The opinion was a united one on board the _Annie Laurie_ the next Sunday
afternoon that Nature had left nothing undone to make the occasion a
success. This might have testified to less than it did; for a similar
view has been expressed as unanimously, and adhered to as firmly, on
board the _Annie Laurie_ when the banks of the Hooghly have been grey
with deluge and the ladies have saved their skirts by sitting on one
another’s knees in her tiny cabin. The _Annie Laurie_ being the
Lieutenant-Governor’s steam-launch, nobody but the Lieutenant-Governor
presumes to be anything but complimentary as to the weather experienced
aboard her. And this in India is natural. It could not be said, however,
that there was anything necessarily diplomatic even in Mrs. Daye’s
appreciation of this particular afternoon. The air—they all dilated on
the air—blew in from the sea, across the salt marshes, through the
plantains and the cocoanut-trees of the little villages, and brought a
dancing crispness, softened by the sun. The brown river hurtled outwards
past her buoys, and a great merchant ship at anchor in midstream swung
slowly round with the tide. A vague concourse of straight masts and
black hulls and slanting funnels stretched along the bank behind them
with the indefiniteness that comes of multitude, for every spar and line
stood and swung clear cut in the glittering sun; and the point they were
bound for elbowed itself out into the river two miles farther down, in
the grey greenness of slanting, pluming palms. Already the water was
growing more golden where the palms toppled over the river: there would
not be more than two good hours of daylight. As Mrs. Daye remarked to
the Lieutenant-Governor, life was all too short in the cold weather
really to absorb, to drink in, the beauties of nature—there was so much
going on.
“Then,” said His Honour, “we must make the most of our time.” But he did
not prolong his gaze at Mrs. Daye by way of emphasising his remark, as
another man, and especially another lieutenant-governor, might have
done. He fixed it instead on the dilapidated plaster façade on the left
bank of the river, formerly inhabited by the King of Oudh and his
relatives, and thought of the deplorable sanitation there.
Not that John Church was by any means unappreciative of the beauties of
nature. It was because he acknowledged the moral use of them that he
came on these Sunday afternoon picnics. He read the poets, and would pay
a good price for a bronze or a picture, for much the same reason. They
formed part of his system of self-development; he applied them to his
mind through the medium which nature has provided, and trusted that the
effect would be good. He did it, however, as he did everything, with the
greatest possible economy of time, and sometimes other considerations
overlapped. That very afternoon he meant to speak to the Superintendent
of the Botanical Gardens—the green elbow of the river crooked about this
place—concerning the manufacture and distribution of a new febrifuge,
and he presently edged away from Mrs. Daye with the purpose of finding
out her husband’s views concerning the silting up of river-beds in
Bengal and the cost of preventive measures. Life with John Church could
be measured simply as an area for effort.
[Illustration: Notwithstanding, it was gay enough.]
Notwithstanding these considerations, it was gay enough. Captain Thrush,
A.D.C., sat on the top of the cabin, and swung his legs to the
accompaniment of his amusing experiences the last time he went quail
shooting. The St. Georges were there, and the St. Georges were
proverbial in Calcutta for lightheartedness. Sir William Scott might
have somewhat overweighted the occasion; but Sir William Scott had taken
off his hat, the better to enjoy the river-breeze, and this reduced him
to a name and a frock coat. In the general good spirits the abnegation
and the resolution with which Lewis Ancram and Judith Church occupied
themselves with other people might almost have passed unnoticed. Rhoda
Daye found herself wondering whether it would be possible for Ancram to
be pathetic under the most moving circumstances, so it may be presumed
that she perceived it; but the waves of mirth engendered by Captain
Thrush and the St. Georges rolled over it so far as the rest were
concerned, as they might over a wreck of life and hope. This pretty
simile occurred to Miss Daye, who instantly dismissed it as mawkish, but
nevertheless continued, for at least five minutes, to reflect on the
irony of fate, as, for the moment, she helped to illustrate it. A new
gravity fell upon her for that period, as she sat there and watched
Judith Church talking to Sir William Scott about his ferns. For the
first time she became aware that the situation had an edge to it—that
she was the edge. She was the saturnine element in what she had hitherto
resolutely regarded as a Calcutta comedy; she was not sure that she
could regard it as a comedy any longer, even from the official point of
view. Ancram evidently had it in mind to make an exhibition to the world
in general, and to Mrs. Church in particular, of devotion to his
betrothed. She caught him once or twice in the act of gratefully
receiving Mrs. Church’s approving glance. Nevertheless she had an
agreeable tolerance for all that he found to do for her. She forbade
herself, for the time being, any further analysis of a matter with which
she meant to have in future little concern. In that anticipation she
became unaccountably light-hearted and talkative and merry. So much so,
that Captain Thrush, A.D.C., registered his conviction that she was
really rather a pretty girl—more in her than he thought; and the
Honourable Mr. Lewis Ancram said to himself that she was enjoying, in
anticipation, the prestige she would have a month later, and that the
cleverest of women were deplorably susceptible to social ambition.
