Gentlemen native to Bengal are not usually invited to balls at
Government House. It is unnecessary to speak of the ladies: they are
non-existent to the social eye, even if it belongs to a Viceroy. The
reason is popularly supposed to be the inability of gentlemen native to
Bengal to understand the waltz, except by Aryan analysis. It is thought
well to circumscribe their opportunities of explaining it thus, and they
are asked instead to evening parties which offer nothing more
stimulating to the imagination than conversation and champagne—of
neither of which they partake. On this occasion however, at the entreaty
of the visiting royalty, the rule was relaxed to admit perhaps fifty;
and when Lewis Ancram arrived—rather late—the first personality he
recognised as in any way significant was that of Mohendra Lal
Chuckerbutty, who leaned against a pillar, with his hands clasped behind
him, raptly contemplating a polka. Mohendra, too, had an appreciation of
personalities, and of his respectful duty to them. He bore down in
Ancram’s direction unswervingly through the throng, his eye humid with
happiness, his hand held out in an impulse of affection. When he thought
he had arrived at the Chief Secretary’s elbow he looked about him in
some astonishment. A couple of subalterns in red jackets disputed with
mock violence over the dance-card of a little girl in white, and a much
larger lady was waiting with imposing patience until he should be
pleased to get off her train. At the same moment an extremely correct
black back glanced through the palms into the verandah.
The verandah was very broad and high, and softly lighted in a way that
made vague glooms visible and yet gave a gentle radiance to the sweep of
pale-tinted drapery that here and there suggested a lady sunk in the
depths of a roomy arm-chair, playing with her fan and talking in
undertones. It was a place of delicious mystery, in spite of the strains
of the orchestra that throbbed out from the ball-room, in spite of the
secluded fans opening and closing in some commonplace of Calcutta
flirtation. The mystery came in from without, where the stars crowded
down thick and luminous behind the palms, and a grey mist hung low in
the garden beneath, turning it into a fantasy of shadowed forms and
filmy backgrounds and new significances. Out there, in the wide spaces
beyond the tall verandah pillars, the spirit of the spring was
abroad—the troubled, throbbing, solicitous Indian spring, perfumed and
tender. The air was warm and sweet and clinging; it made life a
pathetic, enjoyable necessity, and love a luxury of much refinement.
Ancram folded his arms and stood in the doorway and permitted himself to
feel these things. If he was not actually looking for Judith Church, it
was because he was always, so to speak, anticipating her; in a state of
readiness to receive the impression of her face, the music of her voice.
Mrs. Church was the reason of the occasion, the reason of every occasion
in so far as it concerned him. She seemed simply the corollary of his
perception of the exquisite night when he discovered her presently, on
one of the more conspicuous sofas, talking to Sir Peter Bloomsbury. She
was waiting for him to find her, with a little flickering smile that
came in the pauses between Sir Peter’s remarks; and when Ancram
approached he noticed, with as keen a pleasure as he was capable of
feeling, that her replies to this dignitary were made somewhat at
random.
Their conversation changed when Sir Peter went away only to take its
note of intimacy and its privilege of pauses. They continued to speak of
trivial matters, and to talk in tones and in things they left unsaid.
His eyes lingered in the soft depths of hers to ascertain whether the
roses were doing well this year at Belvedere, and there was a conscious
happiness in the words with which she told him that they were quite
beyond her expectations not wholly explicable even by so idyllic a fact.
The content of their neigbourhood surrounded them like an atmosphere,
beyond which people moved about irrationally and a string band played
unmeaning selections much too loud. She was lovelier than he had ever
seen her, more his possession than he had ever felt her—the incarnation,
as she bent her graceful head towards him, of the eloquent tropical
night and the dreaming tropical spring. He told himself afterwards that
he felt at this moment an actual pang of longing, and rejoiced that he
could still experience an undergraduate’s sensation after so many years
of pleasures that were but aridly intellectual at their best. Certainly,
as he sat there in his irreproachable clothes and attitude, he knew that
his blood was beating warm to his finger-tips with a delicious impulse
to force the sweet secret of the situation between them. The south wind
suggested to him, through the scent of breaking buds, that prudence was
entirely a relative thing, and not even relative to a night like this
and a woman like that. As he looked at a tendril of her hair, blown
against the warm whiteness of her neck, it occurred to the Honourable
Mr. Ancram that he might go a little further. He felt divinely rash; but
his intention was to go only a little further. Hitherto he had gone no
distance at all.
The south wind drove them along together. Judith felt it on her neck and
arms, and in little, cool, soft touches about her face. She did not
pause to question the happiness it brought her: there were other times
for pauses and questions; her eyes were ringed with them, under the
powder. She abandoned herself to her woman’s divine sense of ministry;
and the man she loved observed that she did it with a certain inimitable
poise, born of her confidence in him, which was as new as it was
entrancing.
