His Honour, and a Lady

CHAPTER XXIII

There was a florist’s near by – in London there always is a florist’s near by – and Judith stood in the little place, among the fanciful straw baskets and the wire frames and the tin boxes of cut flowers and the damp pots of blooming ones, and made her choice. In her slenderness and her gladness she herself had somewhat the poise of a flower, and the delicate flush of her face, with its new springing secret of life, did more to suggest one – a flower just opened to the summer and the sun.

She picked out some that were growing in country lanes then – it was the middle of July – poppies and cornbottles and big brown-hearted daisies. They seemed to her to speak in a simple way of joy. Then she added a pot of ferns and some clustering growing azaleas, pink and white and very lovely. She paid the florist’s wife ten shillings, and took them all with her in a cab. This was not a day for economies. She drove back to her rooms, the azaleas beside her on the seat making a picture of her that people turned to look at. In her hand she carried a folded brown envelope. On the form inside it was written, in the generically inexpressive characters of the Telegraph Department, “Arrive London 2.30. Will be with you at five. Ancram.”

It was ten o’clock in the morning, but she felt that the day would be too short for all there was to do. There should be nothing sordid in her greeting, nothing to make him remember that she was poor. Her attic should be swept and garnished: women think of these little things. She had also with her in the cab a pair of dainty Liberty muslin curtains to keep out the roof and the chimneys, and a Japanese tea-set, and tea of a kind she was not in the habit of drinking. She had only stopped buying pretty fresh decorative things when it occurred to her that she must keep enough money to pay the cabman. As she hung the curtains, and put the ferns on the window-seat and the azaleas in the corners, and the plump, delicate-coloured silk cushions in the angles of her small hard sofa, her old love of soft luxurious things stirred within her. Instinctively she put her poverty away with impatience and contempt. What in another woman might have been a calculating thought came to her as a hardly acknowledged sense of relief and repose. There would be no more of that!

A knock at the door sent the blood to her heart, and her hand to her dusty hair, before she remembered how impossible it was that this should be any but an unimportant knock. Yet she opened the door with a thrill – it seemed that such a day could have no trivial incidents. When she saw that it was the housemaid with the mail, the Indian mail, she took it with a little smile of indifference and satisfaction. It was no longer the master of her delight.

She put it all aside while she adjusted the folds of the curtains and took the step-ladder out of the room. Then she read Philip Doyle’s letter. She read it, and when she had finished she looked gravely, coldly, at the packet that came with it, carefully addressed in the round accurate hand of the clerk who made quill pens in Doyle’s office. She was conscious of an unkindness in this chance; it might so well have fallen last week or next. There was no ignoring it – it was there, it had been delivered to her, it seemed almost as urgent a demand upon her time and thought and interest as if John Church himself had put it into her hand. With an involuntary movement she pushed the packet aside and looked round the room. There were still several little things to do. She got up to go about them; but she moved slowly, and the glow had gone out of her face, leaving her eyes shadowed as they were on other days. She made the cornbottles and the daisies up into little bouquets, but she let her hands drop into her lap more than once, and thought about other things.

Suddenly, with a quick movement, she went over to where the packet lay and took it up. It was as if she turned her back upon something; she had a resolute look. As she broke the wax and cut the strings, any one might have recognised that she confronted herself with a duty which she did not mean to postpone. It would have been easy to guess her unworded feeling – that, however differently her heart might insist, she could not slight John Church. This was a sensitive and a just woman.

She opened letter after letter, reading slowly and carefully. Every word had its due, every sentence spoke to her. Gradually there came round her lips the look they wore when she knelt upon her hassock in St. Luke’s round the corner, and repeated, with bent head,

/* “But Thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders: Spare Thou them, O Lord, which confess their faults.” */

It seemed to her that in not having loved John Church while he lived nor mourned him in sackcloth when he was dead she had sinned indeed. She was in the midst of preparations that were almost bridal, yet it is quite true that for this man whose death had wrought her deliverance and her joy, her eyes were full of a tender, reverent regret. Presently she came upon a letter which she put aside, with a pang, to be read last of all. It was like Ancram, she thought, to have borne witness to her husband’s worth – he could never have guessed that his letter would hurt her a little one day. She noticed that it was fastened together with a newspaper, by a narrow rubber circlet, and that the newspaper was marked in red pencil. She remembered Ancram’s turn for journalism – he had acknowledged many a clever article to her – and divined that this was some tribute from his pen. The idea gave her a realising sense that her lover shared her penance and was vaguely comforting.

