Sara Jeannette Duncan

“ 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!” ”

“ So much so, that Captain Thrush, A.D.C., registered his conviction that she was really rather a pretty girl—more in her than he thought; and the Honourable Mr. Lewis Ancram said to himself that she was enjoying, in anticipation, the prestige she would have a month later, and that the cleverest of women were deplorably susceptible to social ambition.
The Superintendent met them at the wharf, and John Church led the way up the great central avenue of palms, whose grey, shaven polls look as if they had been turned by some giant lathe, with his hand on the arm of this gentleman. ”

“ Nothing could be more obvious than that the girl did not care for him; and, granting this, was he morally at liberty, from the girl’s own point of view, to degrade her by a marriage which was, on her side, one of pure ambition? If her affections had been involved in the remotest degree——but he shrugged his shoulders at the idea of Rhoda Daye’s affections. He wished to Heaven, like any schoolboy, that she would fall in love with somebody else, but she was too damned clever to fall in love with anybody. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ They embraced strenuously, however, and Mohendra, with a corner of his nether drapery, tenderly wiped the eyes of Tarachand. For the moment the atmosphere became doubly charged with oil and sentiment, breaking into a little storm of phrases of affection and gestures of respect. When it had been gone through with, these gentlemen of Bengal sat opposite each other beaming, and turned their conversation into English as became gentlemen of Bengal. ”

“ Ancram looked on, as it were, at her conversation for a moment or two with his charming smile. Then, “Oh, dear lady,” he broke in, “let 86them go—those people. They are the vulgar considerations of the time which has been—which will be again. But this is a pause—made for us.”
She looked down at the rusty teak-leaves, and he almost told her, as he knocked them aside, how poetic a shadow clung round her eyelids. The curve of the drive brought them to the old stucco mansion, dreaming quietly and open-eyed over its great square porch of the Calcutta of Nuncomar and Philip Francis. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They have fought for religion, they may well fight for education. Let the game go on; let European officials grow fat on our taxes; let the wantons, their women, dance in the arms of men, and look into their faces with impudence, at the tamashos of the Burra Lât as before. But if the Sirkar robs the poor Bengali of his education let him beware. He will become without wings or feathers, while Shiva will protect the helpless and those with a just complaint.’
“Without doubt that will make a sensation,” Mohendra said, handing back the proof. ”

“ 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 ”

“ It’s delicious to live in a place that hasn’t any weather—only a permanent fervency. I like this old Calcutta. It’s so wicked and so rich and so cheerful. People are born and burned and born and burned, and nothing in the world matters. ”

“ A definition to the Aryan mind is always best made in rupees, and to be mulcted heavily by a court of law might give him a grieved and surprised, but to some extent convincing education in political ethics. It would necessarily interfere at the same time, however, with his untrammelled and joyous talent for the creation and circulation of cheap fiction; it would be a hard lesson, and in the course of it Tarachand would petition with fervid loyalty and real tears. Perhaps it was on some of these accounts that the Government of India had never run Tarachand in. ”

“ We shall have a palace and a park to live in, with a guard at the gates, and two outriders with swords to follow our carriage. We shall live in Calcutta, where there are trams and theatres and shops and people. The place carries knighthood if you are confirmed in it, and you will be Sir John Church—that gratifies the snob that is latent in me because I am a woman, John.” (She paused and glanced at his face, which had grown almost morose.) “Best of all,” she added lightly, “as Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal you will be practically sole ruler of eighty millions of people. ”

“ 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!” ”

“ It could never be said of Lewis Ancram that he did not choose his friends with taste, and in this case his discrimination had a foundation of respect which he was in the habit of freely mentioning. His admiration of Doyle was generous and frank, so generous and frank that one might have suspected a virtue in the expression of it. Notwithstanding this implication, it was entirely sincere, though he would occasionally qualify it.
“I often tell Doyle,” he said once to Rhoda, “that his independence is purely a matter of circumstance. ”