The Superintendent met them at the wharf, and John Church led the way up
the great central avenue of palms, whose grey, shaven polls look as if
they had been turned by some giant lathe, with his hand on the arm of
this gentleman. The others arranged themselves with a single eye to
avoiding the stupidity of walking with their own wives and trooped
after.
“We are going to the orchid-houses, John,” Mrs. Church called after her
husband, as Sir William Scott brought them to a halt at a divergent road
he loved; and Church took off his hat in hurried acquiescence.
“Notice my new Dendrobium!” cried the Superintendent, turning a rueful
countenance upon them. “The only one in Asia!” Then his head resumed its
inclination of respectful attention, and the pair disappeared.
Mrs. Church laughed frankly. “Poor Dr. James!” she exclaimed. “My
husband is double-dyed in febrifuge to-day.”
Ancram took the privilege—it was one he enjoyed—of gently rebuking her.
“It is one of those common, urgent needs of the people,” he said, “that
His Honour so intimately understands.”
Judith looked at him with a sudden sweet humility in her eyes. “You are
quite right,” she returned. “I sometimes think that nobody knows him as
you do. Certainly,” she added, in a lower tone, as the two fell back,
“nobody has more of his confidence, more of his dependence.”
“I don’t know,” Ancram answered vaguely. “Do you really think so? I
don’t know.”
“I am sure of it.”
He looked straight before him in silence, irritated in his sensitive
morality—the morality which forbade him to send a Government
_chuprassie_ on a private errand, or to write to his relations in
England on office paper. A curve in the walk showed them Rhoda Daye,
standing alone on the sward, beside a bush in crimson-and-orange flower,
intently examining a spray. Almost involuntarily they paused, and Ancram
turned his eyes upon Mrs. Church with the effect of asking her what he
should do, what he must do.
“Go!” she said; and then, as if it were a commonplace: “I think Miss
Daye wants you. I will overtake the others.”
She thought he left her very willingly, and hurried on with the
conviction that, like everything else, it would come right—quite
right—in the end. She was very happy if in any way she had helped it to
come right—so happy that she longed to be alone with her sensations, and
revolted with all her soul against the immediate necessity of Sir
William Scott and the St. Georges. To be for a few hours quite alone,
unseen and unknown, in the heart of some empty green wilderness like
this, would help her, she knew, to rationalise her satisfaction. “My
dear boy,” she said, with nervous patience, as Captain Thrush appeared
in search of her, “did you think I had fallen into a tank? Do go and
take care of the other people.” An aide-de-camp was not a serious
impediment to reflection, but at the moment Judith would have been
distressed by the attendance of her own shadow, if it were too
perceptible.
Ancram crossed over to Rhoda, with his antipathy to the
Lieutenant-Governor sensibly aggravated by the fact that his wife took
an interest in him—an appreciative interest. It was out of harmony,
Ancram felt vaguely, that she should do this—it jarred. He had so
admired her usual attitude of pale, cool, sweet tolerance toward John
Church—had so approved it. That attitude had been his solace in thinking
about her in her unique position and with her rare temperament. To
suppose her counting up her husband’s virtues, weighing them, doing
justice to them, tinged her with the commonplace, and disturbed him.
“That’s a curious thing,” he said to Rhoda.
She let go her hold of the twig, and the red-and-gold flower danced up
like a flame.
“It belongs to the sun and the soil; so it pleases one better than any
importation.”
“An orchid is such a fairy—you can’t expect it to have a nationality,”
he returned.
She stood, with her head thrown back a little, looking at the sprays
that swung above the line of her lips. Her wide-brimmed hat dropped a
soft shadow over the upper part of her face; her eyes shone through it
with a gleam of intensely feminine sweetness, and the tender curve of
her throat gave him an unreasoned throb of anticipation. In six weeks he
would be married to this slender creature; it would be an excursion into
the unknown, not unaccompanied by adventures. Tentatively, it might be
agreeable; it would certainly be interesting. He confessed to a
curiosity which was well on the way to become impatient.
“Then do you want to go and see the Dendrobium?” she asked.
“Not if you prefer to do anything else.”
“I think I would enjoy the cranes more, or the pink water-lilies. The
others will understand, won’t they, that we two might like to take a
little walk?”
