His Honour, and a Lady

CHAPTER XIV

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.

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!”3

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.

CHAPTER XV

When it became obvious that the College Grants Notification held fateful possibilities for John Church personally, and for his wife incidentally, it rapidly developed into a topic. Ladies, in the course of midday visits in each other’s cool drawing-rooms, repeated things their husbands had let fall at dinner the night before, and said they were awfully sorry for Mrs. Church; it must be too trying for her, poor thing. If it were only on her account, some of them thought, the Lieutenant-Governor – the “L.G.,” they called him – ought to let things go on as they always had. What difference did it make anyway! At the clubs the matter superseded, for the moment, the case of an army chaplain accused of improper conduct at Singapore, and bets were freely laid on the issue – three to one that Church would be “smashed.” If this attitude seemed less sympathetic than that of the ladies, it betokened at least no hostility. On the contrary, no small degree of appreciation was current for His Honour. He would not have heard the matter discussed often from his own point of view, but that was because his own point of view was very much his own property. He might have heard himself commended from a good many others, however, and especially on the ground of his pluck. Men said between their cigars that very few fellows would care to put their hands to such a piece of zubberdusti 4 at this end of the century, however much it was wanted. Personally they hoped the beggar would get it through, and with equal solicitude they proceeded to bet that he wouldn’t. Among the sentiments the beggar evoked, perhaps the liveliest was one of gratitude for so undeniable a sensation so near the end of the cold weather, when sensations were apt to take flight, with other agreeable things, to the hill stations.

The storm reached a point when the Bishop felt compelled to put forth an allaying hand from the pulpit of the Cathedral. As the head of the Indian Establishment the Bishop felt himself allied in no common way with the governing power, and His Lordship was known to hold strong views on the propriety with which lawn sleeves might wave above questions of public importance. Besides, neither Dr. MacInnes nor Professor Porter were lecturing on the binomial theorem under Established guidance, while as to Father Ambrose, he positively invited criticism, with his lives of the Saints. When, therefore, the Cathedral congregation heard his Lordship begin his sermon with the sonorous announcement from Ecclesiastes,

“For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. He – that increaseth – knowledge – increaseth – sorrow,”

it listened, with awakened interest, for a snub to Dr. MacInnes and Professor Porter, and for a rebuke, full of dignity and austerity, to Father Ambrose; both of which were duly administered. His Lordship’s views, supported by the original Preacher, were doubtless more valuable in his sermon than they would be here, but it is due to him to say that they formed the happiest combination of fealty and doctrine. The Honourable Mr. Ancram said to Sir William Scott on the Cathedral steps after the service – it was like the exit of a London theatre, with people waiting for their carriages – that while his Lordship’s reference was very proper and could hardly fail to be of use, public matters looked serious when they came to be discussed in the pulpit. To which Sir William gave a deprecating agreement.

Returning to his somewhat oppressively lonely quarters, Ancram felt the need of further conversation. The Bishop had stirred him to vigorous dissent, which his Lordship’s advantage of situation made peculiarly irritating to so skilled an observer of weak points. He bethought himself that he might write to Philip Doyle. He remembered that Doyle had not answered the letter in which he had written of his changed domestic future, frankly asking for congratulation rather than for condolence; but without resentment, for why should a man trouble himself under Florentine skies with unnecessary Calcutta correspondents? He consulted only his own pleasure in writing again: Doyle was so readily appreciative, he would see the humour in the development of affairs with His Honour. It was almost a week since Mr. Ancram had observed at the ball, with acute annoyance, what an unreasonable effect the matter was having upon Judith Church, and he was again himself able to see the humour of it. He finally wrote with much facility a graphically descriptive letter, in which the Bishop came in as a mere picturesque detail at the end. He seemed to pick his way, as he turned the pages, out of an embarrassing moral quagmire; he was so obviously high and dry when he could fix the whole thing in a caricature of effective paragraphs. He wrote: —

/# “I don’t mind telling you privately that I have no respect whatever for the scheme, and very little for the author of it. He reminds one of nothing so #/ /# much as an elderly hen sitting, with the obstinacy of her kind, on eggs out of which it is easy to see no addled reform will ever step to crow. He is as blind as a bat to his own deficiencies. I doubt whether even his downfall will convince him that his proper sphere of usefulness in life was that of a Radical cobbler. He has a noble preference for the ideal of an impeccable Indian administrator, which he goes about contemplating, while his beard grows with the tale of his blunders. The end, however, cannot be far off. Bengal is howling for his retirement; and, notwithstanding a fulsome habit he has recently developed of hanging upon my neck for sympathy, I own to you that, if circumstances permitted, I would howl too.” #/

Ancram’s first letter had miscarried, a peon in the service of the Sirkar having abstracted the stamps; and Philip Doyle, when he received the second, was for the moment overwhelmed with inferences from his correspondent’s silence regarding the marriage, which should have been imminent when he wrote. Doyle glanced rapidly through another Calcutta letter that arrived with Ancram’s for possible news; but the brief sensation of Miss Daye’s broken engagement had expired long before it was written, and it contained no reference to the affair. The theory of a postponement suggested itself irresistibly; and he spent an absorbed and motionless twenty minutes, sitting on the edge of his bed, while his pipe went out in his hand, looking fixedly at the floor of his room in the hotel, and engaged in constructing the tissue of circumstances which would make such a thing likely. If he did not grow consciously lighter-hearted with this occupation, at least he turned, at the end of it, to re-peruse his letters, as if they had brought him good news. He read them both carefully again, and opened the newspaper that came with the second. It was a copy of the Bengal Free Press, and his friend of the High Court had called his special attention to its leading article, as the most caustic and effective attack upon the College Grants Notification which had yet appeared. Mr. Justice Shears wrote: —

/# “As you will see, there is abundant intrinsic evidence that no native wrote it. My own idea, which I share with a good many people, is that it came from the pen of the Director of Education, which is as facile as it would very naturally be hostile. Let me know #/ /# what you think. Ancram is non-committal, but he talks of Government’s prosecuting the paper, which looks as if the article had already done harm.” #/

Doyle went through the editorial with interest that increased as his eye travelled down the column. He smiled as he read; it was certainly a telling and a forcible presentation of the case against His Honour’s policy, adorned with gibes that were more damaging than its argument. Suddenly he stopped, with a puzzled look, and read the last part of a sentence once again: —

/# “But he has a noble preference for the ideal of an impeccable Indian administrator, which he goes about contemplating, while his beard grows with the tale of his blunders.” #/

The light of a sudden revelation twinkled in Doyle’s eyes – a revelation which showed the Chief Secretary to the Bengal Government led on by vanity to forgetfulness. He reopened Ancram’s letter, and convinced himself that the words were precisely those he had read there. For further assurance, he glanced at the dates of the letter and the newspaper: the one had been written two days before the other had been printed. Presently he put them down, and instinctively rubbed his thumb and the ends of his fingers together with the light, rapid movement with which people assure themselves that they have touched nothing soiling. He permitted himself no characterisation of the incident – lofty denunciation was not part of Doyle’s habit of mind – beyond what might have been expressed in the somewhat disgusted smile with which he re-lighted his pipe. It was like him that his principal reflection had a personal tinge, and that it was forcible enough to find words. “And I,” he said, with a twinkle at his own expense, “lived nine months in the same house with that skunk!”