The Honourable Mr. Ancram found himself gratified by Mrs. Church’s
refusal to see him in Calcutta. It filled out his idea of her, which was
a delicate one, and it gave him a pleasurable suggestive of the stimulus
which he should always receive from her in future toward the alternative
which was most noble and most satisfying. Mr. Ancram had the clearest
perception of the value of such stimulus; but the probability that he
was likely to be able to put it permanently at his disposal could hardly
be counted chief among the reasons which made him, at this time, so
exceedingly happy. His promotion had even less to do with it. India is
known to be full of people who would rather be a Chief Commissioner than
Rudyard Kipling or Saint Michael, but this translation had been in the
straight line of Mr. Ancram’s intention for years; it offered him no
fortuitous joy, and if it made a basis for the more refined delight
which had entered his experience, that is as much as it can be credited
with. Life had hitherto offered him no satisfaction that did not pale
beside the prospect of possessing Judith Church. He gave dreamy
half-hours to the realisation of how the sordidness of existence would
vanish when he should regard it through her eyes, of how her goodness
would sweeten the world to him, and her gaiety brighten it, and her
beauty etherealise it. He tried to analyse the completeness of their
fitness for each other, and invariably gave it up to fall into a little
trance of longing and of anticipation.
He could not be sufficiently grateful to John Church for dying—it was a
circumstance upon which he congratulated himself frankly, an accident by
which he was likely to benefit so vastly that he could indulge in no
pretence of regretting it on any altruistic ground. It was so decent of
Church to take himself out of the way that his former Chief Secretary
experienced a change of attitude toward him. Ancram still considered him
an ass, but hostility had faded out of the opinion, which, when he
mentioned it, dwelt rather upon that animal’s power of endurance and
other excellent qualities. Ancram felt himself distinctly on better
terms with the late Lieutenant-Governor, and his feeling was accented by
the fact that John Church died in time to avoid the necessity for a more
formal resignation. His Chief Secretary felt personally indebted to him
for that, on ethical grounds.
In the long, suggestive, caressing letters which reached Judith by every
mail, he made an appearance of respecting her fresh widowhood that was
really clever, considering the fervency which he contrived to imply. As
the weeks went by, however, he began to consider this attitude of hers,
the note she had struck in going six thousand miles away without seeing
him, rather an extravagant gratification of conscience, and if she had
been nearer it may be doubted whether his tolerance would have lasted.
But she was in London and he was in Assam, which made restraint easier;
and he was able always to send her the assurance of his waiting passion
without hurting her with open talk of the day when he should come into
his own. Judith, seeing that his pen was in a leash, watered her love
anew with the thought of his innate nobility, and shortened the time
that lay between them.
In spite of her conscience, which was a good one, there were times when
Mrs. Church was shocked by the realisation that she was only trying to
believe herself unhappy. In spite of other things, too, of a more
material sort. Misfortune had overtaken the family at Stoneborough:
ill-health had compelled her father to resign the pulpit of Beulah
Church, and to retire upon a microscopic stipend from the superannuation
fund. There was a boy of fourteen, much like his sister, who wanted to
be a soldier, and did not want to wear a dirty apron and sell the
currants of the leading member of his father’s congregation. For these
reasons Judith’s three hundred a year shrank to a scanty hundred and
fifty. The boy went to Clifton, and she to an attic in that south side
of Kensington where they are astonishingly cheap. Here she established
herself, and grew familiar with the devices of poverty. It was not
picturesque Bohemian poverty; she had little ladylike ideals in gloves
and shoes that she pinched herself otherwise to attain, and it is to be
feared that she preferred looking shabby-genteel with eternal
limitations to looking disreputable with spasmodic extravagances. But
neither the sordidness of her life nor the discomfort she tried to
conjure out of the past made her miserable. Rather she extracted a
solace from them—they gave her a vague feeling of expiation; she hugged
her little miseries for their purgatorial qualities, and felt, though
she never put it into a definite thought, that they made a sort of
justification for her hope of heaven.
Besides, except once a week, on Indian mail day, her life was for the
time in abeyance. She had a curious sense occasionally, in some sordid
situation to which she was driven for the lack of five shillings, of how
little anything mattered during this little colourless period; and she
declined kindly invitations from old Anglo-Indian acquaintances in more
expensive parts of Kensington with almost an ironical appreciation of
their inconsequence. She accepted existence without movement or charm
for the time, since she could not dispense with it altogether. She
invented little monotonous duties and occupied herself with them, and
waited, always with the knowledge that just beyond her dingy horizon lay
a world, her old world, of full life and vivid colour and long dramatic
days, if she chose to look.
On mail days she did look, over Ancram’s luxurious pages with soft eyes
and a little participating smile. They made magic carpets for her—they
had imaginative touches. They took her to the scent of the food-stuff in
the chaffering bazar; she saw the white hot sunlight sharp-shadowed by
dusty palms, and the people, with their gentle ways and their simplicity
of guile, the clanking silver anklets of the coolie women, the black
_kol_ smudges under the babies’ eye-lashes—the dear people! She
remembered how she had seen the oxen treading out the corn in the warm
leisure of that country, and the women grinding at the mill. She
remembered their simple talk; how the gardener had told her in his own
tongue that the flowers ate much earth; how a syce had once handed her a
beautiful bazar-written letter, in which he asked for more wages because
he could not afford himself. She remembered the jewelled Rajahs, and the
ragged magicians, and the coolies’ song in the evening, and the
home-trotting little oxen painted in pink spots in honour of a plaster
goddess, and realised how she loved India. She realised it even more
completely, perhaps, when November came and brought fogs which were
always dreary in that they interfered with nothing that she wanted to
do, and neuralgia that was especially hard to bear for being her only
occupation. The winter dragged itself away. Beside Ancram’s letters and
her joy in answering them, she had one experience of pleasure keen
enough to make it an episode. She found it in the _Athenian_, which she
picked up on a news-stall, where she had dropped into the class of
customers who glance over three or four weeklies and buy one or two. It
was a review, a review of length and breadth and weight and density, of
the second volume of the “Modern Influence of the Vedic Books,” by Lewis
Ancram, I.C.S. She bought the paper and took it home, and all that day
her heart beat higher with her woman’s ambition for the man she loved,
sweetened with the knowledge that his own had become as nothing to the
man who loved her.