She went through all the rest, as I have said, conscientiously, seriously, and with a troubled heart. Philip Doyle had not been mistaken in saying that they were sincere, and spontaneous. The tragedy of Church’s death had brought out his motives in high relief; it was not likely he could ever have lived to be so appreciated. These were impressions of him struck off as it were in a white heat of feeling. His widow sat for a moment silent before the revelation they made of him, even to her.

Then, to leave nothing undone, Judith opened Ancram’s letter. Her startled eyes went through it once without comprehending a line of its sequence, though here and there words struck her in the face and made it burn. She put her hand to her head to steady herself; she felt giddy, and sickeningly unable to comprehend. She fastened her gaze upon the page, seeing nothing, while her brain worked automatically about the fact that she was the victim of some terribly untoward circumstance – what and why it refused to discover for her. Presently things grew simpler and clearer; she realised the direction from which the blow had come. Her power to reason, to consider, to compare, came back to her; and she caught up her misfortune eagerly, to minimise it. The lines of Ancram’s hostility and contempt traced themselves again upon her mind, and this time it quivered under their full significance. “Happily for Bengal,” she read, “a fool is invariably dealt with according to his folly.” Then she knew that no mollifying process of reasoning could alter the fact which she had to face.

Her mind grew acute in its pain. She began to make deductions, she looked at the date. The corroboration of the newspaper flashed upon her instantly, and with it came a keen longing to tell her husband who had written that article – he had wondered so often and so painfully. All at once she found herself framing a charge.

A clock struck somewhere, and as if the sound summoned her she got up from her seat and opened a little lacquered box that stood upon the mantel. It contained letters chiefly, but from among its few photographs she drew one of her husband. With this in her hand she went into her bedroom and shut the door and locked it.

When the maid brought Sir Lewis Ancram’s card up at five o’clock she found the door open. Mrs. Church was fitting a photograph into a little frame. She looked thoughtful, but charming; and she said so unhesitatingly, “Bring the gentleman up, Hetty,” that Hetty, noticing the curtains and the cushions in Mrs. Church’s sitting-room, brought the gentleman up with a smile.

At his step upon the stair her eyes dilated, she took a long breath and pulled herself together, her hand tightening on the corner of the table. He came in quickly and stood before her silent; he seemed to insist upon his presence and on his outstretched hands. His face was almost open and expansive in its achieved happiness; one would have said he was a fellow-being and not a Lieutenant-Governor. It looked as if to him the moment were emotional, but Mrs. Church almost immediately deprived it of that character. She gave him the right hand of ordinary intercourse and an agreeable smile.

“You are looking surprisingly well,” she said.

If this struck Ancram as inadequate he hesitated about saying so. The words upon his own lips were “My God! how glad I am to see you!” but he did not permit these to escape him either. Her friendliness was too cheerful to chill him, but he put his eyeglass into his eye, which he generally did when he wanted to reflect, behind a pause.

“And you are just the same,” he said. “A little more colour, perhaps.”

“I am not really, you know,” she returned, slipping her hand quickly out of his. “Since I saw you I am older – and wiser. Nearly two years older and wiser.”

The smile which he sent into her eyes was a visible effort to bring himself nearer to her.

“Where have you found so much instruction?” he asked, with tender banter.

Her laugh accepted the banter and ignored its quality. “In ‘The Modern Influence of the Vedic Books,’ among other places,” she said, and rang the bell. “Tea, Hetty.”

“I must be allowed to congratulate you upon that,” she went on pleasantly. “All the wise people are talking about it, aren’t they? And upon the rest of your achievements. They have been very remarkable.”

“They are very incomplete,” he hinted; “but I am glad you are disposed to be kind about them.”

They had dropped into chairs at the usual conversational distance, and he sat regarding her with a look which almost confessed that he did not understand.

“I suppose you had an execrable passage,” Judith volunteered, with sociable emphasis. “I can imagine what it must have been, as far as Aden, with the monsoon well on.”

“Execrable,” he repeated. He had come to a conclusion. It was part of her moral conception of their situation that he should begin his love-making over again. She would not tolerate their picking it up and going on with it. At least that was her attitude. He wondered, indulgently, how long she would be able to keep it.

“And Calcutta? I suppose you left it steaming?”

“I hardly know. I was there only a couple of days before the mail left. Almost the whole of July I have been on tour.”

“Oh – really?” said Mrs. Church. Her face assumed the slight sad impenetrability with which we give people to understand that they are trespassing upon ground hallowed by the association of grief. Ancram observed, with irritation, that she almost imposed silence upon him for a moment. Her look suggested to him that if he made any further careless allusions she might break into tears.

“Dear me!” Judith said softly at last, pouring out the tea, “how you bring everything back to me!”

He thought of saying boldly that he had come to bring her back to everything, but for some reason he refrained.

