Calcutta, when the Doyles came down from Darjiling, chased by the early
rains, was prepared to find the marriage ridiculous. Calcutta counted on
its fingers the years that lay between Mr. and Mrs. Doyle, and
mentioned, as a condoning fact, that Philip Doyle’s chances for the next
High Court Judgeship were very good indeed. Following up this line of
fancy, Calcutta pictured a matron growing younger and younger and a
dignitary of the Bench growing older and older, added the usual
accessories of jewels and balls and Hill captains and the private
_entrée_, and figured out the net result, which was regrettably vulgar
and even more regrettably common. It is perhaps due to Calcutta rather
than to the Doyles to say that six weeks after their arrival these
prophecies had been forgotten and people went about calling it an ideal
match. One or two ladies went so far as to declare that Rhoda Daye had
become a great deal more tolerable since her marriage; her husband was
so much cleverer than she was, and that was what she needed, you know.
In which statement might occasionally be discerned a gleam of
satisfaction.
It shortly became an item of gossip that very few engagements were
permitted to interfere with Mrs. Philip Doyle’s habit of driving to her
husband’s office to pick him up at five o’clock in the afternoon, and
that very few clients were permitted to keep him there after she had
arrived. People smiled in indulgent comment on it, as the slender,
light, tasteful figure in the cabriolet drove among the thronging
carriages in the Red Road towards Old Post-Office Street, and looked
again, with that paramount interest in individuals which is almost the
only one where Britons congregate in exile. Mrs. Doyle, in the
picturesque exercise of the domestic virtues, was generally conceded to
be even more piquant than Miss Daye in the temporary possession of a
Chief Secretary.
I have no doubt that on one special Wednesday afternoon she was noted to
look absent and a trifle grave, as the Waler made his own pace to bring
his master. There was no reason for this in particular, except that His
Honour the Lieutenant-Governor was leaving for England by the mail train
for Bombay that evening. Perhaps this in itself would hardly have
sufficed to make Mrs. Doyle meditative, but there had been a great
clamour of inquiry and suggestion as to why Sir Lewis Ancram was
straining a point to obtain three months’ leave under no apparent
emergency: people said he had never looked better—and Mrs. Doyle
believed she knew precisely why. The little cloud of her secret
knowledge was before her eyes as the crows pecked hoarsely at the street
offal under the Waler’s deliberate feet, and she was somewhat impatient
at being burdened with any acquaintance with Sir Lewis Ancram’s private
intentions. Also she remembered her liking for the woman he was going
home to marry; and, measuring in fancy Judith Church’s capacity for
happiness, she came to the belief that it was likely to be meagrely
filled. It was the overflowing measure of her own, perhaps, that gave
its liveliness to her very real pang of regret. She knew Lewis Ancram so
much better than Mrs. Church did, she assured herself; was it not proof
enough, that the other woman loved him while she (Rhoda) bowed to him?
As at that moment, when he passed her on horseback, looking young and
vigorous and elate. Rhoda fancied a certain significance in his smile;
it spoke of good-fellowship and the prospect of an equality of bliss and
the general expediency of things as they were rather than as they might
have been. She coloured hotly under it, and gathered up the reins and
astonished the Waler with the whip.
As she turned into Old Post-Office Street, a flanking battalion of the
rains—riding up dark and thunderous behind the red-brick turrets of the
High Court—whipped down upon the Maidan, and drove her, glad of a
refuge, up the dingy stairs to her husband’s office. Her custom was to
sit in the cabriolet and despatch the syce with a message. The syce
would deliver it in his own tongue—“The memsahib sends a salutation”—and
Doyle would presently appear. But to-day it was raining and there was no
alternative.
A little flutter of consideration greeted her entrance. Two or three
native clerks shuffled to their feet and salaamed, and one ran to open
the door into Doyle’s private room for her. Her husband sat writing
against time at a large desk littered thick with papers. At another
table a native youth in white cotton draperies sat making quill pens,
with absorbed precision. The punkah swung a slow discoloured petticoat
above them both. The tall wide windows were open. Through them little
damp gusts came in and lifted the papers about the room; and beyond them
the grey rain slanted down, and sobered the vivid green of everything,
and turned the tilted palms into the likeness of draggled plumes waving
against the sky.
“You have just escaped the shower,” said Doyle, looking up with quick
pleasure at her step. “I’ll be another twenty minutes, I’m afraid. And I
have nothing for you to play with,” he added, glancing round the dusty
room—“not even a novel. You must just sit down and be good.”
“Mail letters?” asked Rhoda, with her hand on his shoulder.
The clerk was looking another way, and she dropped a foolish, quick
little kiss on the top of his head.
“Yes. It’s this business of the memorial to Church. I’ve got the
newspaper reports of the unveiling together, and the Committee have
drafted a formal letter to Mrs. Church, and there’s a good deal of
private correspondence—letters from big natives sending subscriptions,
and all that—that I thought she would like to see. As Secretary to the
Committee, it of course devolves upon me to forward everything. And at
this moment,” Doyle went on, glancing ruefully at the page under his
hand, “I am trying to write to her privately, poor thing.”
Rhoda glanced down at the letter. “I know you will be glad to have these
testimonials, which are as sincere as they are spontaneous, to the
unique position Church held in the regard of many distinguished people,”
she read deliberately, aloud.
“Do you think that is the right kind of thing to say? It strikes me as
rather formal. But one is so terribly afraid of hurting her by some
stupidity.”
“Oh, I don’t think so at all, Philip. I mean—it is quite the proper
thing, I think. After all, it’s—it’s more than a year ago, you know.”
