John Church listened with the look of putting his satisfaction under constraint. He listened in the official manner, as one who has many things to hear, with his head bent forward and toward his wife, and his eyes consideringly upon the floor.
“I am glad of that,” he said nervously when she had finished – “I am glad of that. There is a great deal to be done in Bengal, and matters will be simplified if they recognise it.“
“I think you would find a great deal to do anywhere, John,” remarked Mrs. Church. It could almost be said that she spoke kindly, and a sensitive observer with a proper estimate of her husband might have found this irritating. During the little while that followed, however, as they talked, in the warmth of this unexpected gratification, of what his work had been as a Commissioner, and what it might be as a Lieutenant-Governor, it would have been evident even to an observer who was not sensitive, that here they touched a high-water mark of their intercourse, a climax in the cordiality of their mutual understanding.
“By the way,” said John Church, getting up to go, “when is Ancram to be married?”
“I don’t know!” Mrs. Church threw some interest into the words. Her inflection said that she was surprised that she didn’t know. “He only mentions Miss Daye to call her a ‘study in femininity,’ which looks as if he might be submitting to a protracted process of education at her hands. Certainly not soon, I should think.”
“Ancram must be close on forty, with good pay, good position, good prospects. He shouldn’t put it off any longer: a man has no business to grow old alone in this country. He deteriorates.”
Church pulled himself together with a shake – he was a loose-hung creature – and put a nervous hand up to his necktie. Then he pulled down his cuffs, considered his hat with the effect of making quite sure that there was nothing more to say, and turned to go.
“You might send me over something,” he said, glancing at his watch. “I won’t be able to come back to breakfast. Already I’ve lost three-quarters of an hour from work. Government doesn’t pay me for that. You are pleased, then?” he added, looking round at her in a half shamefaced way from the door.
Mrs. Church had returned to the writing-table, and had again taken up her pen. She leaned back in her chair and lifted her delicate chin with a smile that had custom and patience in it.
“Very pleased indeed,” she said; and he went away. The intelligent observer, again, would have wondered how he refrained from going back and kissing her. Perhaps the custom and the patience in her smile would have lent themselves to the explanation. At all events, he went away.
He was forty-two, exactly double her age, when he married Judith Strange, eight years before, in Stoneborough, a small manufacturing town in the north of England, where her father was a Nonconformist minister. He was her opportunity, and she had taken him, with private congratulation that she could respect him and private qualms as to whether her respect was her crucial test of him – considered in the light of an opportunity. Not in any sordid sense; she would be more inclined perhaps to apologise for herself than I am to apologise for her. But with an inordinately hungry capacity for life she had the narrowest conditions to live in. She knew by intuition that the world was full of colour and passion, and when one is tormented with this sort of knowledge it becomes more than ever grievous to inhabit one of its small, dull, grimy blind alleys, with the single anticipation of enduring to a smoke-blackened old age, like one of Stoneborough’s lesser chimneys. There was nothing ideal about John Church except his honesty, – already he stooped, already he was grey, sallow and serious, with the slenderest interest in questions that could not express their utility in unquestionable facts, – but when he asked her to marry him, the wall at the end of the alley fell down, and a breeze stole in from the far East, with a vision of palms and pomegranates. She accepted him for the sake of her imagination, wishing profoundly that he was not so much like her father, with what her mother thought almost improper promptitude; and for a long time, although he still stood outside it, her imagination loyally rewarded her. She felt the East to her fingertips, and her mere physical life there became a thing of vivid experience, to be valued for itself. If her husband confounded this joy in her expansion with the orthodox happiness of a devoted wife, it cannot be said that he was particularly to blame for his mistake, for numbers of other people made it also. And when, after eight years of his companionship, and that of the sunburned policeman, the anæmic magistrate, the agreeable doctor, their wives, the odd colonel, and the stray subalterns that constituted society in the stations they lived in, she began to show a little lassitude of spirit, he put it down not unnaturally to the climate, and wished he could conscientiously take a few months’ leave, since nothing would induce her to go to England without him. By this time India had become a resource, India that lay all about her, glowing, profuse, mysterious, fascinating, a place in which she felt that she had no part, could never have any part, but that of a spectator. The gesture of a fakir, the red masses of the gold-mohur trees against the blue intensity of the sky, the heavy sweetness of the evening wind, the soft colour and curves of the homeward driven cattle, the little naked babies with their jingling anklets in the bazar – she had begun to turn to these things seeking their gift of pleasure jealously, consciously thankful that, in spite of the Amusement Club, she could never be altogether bored.
John Church went back to work with his satisfaction sweetened by the fact that his wife had told him that she was very pleased indeed, while Mrs. Church answered the Honourable Mr. Lewis Ancram’s letter.
“I have been making my own acquaintance this morning,” she said among other things, “as an ambitious woman. It is intoxicating, after this idle, sun-filled, wondering life, with the single supreme care that John does not wear ragged collars to church – as a Commissioner he ought to be extravagant in collars – to be confronted with something to assume and carry out, a part to play, with all India looking on. Don’t imagine a lofty intention on my part to inspire my husband’s Resolutions. I assure you I see myself differently. Perhaps, after all, it is the foolish anticipation of my state and splendour that has excited my vain imagination as much as anything. Already, prospectively, I murmur lame nothings into the ear of the Viceroy as he takes me down to dinner! But I am preposterously delighted. To-morrow is Sunday – I have an irreverent desire for the prayers of all the churches.”
CHAPTER II
“Here you are at last!” remarked Mrs. Daye with vivacity, taking the three long, pronounced and rustling steps which she took so very well, toward the last comer to her dinner party, who made his leisurely entrance between the portières, pocketing his handkerchief. “Don’t say you have been to church,” she went on, holding out a condoning hand, “for none of us will believe you.”
Although Mr. Ancram’s lips curved back over his rather prominent teeth in a narrow smile as he put up his eyeglass and looked down at his hostess, Mrs. Daye felt the levity fade out of her expression: she had to put compulsion on herself to keep it in her face. It was as if she, his prospective mother-in-law, had taken the least of liberties with Mr. Ancram.
“Does the only road to forgiveness lie through the church gate?” he asked. His voice was high and agreeable; it expressed discrimination; his tone implied that, if the occasion had required it, he could have said something much cleverer easily – an implication no one who knew him would have found unwarrantable.
“The padres say it does, as a rule, Ancram,” put in Colonel Daye. “In this case it lies through the dining-room door. Will you take my wife in?”
In a corner of the room, which she might have chosen for its warm obscurity, Rhoda Daye watched with curious scrutiny the lightest detail of Mr. Lewis Ancram’s behaviour. An elderly gentleman, with pulpy red cheeks and an amplitude of white waistcoat, stood beside her chair, swaying