“Not unpleasantly, I hope?” He had an instant’s astonishment at finding such a commonplace upon his lips. He had thought of this in poems for months.

She gave him his tea, and a pathetic smile. It was so pathetic that he looked away from it, and his eye fell upon the portrait of John Church, framed, near her on the table.

“Do you think it is a good one?” she asked eagerly, following his glance. “Do you think it does him justice? It was so difficult,” she added softly, “to do him justice.”

Sir Lewis Ancram stirred his tea vigorously. He never took sugar, but the manipulation of his spoon enabled him to say, with candid emphasis, “He never got justice.”

For the moment he would abandon his personal interest, he would humour her conscience; he would dwell upon the past, for the moment.

“No,” she said, “I think he never did. Perhaps, now – ”

Ancram’s lip curled expressively.

“Yes, now,” he said – “now that no appreciation can encourage him, no applause stimulate him, now that he is for ever past it and them, they can find nothing too good to say of him. What a set of curs they are!”

“It is the old story,” she replied. Her eyes were full of sadness.

“Forgive me!” Ancram said involuntarily. Then he wondered for what he had asked to be forgiven.

“He was a martyr,” Judith went on calmly – “‘John Church, martyr,’ is the way they ought to write him down in the Service records. But there were a few people who knew him great and worthy while he lived. I was one – ”

“And I was another. There were more than you think.”

“He used to trust you. Especially in the matter that killed him – that educational matter – he often said that without your sympathy and support he would hardly know where to turn.”

“His policy was right. Events are showing now how right it was. Every day I find what excellent reason he had for all he did.”

“Yes,” Judith said, regarding him with a kind of remote curiosity. “You have succeeded to his difficulties. I wonder if you lie awake over them, as he used to do! And to all the rest. You have taken his place, and his hopes, and the honours that would have been his. How strange it seems!”

“Why should it seem so strange, Judith?”

She half turned and picked up a letter and a newspaper that lay on the table behind her.

“This is one reason,” she said, and handed them to him. “Those have reached me to-day, by some mistake in Mr. Doyle’s office, I suppose. One knows how these things happen in India. And I thought you might like to have them again.”

Ancram’s face fell suddenly into the lines of office. He took the papers into his long nervous hands in an accustomed way, and opened the pages of the letter with a stroke of his finger and thumb which told of a multitude of correspondence and a somewhat disregarding way of dealing with it. His eyes were riveted upon Doyle’s red pencil marks under “his beard grows with the tale of his blunders” in the letter and the newspaper, but his expression merely noted them for future reference.

“Thanks,” he said presently, settling the papers together again. “Perhaps it is as well that they should be in my possession. It was thoughtful of you. In other hands they might be misunderstood.”

She looked at him full and clearly, and something behind her eyes laughed at him.

“Oh, I think not!” she said. “Let me give you another cup of tea.”

“No more, thank you.” He drew his feet together in a preliminary movement of departure, and then thought better of it.

“I hope you understand,” he said, “that in – in official life one may be forced into hostile criticism occasionally, without the slightest personal animus.” His voice was almost severe – it was as he were compelled to reason with a subordinate in terms of reproof.

Judith smiled acquiescently.

“Oh, I am sure that must often be the case,” she said; and he knew that she was beyond all argument of his. She had adopted the official attitude; she was impersonal and complaisant and non-committal. Her comment would reach him later, through the authorised channels of the empty years. It would be silent and negative in its nature, the denial of promotion, but he would understand. Even in a matter of sentiment the official attitude had its decencies, its conveniences. He was vaguely aware of them as he rose, with a little cough, and fell back into his own.

Nevertheless it was with something like an inward groan that he abandoned it, and tried, for a few lingering minutes, to remind her of the man she had known in Calcutta.

“Judith,” he said desperately at the door, after she had bidden him a cheerful farewell, “I once thought I had reason to believe that you loved me.”

She was leaning rather heavily on the back of a chair. He had made only a short visit, but he had spent five years of this woman’s life since he arrived.

“Not you,” she said: “my idea of you. And that was a long time ago.”

She kept her tone of polite commonplace; there was nothing for it but a recognisant bow, which Ancram made in silence. As he took his way downstairs and out into Kensington, a malignant recollection of having heard something very like this before took possession of him and interfered with the heroic quality of his grief. If he had a Nemesis, he told himself, it was the feminine idea of him. But that was afterward.

One day, a year later, Sir Lewis Ancram paused in his successful conduct of the affairs of Bengal long enough to state the case with ultimate emphasis to a confidentially inquiring friend.

“As the wife of my late honoured chief,” he said, “I have the highest admiration and respect for Mrs. Church; but the world is wrong in thinking that I have ever made her a proposal of marriage; nor have I the slightest intention of doing so.”

THE END