“Mummie,” remarked Miss Daye, as she pushed on the fingers of a new pair
of gloves in the drawing-room, “the conviction grows upon me that I
shall never become Mrs. Ancram.”
“Rhoda, if you talk like that you will certainly bring on one of my
headaches, and it will be the third in a fortnight that I’ll have to
thank you for. Did I or did I not send home the order for your wedding
dress by last mail?”
“You did, mummie. But you could always advertise it in the local papers,
you know. Could you fasten this? ‘_By Private Sale—A Wedding Dress
originally intended for the Secretariat. Ivory Satin and Lace. Skirt
thirty-nine inches, waist twenty-one. Warranted never been worn._’
Thanks so much!”
“Rhoda! you are capable of anything——”
“Of most things, mummie, I admit. But I begin to fear, not of that!”
“Are you going to break it off? There he is this minute! Don’t let him
come in here, dear—he would know instantly that we had been discussing
him. You _have_ upset me so!”
“He shan’t.” Miss Daye walked to the door. “You are not to come any
farther, my dear sir,” said she to the Honourable Mr. Ancram among the
Japanese pots on the landing: “mummie’s going to have a headache, and
doesn’t want you. I’m quite ready!” She stood for a moment in the
doorway, her pretty shoulders making admirably correct lines, in a
clinging grey skirt and silver braided zouave, that showed a charming
glimpse of blue silk blouse underneath, buttoning her second glove.
Ancram groaned within himself that he must have proposed to her because
she was _chic_. Then she looked back. “Don’t worry, mummie. I’ll let you
know within a fortnight. You won’t have to advertise it after all—you
can countermand the order by telegraph!” Mrs. Daye, on the sofa, threw
up her hands speechlessly, and her eyes when her daughter finally left
the room were round with apprehension.
Ancram had come to take his betrothed for a drive in his dog-cart. It is
a privilege Calcutta offers to people who are engaged: they are
permitted to drive about together in dog-carts. The act has the binding
force of a public confession. Mr. Ancram and Miss Daye had taken
advantage of it in the beginning. By this time it would be more proper
to say that they were taking refuge in it.
He had seen Mrs. Church several times since the evening on which he had
put her into her carriage at the gates of Hastings House, and got into
his own trap and driven home with a feeling which he analysed as
purified but not resigned. She had been very quiet, very self-contained,
apparently content to be gracious and effective in the gown of the
occasion; but once or twice he fancied he saw a look of waiting, a gleam
of expectancy, behind her eyes. It was this that encouraged him to ask
her, at the first opportunity, whether she did not think he would be
perfectly justified in bringing the thing to an end. She answered him,
with an unalterable look, that she could not help him in that decision;
and he brought away a sense that he had not obtained the support on
which he had depended. This did not prevent him from arriving very
definitely at the decision in question unaided. Nothing could be more
obvious than that the girl did not care for him; and, granting this, was
he morally at liberty, from the girl’s own point of view, to degrade her
by a marriage which was, on her side, one of pure ambition? If her
affections had been involved in the remotest degree——but he shrugged his
shoulders at the idea of Rhoda Daye’s affections. He wished to Heaven,
like any schoolboy, that she would fall in love with somebody else, but
she was too damned clever to fall in love with anybody. The thing would
require a little finessing; of course the rupture must come from her.
There were things a man in his position had to be careful about. But
with a direct suggestion——Nothing was more obvious than that she did not
care for him. He would make her say so. After that, a direct suggestion
would be simple—and wholly justifiable. These were Mr. Lewis Ancram’s
reflections as he stood, hat in hand, on Mrs. Daye’s landing. They were
less involved than usual, but in equations of personal responsibility
Mr. Ancram liked a formula. By the intelligent manipulation of a formula
one could so often eliminate the personal element and transfer the
responsibility to the other side.
The beginning was not auspicious.
“Is that _le dernier cri_?” he asked, looking at her hat as she came
lightly down the steps.
“Papa’s? Poor dear! yes. It was forty rupees, at Phelps’s. You’ll find
me extravagant—but horribly!—especially in hats. I adore hats; they’re
such conceptions, such ideas! I mean to insist upon a settlement in
hats—three every season, in perpetuity.”
They were well into the street and half-way to Chowringhee before he
found the remark, at which he forced himself to smile, that he supposed
a time would arrive when her affections in millinery would transfer
themselves to bonnets. The occasion was not propitious for suggestions
based on emotional confessions. The broad roads that wind over the
Maidan were full of gaiety and the definite facts of smart carriages and
pretty bowing women. The sun caught the tops of the masts in the river,
and twinkled there; it mellowed the pillars of the bathing-ghats, and
was also reflected magnificently from the plate-glass mirrors with which
Ram Das Mookerjee had adorned the sides of his barouche. A white patch a
mile away resolved itself into a mass of black heads and draped bodies
watching a cricket match. Mynas chattered by the wayside, stray notes of
bugle practice came crisply over the walls of the Fort; there was an
effect of cheerfulness even in the tinkle of the tram bells. If the
scene had required any further touch of high spirits, it was supplied in
the turn-out of the Maharajah of Thuginugger, who drove abroad in a
purple velvet dressing gown, with pink outriders. Ancram had a fine
susceptibility to atmospheric effect, and it bade him talk about the
Maharajah of Thuginugger.
“That chap Ezra, the Simla diamond merchant, told me that he went with
the Maharajah through his go-downs once. His Highness likes pearls. Ezra
saw them standing about in bucketsful.”
“Common wooden buckets?”
“I believe so.”
“How satisfying! Tell me some more.”
“There isn’t any more. The rest was between Ezra and the Maharajah. I
dare say there was a margin of profit somewhere. What queer weather they
seem to be having at home!”
