His Honour, and a Lady

CHAPTER VIII

Philip Doyle did not know at all how it was that he found himself at the Maharajah of Pattore’s garden-party. He had not the honour of knowing the Maharajah of Pattore – his invitation was one of the many amiabilities which he declared he owed to his distinguished connection with the Bengal Secretariat in the person of Lewis Ancram. Certainly Ancram had asked him to accept, and take his, Ancram’s, apologies to the Maharajah; but that seemed no particular reason why he should be there. The fact was, Doyle assured himself, as he bowled along through the rice-fields of the suburbs to His Highness’s garden-house – the fact was, he was restless, he needed change supremely, and anything out of the common round had its value. Things in Calcutta had begun to wear an unusually hard and irritating look; he felt his eye for the delinquencies of human nature growing keener and more critical. This state of things, taken in connection with the possession of an undoubted sense of humour, Doyle recognised to be grave. He told himself that, although he was unaware of anything actually physically wrong, the effects of the climate were most insidious, and he made it a subject of congratulation that his passage was taken in the Oriental.

There was a festival arch over the gate when he reached it, and a multitude of little flags, and “Wellcome” pendent in yellow marigolds. Doyle was pleased that he had come. It was a long time since he had attended a Maharajah’s garden party; its features would be fresh and in some ways soothing. He shook hands gravely with the Maharajah’s eldest son, a slender, subdued, cross-eyed young man in an embroidered smoking-cap and a purple silk frock-coat, and said “Thank you – thank you!” for a programme of the afternoon’s diversions. The programme was printed in gold letters, and he was glad to learn from it that His Highness’s country residence was called “Floral Bower.” This was entirely as it should be. He noticed that the Maharajah had provided wrestling and dancing and theatricals for the amusement of his guests, and resolved to see them all. He had a pleasant sense of a strain momentarily removed, and he did not importune himself to explain it. There were very few English people in the crowd that flocked about the grounds, following with docile admiration the movements of the principal guests; it was easy to keep away from them. He had only to stroll about, and look at the curiously futile arrangement of ponds and grottoes and fountains and summer-houses, and observe how pretty a rose-bush could be in spite of everything and how appropriately brilliant the clothes of the Maharajah’s friends were. Some of the younger ones were playing football, with much laughter and screaming and wonderfully high kicks. He stood and watched them, smilingly reflecting that he would back a couple of Harrovians against the lot. His eyes were still on the boys and the smile was still on his lips when he found himself considering that he would reach England just about the day of Ancram’s wedding. Then he realised that Ancram’s wedding had for him some of the characteristics of a physical ailment which one tries, by forgetting, to conjure out of existence. The football became less amusing, and he was conscious that much of its significance had faded out of the Maharajah’s garden-party. Nevertheless he followed the feebly curved path which led to His Highness’s private menagerie, and it was while he was returning the unsympathetic gaze of a very mangy tiger in a very ramshackle cage, that the reflection came between them, as forcibly as if it were a new one, that he would come back next cold weather to an empty house. Ancram would be married. He acknowledged, still carefully examining the tiger, that he would regret the man less if his departure were due to any other reason; and he tried to determine, without much success, to what extent he could blame himself in that his liking for Ancram had dwindled so considerably during the last few months. By the time he turned his back upon the zoölogical attraction of the afternoon he had fallen into the reverie from which he hoped to escape in the Oriental– the recollection, perfect in every detail, of the five times he had met Rhoda Daye before her engagement, and a little topaz necklace she had worn three times out of the five, and the several things that he wished he had said, and especially the agreeable exaltation of spirit in which he had called himself, after every one of these interviews, an elderly fool.

His first thought when he saw her, a moment after, walking towards him with her father, was of escape – the second quickened his steps in her direction, for she had bowed, and after that there could be no idea of going. He concluded later, with definiteness, that it would have been distinctly rude when there were not more than twenty Europeans in the place. Colonel Daye’s solid white-whiskered countenance broke into a square smile as Doyle approached – a smile which expressed that it was rather a joke to meet a friend at a maharajah’s garden party.