“The wives of men like Church remember them longer than that, I fancy.
But if you will be pleased to sit down, Mrs. Doyle, I’ll finish it in
some sort of decency and get it off.”
Rhoda sat down and crossed her feet and looked into dusty vacancy. The
recollection of Ancram’s expression as he passed her in the road came
back to her, and as she reflected that the ship which carried him to
Judith Church would also take her the balm respectfully prepared by the
Committee, her sense of humour curved her lips in an ironical smile. The
grotesqueness of the thing made it seem less serious, and she found
quite five minutes’ interested occupation in considering it. Then she
regarded the baboo making pens, and picked up a “Digest” and put it down
again, and turned over the leaves of a tome on the “Hindu Law of
Inheritance,” and yawned, and looked out of the window, and observed
that it had stopped raining.
“Philip, aren’t you nearly done? Remember me affectionately to Mrs.
Church—no, perhaps you’d better not, either.”
Doyle was knitting his brows over a final sentiment, and did not reply.
“Philip, is that one of your old coats hanging on the nail? Is it old
enough to give away? I want an old coat for the syce to sleep in: he had
fever yesterday.”
Mrs. Doyle went over to the object of her inquiries, took it down, and
daintily shook it.
“_Philip!_ Pay some attention to me. May I have this coat? There’s
nothing in the pockets—nothing but an old letter and a newspaper. Oh!”
Her husband looked up at last, noting a change in the tone of her
exclamation. She stood looking in an embarrassed way at the address on
the envelope she held. It was in Ancram’s handwriting.
“What letter?” he asked.
She handed it to him, and at the sight of it he frowned a little.
“Is the newspaper the _Bengal Free Press_?”
“Yes,” she said, glancing at it. “And it’s marked in one or two places
with red pencil.”
“Then read them both,” Doyle replied. “They don’t tell a very pretty
story, but it may amuse you. I thought I had destroyed them long ago. I
can’t have worn that coat since I left Florence.”
Rhoda sat down, with a beating curiosity, and applied herself to
understand the story that was not very pretty. It sometimes annoyed her
that she could not resist her interest in things that concerned Ancram,
especially things that exemplified him. She brought her acutest
intelligence to bear upon the exposition of the letter and the
newspaper; but it was very plain and simple, especially where it was
underscored in red pencil, and she comprehended it at once.
She sat thinking of it, with bright eyes, fitting it into relation with
what she had known and guessed before, perhaps unconsciously pluming
herself a little upon her penetration, and, it must be confessed,
feeling a keen thrill of unregretting amusement at Ancram’s conviction.
Then suddenly, with a kind of mental gasp, she remembered Judith Church.
“Ah!” she said to herself, and her lips almost moved. “What a
complication!” And then darted up from some depth of her moral
consciousness the thought, “She ought to know, and I ought to tell her.”
She tried to look calmly at the situation, and analyse the character of
her responsibility. She sought for its _pros_ and _cons_; she made an
effort to range them and to balance them. But, in spite of herself, her
mind rejected everything save the memory of the words she had overheard
one soft spring night on the verandah at Government House:
“_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 trusts you! and trusts you!” Remembering the way her own blood
quickened when she heard Judith Church say that, Rhoda made a spiritual
bound towards the conviction that she could not shirk opening such
deplorably blind eyes and respect herself in future. Then her memory
insisted again, and she heard Judith say, with an inflection that
precluded all mistake, all self-delusion, all change:
“_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._”
Did that make no difference? And was there not infinitely too much
involved for any such casual, rough-handed interference as hers would
be?
At that moment she saw that her husband was putting on his hat. His
letter to Mrs. Church lay addressed upon the desk, the papers that were
to accompany scattered about it, and Doyle was directing the clerk with
regard to them.
“You will put all these in a strong cover, Luteef,” said he, “and
address it as I have addressed that letter. I would like you to take
them to the General Post Office yourself, and see that they don’t go
under-stamped.”
“Yessir. All thee papers, sir? And I am to send by letter-post, sir?”
“Yes, certainly. Well, Rhoda? That was a clever bit of trickery, wasn’t
it? I heard afterwards that the article was quoted in the House, and did
Church a lot of damage.”
Doyle spoke with the boldness of embarrassment. These two were not in
the habit of discussing Ancram; they tolerated him occasionally as an
object, but never as a subject. Already he regretted the impulse that
put her in possession of these facts. It seemed to his sensitiveness
like taking an unfair advantage of a man when he was down, which,
considering to what Lewis Ancram had risen, was a foolish and baseless
scruple. Rhoda looked at her husband, and hesitated. For an instant she
played with the temptation to tell him all she knew, deciding, at the
end of the instant, that it would entail too much. Even a reference to
that time had come to cost her a good deal.
“I am somehow not surprised,” she said, looking down at the letter and
paper in her hand. “But—I think it’s a pity Mrs. Church doesn’t know.”
“Poor dear lady! why should she? I am glad she is spared that
unnecessary pang. We should all be allowed to think as well of the world
as we can, my wife. Come; in twenty minutes it will be dark.”
“Do you think so?” his wife asked doubtfully. But she threw the letter
and the newspaper upon the desk. She would shirk it; as a duty it was
not plain enough.
“Then you ought to burn those, Philip,” she said, as they went
downstairs together. “They wouldn’t make creditable additions to the
records of the India Office.”
“I will,” replied her husband. “I don’t know why I didn’t long ago. How
deliciously fresh it is after the rain!”