Her coquetry, he said to himself, was preposterously pretty. They took
another of the wide solitary paths that led under showery bamboos and
quivering mahogany trees to where a stretch of water gave back the
silence of the palms against the evening sky, and he dropped
unconsciously into the stroll which is characterised everywhere as a
lover’s. She glanced at him once or twice corroboratively, and said to
herself that she had not been mistaken: he had real distinction—he was
not of the herd. Then she picked up broad, crisp leaves with the point
of her parasol and pondered while he talked of a possible walking tour
in the Tyrol. Presently she broke in irrelevantly, hurriedly.
“I like to do a definite thing in a definite way: don’t you?”
“Certainly; yes, of course.”
“Well; and that is why I waited till this afternoon to tell you—to tell
you——”
“To tell me——”
“My dear Mr. Ancram, that I cannot possibly marry you.”
She had intended to put it differently, more effectively—perhaps with a
turn that would punish him for his part in making the situation what it
was. But it seemed a more momentous thing than she thought, now that she
came to do it; she had a sense that destiny was too heavy a thing to
play with.
He gave her an official look, the look which refuses to allow itself to
be surprised, and said “Really?” in a manner which expressed absolutely
nothing except that she had his attention.
“I do not pretend,” she went on, impaling her vanity upon her candour,
“that this will give you the slightest pain. I have been quite conscious
of the relation between us” (here she blushed) “for a very long time;
and I am afraid you must understand that I have reached this decision
without any undue distress—_moi aussi_.”
She had almost immediately regained her note; she was wholly mistress of
what she said. For an instant Ancram fancied that the bamboos and the
mahogany trees and the flaming hibiscus bushes were unreal, that he was
walking into a panorama, and it seemed to him that his steps were
uncertain. He was carrying his silk hat, and he set himself mechanically
to smooth it round and round with his right hand as he listened.
When she paused he could find nothing better to say than “Really?”
again; and he added, “You can’t expect me to be pleased.”
“Oh, but I do,” she returned promptly. “You are, aren’t you?”
It seemed a friendly reminder of his best interests. It brought the
bamboos back to a vegetable growth, and steadied Ancram’s nerves. He
continued to smooth his hat; but he recovered himself sufficiently to
join her, at a bound, in the standpoint from which she seemed inclined
to discuss the matter without prejudice.
“Since we are to be quite candid with each other,” he said, smiling,
“I’m not sure.”
“Your candour has—artistic qualities—which make it different from other
people’s. At all events, you will be to-morrow: to-morrow you will thank
Heaven fasting.”
He looked at her with some of the interest she used to inspire in him
before his chains began to gall him.
“Prickly creature!” he said. “Are _you_ quite sure? Is your
determination unalterable?”
“I acknowledge your politeness in asking me,” she returned. “It is.”
“Then I suppose I must accept it.” He spoke slowly. “But for the
_soulagement_ you suggest I am afraid I must wait longer than
to-morrow.”
They walked on in silence, reached the rank edge of the pond, and turned
to go back. The afternoon still hung mellow in mid air, and something of
its tranquillity seemed to have descended between them. In their joint
escape from their mutual burden they experienced a reciprocal good
feeling, something like comradeship, not untouched by sentiment. Once or
twice he referred to their broken bond, asking her, with the appetite of
his egotism, to give him the crystal truth of the reason she had
accepted him.
“I accepted my idea of you,” she said simply, “which was not altogether
an accurate one. Besides, I think a good deal about—a lot of questions
of administration. I thought I would like to have a closer interest,
perhaps a hand in them. Such fools of women do.”
After which they talked in a friendly way (it has been noted that Ancram
was tolerant) about how essential ambition was to the bearableness of
life in India.
“I see that you will be a much more desirable acquaintance,” Rhoda said
once, brightly, “now that I am not going to marry you.” And he smiled in
somewhat unsatisfied acquiescence.
Ancram grew silent as they drew near the main avenue and the real
parting. The dusk had fallen suddenly, and a little wind brought showers
of yellow leaves out of the shivering bamboos. They were quite alone,
and at a short distance almost indistinguishable from the ixora bushes
and the palmettos.
“Rhoda,” he said, stopping short, “this is our last walk together—we who
were to have walked together always. May I kiss you?”
The girl hesitated for an instant. “No,” she said, with a nervous laugh:
“not that. It would be like the resurrection of something that had never
lived and never died!”
But she gave him her hand, and he kissed that, with some difficulty in
determining whether he was grateful or aggrieved.
“It’s really very raw,” said Miss Daye, as they approached the others;
“don’t you think you had better put on your hat?”