“You’re a singular being,” he said, as they shook hands; “one never comes across you in the haunts of civilisation. Here’s my excuse.” Colonel Daye indicated his daughter. “Would come. Offered to take her to the races instead – wouldn’t look at it!”

“If I had no reason for coming before, I’ve found one,” said Doyle, with an inclination towards Rhoda that laid the compliment at her feet. There were some points about Philip Doyle that no emotional experience could altogether subdue. He would have said precisely the same thing, with precisely the same twinkle, to any woman he liked.

Rhoda looked at him gravely, having no response ready. If the in-drawing of her under-lip betrayed anything it was that she felt the least bit hurt – which, in Rhoda Daye, was ridiculous. If she had been asked she might have explained it by the fact that there were people whom she preferred to take her seriously, and in the ten seconds during which her eyes questioned this politeness she grew gradually delicately pink under his.

“Rum business, isn’t it?” Colonel Daye went on, tapping the backs of his legs with his stick. “Hallo! there’s Grigg. I must see Grigg – do you mind? Don’t wait, you know – just walk on. I’ll catch you up in ten minutes.”

Without further delay Colonel Daye joined Grigg.

“That’s like my father,” said the girl, with a trace of embarrassment: “he never can resist the temptation of disposing of me, if it’s only for ten minutes. We ought to feel better acquainted than we do. I’ve been out seven months now, but it is still only before people that we dare to chaff each other. I think,” she added, turning her grey eyes seriously upon Doyle, “that he finds it awkward to have so much of the society of a young lady who requires to be entertained.”

“What a pity that is!” Doyle said involuntarily.

She was going to reply with one of her bright, easy cynicisms, and then for some reason changed her mind. “I don’t know about the advantage of very deep affections,” she said involuntarily, and there was no flippancy in her tone. Doyle fancied that he detected a note of pathos instead, but perhaps he was looking for it.

They were walking with a straggling company of baboos in white muslin down a double row of plantains towards the wrestling ring. Involuntarily he made their pace slower.

“You can’t be touched by that ignoble spirit of the age – already.”

Miss Daye felt her moral temperature fall several degrees from the buoyant condition in which she contrived to keep it as a rule. To say she experienced a chill in the region of her conscience is perhaps to put it grotesquely, but she certainly felt inclined to ask Philip Doyle with some astonishment what difference it made to him.

“The spirit of the age is an annoying thing. It robs one of all originality.”

“Pray,” he said, “be original in some other direction. You have a very considerable choice.”

His manner disarmed his words. It was grave, almost pleading. She wondered why she was not angry, but the fact remained that she was only vaguely touched, and rather unhappy. Then he spoiled it.

“In my trade we get into dogmatic ways,” he apologised. “You won’t mind the carpings of an elderly lawyer who has won a bad eminence for himself by living for twenty years in Calcutta. By the way, I had Ancram’s apologies to deliver to the Maharajah. If he had known he would perhaps have entrusted me with more important ones.” Doyle made this speech in general compensation, to any one who wanted it, for being near her – with her. If he expected blushing confusion he failed to find it.

“He didn’t know,” she said indifferently; “and if he had – Oh, there are the wrestlers.” She looked at them for a moment with disfavour. “Do you like them? I think they are like performing animals.”

The men separated for a moment and rubbed their shining brown bodies with earth. Somewhere near the gate the Maharajah’s band struck up “God Save the Queen,” four prancing pennons appeared over the tops of the bushes, and with one accord the crowd moved off in that direction. A moment later His Highness was doubling up in appreciation of His Excellency’s condescension in arriving. His Excellency himself was surrounded ten feet deep by his awe-struck and delighted fellow-guests, and the wrestlers, bereft of an audience, sat down and spat.