People began to flock downstairs to supper in the wake of the Viceroy
and the visiting royalty; the verandah emptied itself. Presently they
became aware that they were alone.
“You have dropped your fan,” Ancram said, and picked it up. He looked at
its device for a moment, and then restored it. Judith’s hands were lying
in her lap, and he slipped the fan into one of them, letting his own
rest for a perceptible instant in the warm palm of the other. There
ensued a tumultuous silence. He had only underscored a glance of hers;
yet it seemed that he had created something—something as formidable as
lovely, as embarrassing as divine. As he gently withdrew his hand she
lifted her eyes to his with mute entreaty, and he saw that they were
full of tears. He told himself afterwards that he had been profoundly
moved; but this did not interfere with his realisation that it was an
exquisite moment.
Ancram regarded her gravely, with a smile of much consideration. He gave
her a moment of time, and then, as she did not look up again, he leaned
forward, and said, quite naturally and evenly, as if the proposition
were entirely legitimate: “The relation between us is too tacit. Tell me
that you love me, dear.”
For an instant he repented, since it seemed that she would be carried
along on the sweet tide of his words to the brink of an indiscretion.
Once more she looked up, softly seeking his eyes; and in hers he saw so
lovely a light of self-surrender that he involuntarily thanked Heaven
that there was no one else to recognise it. In her face was nothing but
the thought of him; and, seeing this, he had a swift desire to take her
in his arms and experience at its fullest and sweetest the sense that
she and her little empire were gladly lost there. In the pause of her
mute confession he felt the strongest exultation he had known. Her
glance reached him like a cry from an unexplored country; the revelation
of her love filled him with the knowledge that she was infinitely more
adorable and more desirable than he had thought her. From that moment
she realised to him a supreme good, and he never afterwards thought of
his other ambitions without a smile of contempt which was almost
genuine. But she said nothing: she seemed removed from any necessity of
speech, lifted up on a wave of absolute joy, and isolated from all that
lay either behind or before. He controlled his impatience for words from
her—for he was very sure of one thing; that when they came they would be
kind—and chose his own with taste.
“Don’t you think that it would be better if we had the courage and the
candour to accept things as they are? Don’t you think we would be
stronger for all that we must face if we acknowledged—only to each
other—the pain and the sweetness of it?”
“I have never been blind,” she said softly.
“All I ask is that you will not even pretend to be. Is that too much?”
“How can it be a question of that?” Her voice trembled a little. Then
she hurried illogically on: “But there can be no change—there must be no
change. These are things I hoped you would never say.”
“The alternative is too wretched: to go on living a lie—and a stupid,
unnecessary lie. Why, in Heaven’s name, should there be the figment of
hypocrisy between us? I know that I must be content with very little,
but I am afraid there is no way of telling you how much I want that
little.”
She had grown very pale, and she put up her hand and smoothed her hair
with a helpless, mechanical gesture.
“No, no,” she said—“stop. Let us make an end of it quickly. I was very
well content to go on with the lie. I think I should always have been
content. But now there is no lie: there is nothing to stand upon any
longer. You must get leave, or something, and go away—or I will. I am
not—really—very well.”
She looked at him miserably, with twitching lips, and he laid a soothing
hand—there was still no one to see—upon her arm.
“Judith, don’t talk of impossibilities. How could we two live in one
world—and apart! Those are the heroics of a dear little schoolgirl. You
and I are older, and braver.”
She put his hand away with a touch that was a caress, but only said
irrelevantly, “And Rhoda Daye might have loved you honestly!”
“Ah, that threadbare old story!” He felt as if she had struck him, and
the feeling impelled him to ask her why she thought he deserved
punishment. “Not that it hurts,” Mr. Ancram added, almost resentfully.
She gave him a look of vague surprise, and then lapsed, refusing to make
the effort to understand, into the troubled depths of her own thought.
“Be a little kind, Judith. I only want a word.”
The south wind brought them a sound out of the darkness—the high, faint,
long-drawn sound of a cheer from the Maidan. She lifted her head and
listened intently, with apprehensive eyes. Then she rose unsteadily from
her seat, and, as he gave her his arm in silence, she stood for a moment
gathering up her strength, and waiting, it seemed, for the sound to come
again. Nothing reached them but the wilder, nearer wail of the jackals
in the streets.
“I must go home,” she said, in a voice that was quite steady; “I must
find my husband and go home.”
He would have held her back, but she walked resolutely, if somewhat
purposelessly, round the long curve of the verandah, and stood still,
looking at the light that streamed out of the ballroom and glistened on
the leaves of a range of palms and crotons in pots that made a seclusion
there.