“ 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 goes against me to see disgrace on a high official. It is not pleasant. He means well—he means well. And at heart he is a very good fellow—personally I have had much agreeable conversation with him. Always he has asked me to his garden-parties.”
“He has set fire to his own beard, brother,” said the editor of the Word of Truth in the vernacular, spitting.
“Very true—oh, very true! And all the more we must attack him because I see the reptile English press, in Calcutta, in Bombay, in Allahabad, they are upholding this dacoity. That iss the only word—dacoity.” Mohendra rose. ”

“ It was perceived that the new King of Bengal would bring a certain picturesqueness to the sceptre, he was so comparatively young and so superlatively clever. In view of this the feelings of Hawkins of the Board of Revenue were lost sight of. And nothing could have been more signal than the approbation of the native newspapers. Mohendra Lal Chuckerbutty, in the Bengal Free Press, wept tears of joy in leading articles every day for a week. “Bengal,” said Mohendra, editorially, “has been given a man after her own heart.” By which Sir Lewis Ancram was ungrateful enough to be annoyed. ”

“ 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.” 124Colonel 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. ”

“ The Viceroy and Lady Scansleigh, of course! As if there could be the slightest doubt about anybody else! You will want to know next what I intend to ask them to. I have never known a girl take so little interest in her own wedding.”
“That brings us to the point,” said Rhoda.
An aroused suspicion shot into Mrs. Daye’s brown eyes. “What point, pray? No nonsense, now, Rhoda!”
“No nonsense this time, mummie; but no wedding either. I have decided—finally—not to marry Mr. Ancram.”
Mrs. Daye sat upright—pretty, plump, determined. ”

“ Ancram saw him at the same moment, and in the silence that asserted itself between them there was a touch of embarrassment which the man found sweet. He felt a foolish impulse to devote himself to turning John Church into an ornament to society.
“This sort of thing——” he suggested condoningly.
“Bores him. Intolerably. He grudges the time and the energy. He says there is so much to do.” ”

“ Once or twice he referred to their broken bond, asking her, with the appetite of his egotism, to give him the crystal truth of the reason she had accepted him.
“I accepted my idea of you,” she said simply, “which was not altogether an accurate one. Besides, I think a good deal about—a lot of questions of administration. I thought I would like to have a closer interest, perhaps a hand in them. Such fools of women do.”
After which they talked in a friendly way (it has been noted that Ancram was tolerant) about how essential ambition was to the bearableness of life in India. ”

“ Ancram’s eyebrows underwent a slight contraction. “Notice” did not seem to be a felicitous word.
“Oh, thanks,” he said. “Never mind; one generally comes across those things sooner or later.”
“I say, Ancram,” put in Mr. St. George, who had been listening on Mrs. Daye’s left, “you Asiatic Society fellows won’t get as much out of Church for your investigations as you did out of Spence.”
Ancram looked fixedly at a porcelain cherub that moored a boatful of pink-and-white confectionery to the nearest bank of the Viceregal roses. “Sir Griffiths was certainly generous,” he said. ”

“ It was the unctuous voice of the native apothecary.
“No, you may not. Damn you, I suppose you can help to rub him? Quick, Sparks; the turpentine!”
Next day at noon arrived Hari Lal, who had travelled many hours and many miles with a petition to the Chota Lât Sahib, wherein he and his village implored that the goats might eat the young shoots in the forest as aforetime; for if not—they were all poor men—how should the goats eat at all? Hari Lal arrived upon his beast, and saw from afar off that there was a chuprassie in red and gold upon the verandah whose favour would cost money. ”

“ But she isn’t a woman—she’s an intelligence. Conceive, I beg of you, the prospect of passing one’s life in conjugal relations with an intelligence!”
Judith assured herself vaguely that this brutality of language had its excuse. She could have told him very fluently that he ought not to marry Rhoda Daye under any circumstances, but something made it impossible that she should say anything of the sort. ”