What Doyle always told himself that he must do with regard to Miss Daye was to approach her in the vein of polished commonplace – polished because he owed it to himself, commonplace because its after effect on the nerves he found to be simpler. Realising his departure from this prescribed course, he fervently set himself down a hectoring idiot, and looked round for Colonel Daye. Colonel Daye radiated the commonplace; he was a most usual person. In his society there was not the slightest danger of saying anything embarrassing. But he was not even remotely visible.

“Believe me,” said Rhoda, with sudden divination, “we shall be lucky if we see my father again in half an hour. I am very sorry, but he really is a most unnatural parent.” There was a touch of defiance in her laugh. He should not lecture her again. “Where shall we go?”

“Have you seen the acting?”

“Yes. It’s a conversation between Rama and Shiva. Rama wears a red wig and Shiva wears a yellow one; the rest is tinsel and pink muslin. They sit on the floor and argue – that is the play. While one argues the other chews betel and looks at the audience. I’ve seen better acting,” she added demurely, “at the Corinthian Theatre.”

Doyle laughed irresistibly. Calcutta’s theatrical resources, even in the season, lend themselves to frivolous suggestion.

“I could show you the Maharajah’s private chapel, if you like,” she said.

Doyle replied that nothing could be more amusing than a Maharajah’s private chapel; and as they walked together among the rose bushes he felt every consideration, every scruple almost, slip away from him in the one desire her nearness always brought him – the desire for that kind of talk with her which should seal the right he vaguely knew was his to be acknowledged in a privacy of her soul that was barred against other people. Once or twice before he had seemed almost to win it, and by some gay little saying which rang false upon his sincerity she had driven him back. She assuredly did not seem inclined to give him an opportunity this afternoon. It must be confessed that she chattered, in that wilful, light, irrelevant way that so stimulated his desire to be upon tenderly serious terms with her, by no means as her mentor, but for his own satisfaction and delight. She chattered, with her sensitiveness alive at every point to what he should say and to what she thought she could guess he was thinking. She believed him critical, which was distressing in view of her conviction that he could never understand her – never! He belonged to an older school, to another world; his feminine ideal was probably some sister or mother, with many virtues and no opinions. He was a person to respect and admire – she did respect and she did admire him – but to expect any degree of fellowship from him was absurd. The incomprehensible thing was that this conclusion should have any soreness about it. For the moment she was not aware that this was so; her perception of it had a way of coming afterwards, when she was alone.

“Here it is,” she said, at the entrance of a little grotto made of stucco and painted to look like rock, serving no particular purpose, by the edge of an artificial lake. “And here is the shrine and the divinity!”

As a matter of fact, there was a niche in the wall, and the niche held Hanuman with his monkey face and his stolen pineapple, coy in painted plaster.

Miss Daye looked at the figure with a crisp assumption of interest. “Isn’t he amusing!” she remarked: “‘Bloomin’ idol made o’ mud’!”

“And so this is where you think His Highness comes to say his prayers?” Doyle said, smiling.

“Perhaps he has a baboo to say them for him,” she returned, as they strolled out. “That would be an ideal occupation for a baboo – to make representations on behalf of one exalted personage to another. I wonder what he asks Hanuman for! To be protected from all the evils of this life, and to wake up in the next another maharajah!”

He was so engaged with the airiness of her whimsicality and the tilt of the feather in her hat that he found no answer ready for this, and to her imagination he took the liberty of disapproving her flippancy. Afterwards she told herself that it was not a liberty – that the difference in their ages made it a right if he chose to take it – but at the moment the idea incited her to deepen his impression. She cast about her for the wherewithal to make the completest revelation of her cheaper qualities. In a crisis of candour she would show him just how audacious and superficial and trivial she could be. Women have some curious instincts.

“I am dying,” she said, with vivacity, “to see how His Highness keeps house. They say he has a golden chandelier and the prettiest harem in Bengal. And I confide to you, Mr. Doyle, that I should like a glass of simpkin – immensely. It goes to my head in the most amusing way in the middle of the afternoon.”