“Then,” said Ancram, “I am to go on with the forlorn comfort of a guess.
I ought to be thankful, I suppose, that you can’t take that from me.
Perhaps you would,” he added bitterly, “if you could know how precious
it is.”
His words seemed to fix her in a half-formed resolve. Her hand slipped
out of his arm, and she took a step away from him toward the crotons.
Against their dark green leaves he saw, with some alarm, how white her
face was.
“Listen,” she said: “I think you do not realise it, but I know you are
hard and cruel. You ask me if I am not to you what I ought to be to my
husband, who is a good man, and who loves me, and trusts you. And, what
is worse, this has come up between us at a time when he is threatened
and troubled: on the very night when I meant—when I meant”—she stopped
to conquer the sob in her throat—“to have asked you to think of
something that might be done to help him. Well, but you ask me if I have
come to love you, and perhaps in a way you have a right to know; and the
truth is better, as you say. And I answer you that I have. I answer you
yes, it is true, and I know it will always be true. But from to-night
you will remember that every time I look into your face and touch your
hand I hurt my own honour and my husband’s, and—and you will not let me
see you often.”
As Ancram opened his lips to speak, the cheer from the Maidan smote the
air again, and this time it seemed nearer. Judith took his arm
nervously.
“What can they be doing out there?” she exclaimed. “Let us go—I must
find my husband—let us go!”
They crossed the threshold into the ballroom, where John Church joined
them almost immediately, his black brows lightened by an unusually
cheerful expression.
“I’ve been having a long talk with His Excellency,” he said to them
jointly. “An uncommonly capable fellow, Scansleigh. He tells me he has
written a strong private letter to the Secretary of State about this
Notification of mine. That’s bound to have weight, you know, in case
they make an attempt to get hold of Parliament at home.”
As Mrs. Church and Mr. Lewis Ancram left the verandah a chair was
suddenly pushed back behind the crotons. Miss Rhoda Daye had been
sitting in the chair, alone too, with the south wind and the stars. She
had no warning of what she was about to overhear—no sound had reached
her, either of their talk or their approach—and in a somewhat agitated
colloquy with herself she decided that nothing could be so terrible as
her personal interruption of what Mrs. Church was saying. That lady’s
words, though low and rapid, were very distinct, and Rhoda heard them
out involuntarily, with a strong disposition to applaud her and to love
her. Then she turned a key upon her emotions and Judith Church’s secret,
and slipped quietly out to look for her mother, who asked her, between
her acceptance of an ice from the Home Secretary and a _petit four_ from
the General Commanding the Division, why on earth she looked so
depressed.
[Illustration: “What do I know about the speech!”]
Ancram, turning away from the Churches, almost ran into the arms of
Mohendra Lal Chuckerbutty, with whom he shook hands. His manner
expressed, combined with all the good will in the world, a slight
embarrassment that he could not remember Mohendra’s name, which is so
often to be noticed when European officials have occasion to greet
natives of distinction—natives of distinction are so very numerous and
so very similar.
“I hope you are well!” beamed the editor of the _Bengal Free Press_. “It
is a very select party.” Then Mohendra dropped his voice confidentially:
“We have sent to England, by to-day’s mail, every word of the isspeech
of Dr. MacInnes——”
“Damn you!” Ancram said, with a respectful, considering air: “what do I
know about the speech of Dr. MacInnes! _Jehannum jao!_”[C]
-----
Footnote C:
“Go to Hades!”
-----
Mohendra laughed in happy acquiescence as the Chief Secretary bowed and
left him. “Certainlie! certainlie!” he said; “it is a very select
party!”
The evening had one more incident. Mr. and Mrs. Church made their
retreat early: Judith’s face offered an excuse of fatigue which was
better than her words. Their carriage turned out of Circular Road with a
thickening crowd of natives talking noisily and walking in the same
direction. They caught up with a glare and the smell and smoke of
burning pitch. Judith said uneasily that there seemed to be a bonfire in
the middle of the road. They drew a little nearer, and the crowd massed
around them before and behind, on the bridge leading to Belvedere out of
the city. Then John Church perceived that the light streamed from a
burning figure which flamed and danced grotesquely, wired to a pole
attached to a bullock cart and pulled along by coolies. The absorbed
crowd that walked behind, watching and enjoying like excited children at
a show, chattered defective English, and the light from the burning
thing on the pole streamed upon faces already to some extent illumined
by the higher culture of the University Colleges. But it was not until
they recognised his carriage and outriders, and tried to hurry and to
scatter on the narrow bridge, that the Acting Lieutenant-Governor of
Bengal fully realised that he had been for some distance swelling a
procession which was entertaining itself with much gusto at the expense
of his own effigy.