dallied for a time with the idea of asking one of the
aides-de-camp. But as a matter of fact,” she said confidentially,
“though I order them about most callously, I am still horribly afraid of
the aides-de-camp—in uniform, on duty.”
“And in flannels, off duty?”
“In flannels, off duty, I make them almond toffee and they tell me their
love affairs. I am their sisterly mother and their cousinly aunt. We
even have games of ball.”
“They are nice boys,” he said, with a sigh of resignation: “I daresay
they deserve it.”
There was an instant’s silence of good fellowship, and then she moved
her foot a little, so that a breadth of the heliotrope velvet took on a
paler light.
“Yes,” he nodded, “it is quite—regal.”
She laughed, flushing a little. “Really! That’s not altogether correct.
It ought to be only officiating. But I can’t tell you how delicious it
is to be _obliged_ to wear pretty gowns.”
At that moment an Additional Member of Council passed them so
threateningly that Mrs. Church was compelled to put out a staying hand
and inquire for Lady Bloomsbury, who was in England, and satisfy herself
that Sir Peter had quite recovered from his bronchitis, and warn Sir
Peter against Calcutta’s cold-weather fogs. Ancram kept his seat, but
Sir Peter stood with stout persistence, rooted in his rights. It was
only when Mrs. Church asked him whether he had seen the new portrait,
and told him where it was, that he moved on, and then he believed that
he went of his own accord. By the time an Indian official arrives at an
Additional Membership he is usually incapable of perceiving anything
which does not tend to enhance that dignity.
“You have given two of my six minutes to somebody else, remember,”
Ancram said. For an instant she did not answer him. She was looking
about her with a perceptible air of having, for the moment, been
oblivious of something it was her business to remember. Almost
immediately her eye discovered John Church. He was in conversation with
the Bishop, and apparently they were listening to each other with
deference, but sometimes Church’s gaze wandered vaguely over the heads
of the people and sometimes he looked at the floor. His hands were
clasped in front of him, his chin was so sunk in his chest that the most
conspicuous part of him seemed his polished forehead and his heavy black
eyebrows, his expression was that of a man who submits to the
inevitable. Ancram saw him at the same moment, and in the silence that
asserted itself between them there was a touch of embarrassment which
the man found sweet. He felt a foolish impulse to devote himself to
turning John Church into an ornament to society.
“This sort of thing——” he suggested condoningly.
“Bores him. Intolerably. He grudges the time and the energy. He says
there is so much to do.”
“He is quite right.”
“Oh, don’t encourage him! On the contrary—promise me something.”
“Anything.”
“When you see him standing about alone—he is really very
absent-minded—go up and make him talk to you. He will get your ideas—the
time, you see, will not be wasted. And neither will the general public,”
she added, “be confronted with the spectacle of a Lieutenant-Governor
who looks as if he had a contempt for his own hospitality.”
“I’ll try. But I hardly think my ideas upon points of administration are
calculated to enliven a social evening. And don’t send me now. The
Bishop is doing very well.”
“The Bishop?” She turned to him again, with laughter in the dark depths
of her eyes. “I realised the other day what one may attain to in
Calcutta. His Lordship asked me, with some timidity, what I thought of
the length of his sermons! Tell me, please, who is this madam bearing
down upon me in pink and grey?”
Ancram was on his feet. “It is Mrs. Daye,” he said. “People who come so
late ought not to insist upon seeing you.”
“Mrs. Daye! Oh, of course; your——” But Mrs. Daye was clasping her
hostess’s hand. “And Miss Daye, I think,” said Mrs. Church, looking
frankly into the face of the girl behind, “whom I have somehow been
defrauded of meeting before. I have a great many congratulations
to—divide,” she went on prettily, glancing at Ancram. “Mr. Ancram is an
old friend of ours.”
“Thank you,” replied Miss Daye. Her manner suggested that at school such
acknowledgments had been very carefully taught her.
“My dear, you should make a pretty curtsey,” her mother said jocularly,
and then looked at Rhoda with astonishment as the girl, with an unmoved
countenance, made it.
Ancram looked uncomfortable, but Mrs. Church cried out with vivacity
that it was charming—she was so glad to find that Miss Daye could unbend
to a stranger; and Mrs. Daye immediately stated that she _must_ hear
whether the good news was true that Mrs. Church had accepted the
presidency—presidentship (what should one say?)—of the Lady Dufferin
Society. Ah! that was delightful—now _everything_ would go smoothly.
Poor dear Lady Spence found it _far_ too much for her! Mrs. Daye touched
upon a variety of other matters as the four stood together, and the
gaslights shone down upon the diamond stars in the women’s hair, and the
band played on the verandah behind the palms. Among them was the
difficulty of getting seats in the Cathedral in the cold weather, and
the fascinating prospect of having a German man-of-war in port for the
season, and that dreadful frontier expedition against the Nagapis; and
they ran, in the end, into an allusion to Mrs. Church’s delightful
Thursday tennises.
“Ah, yes,” Mrs. Church replied, as the lady gave utterance to this, with
her dimpled chin thrust over her shoulder, in the act of departure: “you
must not forget my Thursdays. And you,” she said to Rhoda, with a
directness which she often made very engaging—“you will come too, I
hope?”
“Oh, yes, thank you,” the girl answered, with her neat smile: “I will
come too—with pleasure.”
“Why didn’t you go with them?” Mrs. Church exclaimed a moment later.
Ancram looked meditatively at the chandelier. “We are not exactly a
demonstrative couple,” he said. “She likes a decent reticence, I
believe—in public. I’ll find them presently.”
They were half a mile on their way home when he began to look for them;
and Mrs. Daye had so far forgotten herself as to comment unfavourably
upon his behaviour.
“My dear mummie,” her daughter responded, “you don’t suppose I want to
interfere with his amusements!”