“His ideal young woman,” she declared to herself, “would have said ‘champagne’ – no, she would have preferred tea; and she would have died rather than mention the harem.”

But it must be confessed that Philip Doyle was more occupied for the moment with the curve of her lips than with anything that came out of them, except in so far that everything she said seemed to place him more definitely at a distance.

“I’m afraid,” he returned, “that the ladies are all under double lock and key for the occasion, but there ought to be no difficulty about the champagne and the chandelier.”

At that moment Colonel Daye’s tall grey hat came into view, threading the turbaned crowd in obvious quest. Rhoda did not see it, and Doyle immediately found a short cut to the house which avoided the encounter. He had suddenly remembered several things that he wanted to say. They climbed a flight of marble stairs covered with some dirty yards of matting, and found themselves almost alone in the Maharajah’s drawing-room. The Viceroy had partaken of an ice and gone down again, taking the occasion with him; and the long table at the end of the room was almost as heavily laden as when the confectioner had set it forth.

“A little pink cake in a paper boat, please,” she commanded, “with jam inside”; and then, as Doyle went for it, she sat down on one of Pattore’s big brocaded sofas, and crossed her pretty feet, and looked at the chromolithographs of the Prince and Princess of Wales askew upon the wall, and wondered why she was making a fool of herself.

“I’ve brought you a cup of coffee: do you mind?” he asked, coming back with it. “His Highness’ intentions are excellent, but the source of his supplies is obscure. I tried the champagne,” he added apologetically: “it’s unspeakable!”

No, Miss Daye did not mind. Doyle sat down at the other end of the sofa, and reflected that another quarter of an hour was all he could possibly expect, and then —

“I am going home, Miss Daye,” he said.

Since there was no other way of introducing himself to her consideration, he would do it with a pitchfork.

“I knew you were. Soon?”

“The day after to-morrow, in the Oriental. I suppose Ancram told you?”

“I believe he did. You and he are great friends, aren’t you?”

“We live together. Men must be able to tolerate each other pretty fairly to do that.”

“How long shall you be in England?”

“Six months, I hope.”

She was silent, and he fancied she was thinking, with natural resentment, that he might have postponed his departure until after the wedding. Doyle hated a lie more than most people, but he felt the situation required that he should say something.

“The exigency of my going is unkind,” he blundered. “It will deprive me of the pleasure of offering Ancram my congratulations.”

There was only the faintest flavour of mendacity about this; but she detected it, and fitted it, with that unerring feminine instinct we hear so much about, to her thought. For an instant she seemed lost in buttoning her glove; then she looked up, with a little added colour.

“Don’t tamper with your sincerity for me,” she said quickly: “I’m not worth it. It’s very kind of you to consider my feelings, but I would much rather have the plain truth between us – that you don’t approve of me or of the – the marriage. I jar upon you – oh! I see it! a dozen times in half an hour – and you are sorry for your friend. For his sake you even try to like me: I’ve seen you doing it. Please don’t: it distresses me to know that you take that trouble – ”

“Here you are!” exclaimed Colonel Daye, in the doorway. “Much obliged to you, Doyle, really, for taking care of this little girl. Most difficult man to get hold of, Grigg.”