“It’s delicious to live in a place that hasn’t any weather—only a
permanent fervency. I like this old Calcutta. It’s so wicked and so rich
and so cheerful. People are born and burned and born and burned, and
nothing in the world matters. Their nice little stone gods are so easy
to please, too. A handful of rice, a few marigold chains, a goat or two:
hardly any of them ask more than that. And the sun shines every day—on
the just man who has offered up his goat, and on the unjust man who has
eaten it instead.”
She sat up beside him, her slender figure swaying a little with the
motion of the cart, and looked about her with a light in her grey eyes
that seemed the reflection of her mood. He thought her chatter
artificial; but it was genuine enough. She always felt more than her
usual sense of irresponsibility with him in their afternoon drives. The
world lay all about them and lightened their relation; he became, as a
rule, the person who was driving, and she felt at liberty to become the
person who was talking.
“There!” she exclaimed, as three or four coolie women filed, laughing,
up to a couple of round stones under a pipal tree by the roadside, and
took their brass lotas from their heads and carefully poured water over
the stones. “Fancy one’s religious obligations summed up in a
cooking-potful of Hughli water! Are those stones sacred?”
“I suppose so.”
“The author of ‘The Modern Influence of the Vedic Books,’” she suggested
demurely, “should be quite sure. He should have left no stone unturned.”
She regarded him for a moment, and, observing his preoccupation, just
perceptibly lifted her eyebrows. Then she went on: “But perhaps big
round stones under pipal trees that like libations come in the second
volume. When does the second volume appear?”
“Not until Sir Griffiths Spence comes out again and this lunatic goes
back to Hassimabad, I fancy. I want an appropriation for some further
researches first.”
The most enthusiastic of Mr. Ancram’s admirers acknowledged that he was
not always discreet.
“And he won’t give it to you—this lunatic?”
“Not a pice.”
“Then,” she said, with a ripple of laughter, “he _must_ be a fool!”
She was certainly irritating this afternoon. Ancram gave his Waler as
smart a cut as he dared, and they dashed past Lord Napier, sitting on
his intelligent charger in serious bronze to all eternity, and rounded
the bend into the Strand. The brown river tore at its heaving buoys; the
tide was racing out. The sun had dipped, and the tall ships lay in the
after-glow in twos and threes and congeries along the bank, along the
edge of Calcutta, until in the curving distance they became mere
suggestions of one another and a twilight of tilted masts. Under their
keels slipped great breadths of shining water. Against the glow on it a
country-boat, with its unwieldy load of hay, looked like a floating
barn. On the indistinct other side the only thing that asserted itself
was a factory chimney. They talked of the eternal novelty of the river,
and the eternal sameness of the people they met; and then he lapsed
again.
Rhoda looked down at the bow of her slipper. “Have you got a headache?”
she asked. The interrogation was one of cheerful docility.
“Thanks, no. I beg your pardon: I’m afraid I was inexcusably
preoccupied.”
“Would it be indiscreet to ask what about? Don’t you want my opinion? I
am longing to give you my opinion.”
“Your opinion would be valuable.”
Miss Daye again glanced down at her slipper. This time her pretty
eyelashes shaded a ray of amused perception. “He thinks he can do it
himself,” she remarked privately. “He is quite ready to give himself all
the credit of getting out of it gracefully. The amount of flattery they
demand for themselves, these Secretaries!”
“A premium on my opinion!” she said. “How delightful!”
Ancram turned the Waler sharply into the first road that led to the
Casuerina Avenue. The Casuerina Avenue is almost always poetic, and
might be imagined to lend itself very effectively, after sunset, to the
funeral of a sentiment which Mr. Ancram was fond of describing to
himself as still-born. The girl beside him noted the slenderness of his
foot and the excellent cut of his grey tweed trousers. Her eyes dwelt
upon the nervously vigorous way he handled the reins, and her glance of
light bright inquiry ascertained a vertical line between his eyebrows.
It was the line that accompanied the Honourable Mr. Ancram’s Bills in
Council, and it indicated a disinclination to compromise. Miss Daye,
fully apprehending its significance, regarded him with an interest that
might almost be described as affectionate. She said to herself that he
would bungle. She was rather sorry for him. And he did.
“I should be glad of your opinion of our relation,” he said—which was
very crude.
“I think it is charming. I was never more interested in my life!” she
declared frankly, bringing her lips together in the pretty composure
with which she usually told the vague little lie of her satisfaction
with life.
“Does that sum up your idea of—of the possibilities of our situation?”
He felt that he was doing better.
“Oh no! There are endless possibilities in our situation—mostly stupid
ones. But it is a most agreeable actuality.”
“I wish,” he said desperately, “that you would tell me just what the
actuality means to you.”
They were in the Avenue row, and the Waler had been allowed to drop into
a walk. The after-glow still lingered in the soft green duskiness over
their heads; there was light enough for an old woman to see to pick up
the fallen spines in the grass; the nearest tank, darkling in the
gathering gloom of the Maidan, had not yet given up his splash of red
from over the river. He looked at her intently, and her eyes dropped to
the thoughtful consideration of the crone who picked up spines. It might
have been that she blushed, or it might have been some effect of the
after-glow. Ancram inclined to the latter view, but his judgment could
not be said to be impartial.
“Dear Lewis!” she answered softly, “how very difficult that would be!”
In the sudden silence that followed, the new creaking of the Waler’s
harness was perceptible. Ancram assured himself hotly that this was
simple indecency, but it was a difficult thing to say. He was still
guarding against the fatality of irritation when Rhoda added daintily:
“But I don’t see why you should have a monopoly of catechising. Tell me,
sir—I’ve wanted to know for ever so long—what was the first, the very
first thing you saw in me to fall in love with?”