CHAPTER IX

It has been obvious, I hope, that Lewis Ancram was temperamentally equal to adjusting himself to a situation. His philosophy was really characteristic of him; and none the less so because it had a pessimistic and artistic tinge, and he wore it in a Persian motto inside a crest ring on his little finger. It can hardly be said that he adjusted himself to his engagement and his future, when it became apparent to him that the one could not be broken or the other changed, with cheerfulness – for cheerfulness was too commonplace a mental condition to have characterised Mr. Ancram under the happiest circumstances. Neither can it be denied, however, that he did it with a good deal of dignity and some tact. He permitted himself to lose the abstraction that had been overcoming him so habitually in Rhoda’s society, and he said more of those clever things to her which had been temporarily obscured by the cloud on his spirits. They saw one another rather oftener than usual in the fortnight following the evening on which Mr. Ancram thought he could suggest a course for their mutual benefit to Miss Daye and her daintily authoritative manner with him convinced him that his chains were riveted very firmly. At times he told himself that she had, after all, affectionate potentialities, though he met the problem of evolving them with a shrug. He disposed himself to accept all the ameliorations of the situation that were available, all the consolations he could find. One of the subtlest and therefore most appreciable of these was the necessity, which his earlier confidence involved, of telling Judith Church in a few suitably hesitating and well-chosen words that things were irrevocable. Judith kept silence for a moment, and then, with a gravely impersonal smile, she said, “I hope – and think – you may be happier than you expect,” in a manner which made further discussion of the matter impossible. It cannot be doubted, however, that she was able to convey to him an under-current of her sympathy without embarrassment. Otherwise he would hardly have found himself so dependent on the odd half-hours during which they talked of Henley’s verses and Swan’s pictures and the possibility of barricading oneself against the moral effect of India. Ancram often gave her to understand, in one delicate way or another, that if there were a few more women like her in the country it could be done.

The opinion seemed to be general, though perhaps nobody else formulated it exactly in those terms. People went about assuring each other that Mrs. Church was the most charming social success, asserting this as if they recognised that it was somewhat unusual to confer such a decoration upon a lady whose husband had as yet none whatever. People said she was a really fascinating woman in a manner which at once condoned and suggested her undistinguished antecedents – an art which practice has made perfect in the bureaucratic circles of India. They even went so far as to add that the atmosphere of Belvedere had entirely changed since the beginning of the officiating period – which was preposterous, for nothing could change the social atmosphere of any court of Calcutta short of the reconstruction of the Indian Empire. The total of this meant that Mrs. Church had a good memory, much considerateness, an agreeable disposition, and pretty clothes. Her virtues, certainly her virtues as I know them, would hardly be revealed in the fierce light which beats upon the wife of an acting Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal from November until April, though a shadow of one of them might have been detected in the way she behaved to the Dayes. Ancram thought her divine in this, but she was only an honest woman with a temptation and a scruple. Her dignity made it difficult; she was obliged to think out delicate little ways of offering them her friendship in the scanty half hours she had to herself after dinner, while the unending scratch of her husband’s pen came through the portière that hung across the doorway into his dressing-room. What she could do without consulting them she did; though it is not likely that Colonel Daye will ever attribute the remarkable smoothness of his official path at this time to anything but the spirit of appreciation in which he at last found Government disposed to regard his services. The rest was not so easy, because she had to count with Rhoda. On this point her mother was in the habit of invoking Rhoda’s better nature, with regrettable futility. Mrs. Daye said that for her part she accepted an invitation in the spirit in which it was given, and it is to be feared that no lady in Mrs. Church’s “official position” would be compelled to make overtures twice to Mrs. Daye, who told other ladies, in confidence, that she had the best reason to believe Mrs. Church a noble-minded woman – a beautiful soul. It distressed her that she was not able to say this to Rhoda also, to be frank with Rhoda, to discuss the situation and perhaps to hint to the dear child that her non-responsiveness to Mrs. Church’s very kind attitude looked “the least bit in the world like the little green monster, you know, dearest one.” It was not, Mrs. Daye acknowledged, that Rhoda actively resisted Mrs. Church’s interest; she simply appeared to be unaware of it, and sat on a chair beside that sweet woman in the Belvedere drawing-room with the effect of being a hundred miles away. Mrs. Daye sometimes asked herself apprehensively how soon Mrs. Church would grow tired of coaxing Rhoda, how long their present beatitudes might be expected to last. It was with this consideration in mind that she went to her daughter’s room the day after the Maharajah of Pattore’s garden-party, which was Thursday. The windows of that apartment were wide open, letting in great squares of vivid sunlight, and their muslin curtains bellied inward with the pleasant north wind. It brought gusts of sound from the life outside – the high plaintive cheeling of the kites, the interminable cawing of the crows, the swish of the palm fronds, the scolding of the mynas; and all this life and light and clamour seemed to centre in and circle about the yellow-haired girl who sat, half-dressed, on the edge of the bed writing a letter. She laid it aside face downward, at her mother’s knock, and that amiable lady found her daughter seated before the looking-glass with a crumpled little brown ayah brushing her hair.

Mrs. Daye cried out at the glare, at the noise. “It’s like living in one of those fretwork marble summer-houses at Delhi where the kings of what-you-may-call-it dynasty kept their wives!” she declared, with her hands pressed on her eyes and a thumb in each ear; and when the shutters were closed and the room reduced to some degree of tranquillity, broken by glowing points where the green slats came short of the sash, she demanded eau-de-cologne and sank into a chair. “I’ve come for ‘Cruelle Enigme,’ Rhoda,” Mrs. Daye announced.

“No, you haven’t, mummie. And besides, you can’t have it – it isn’t a nice book for you to read.”

“Can’t I?” Mrs. Daye asked plaintively. “Well, dear, I suppose I must take your opinion – you know how much my wretched nerves will stand. From all I hear I certainly can’t be too thankful to you for protecting me from Zola.”

“Ayah,” Rhoda commanded in the ayah’s tongue, “give me the yellow book on the little table – the yellow one, owl’s daughter! Here’s one you can have, mother,” she said, turning over a few of the leaves with a touch that was a caress – “‘Robert Helmont’ – you haven’t read that.”

Mrs. Daye glanced at it without enthusiasm.

“It’s about a war, isn’t it? I’m not fond of books about wars as a rule, they’re so ‘bluggy,’” and the lady made a little face; “but of course – oh yes, Daudet, I know he would be charming even if he was bluggy. Rhoda, don’t make any engagement for Sunday afternoon. I’ve accepted an invitation from Belvedere for a river-party.”

The face in the looking-glass showed the least contraction between the eyebrows. The ayah saw it, and brushed even more gently than before. Mrs. Daye was watching for it, and hurried on. “I gather from Mrs. Church’s extremely kind note – she writes herself, and not the aide-de-camp – that it is a little fête she is making especially, in a manner, for you and Mr. Ancram, dear – in celebration, as it were. She has asked only people we know very well indeed; it is really almost a family affair. Very sweet of her I call it, though of course Lewis Ancram is an old friend of – of the Lieutenant-Governor’s.”

The contraction between the girl’s brows deepened seriously, gave place to a considering air, and for a moment she looked straight into her own eyes in the glass and said nothing. They rewarded her presently with a bubble of mischievous intelligence, which almost broke into a smile. Mrs. Daye continued to the effect that nothing did one so much good as a little jaunt on the river – it seemed to blow the malaria out of one’s system – for her part she would give up anything for it. But Rhoda had no other engagement?

“Oh dear no!” Miss Daye replied. “There is nothing in the world to interfere!”

“Then you will go, dearest one?”

“I shall be delighted.”

“My darling child, you have relieved my mind! I was so afraid that some silly little fad – I know how much you dislike the glare of the river – ” then, forgetfully, “I will write at once and accept for us all.” Mrs. Daye implanted a kiss upon her daughter’s forehead, with a sense that she was picturesquely acknowledging dutiful obedience, and rustled out. “Robert Helmont” remained on the floor beside her chair, and an indefinitely pleasant freshness was diffused where she had been.

As Rhoda twisted her hair a little uncontrollable smile came to her lips and stayed there. “Ayah, worthy one,” she said, “give me the letter from the bed”; and having read what she had written she slowly tore it into very small pieces. “After all,” she reflected, “that would be a stupid way.”