“You are exactly like all the rest! You think that no woman can possibly care to read anything but novels! Now, as a matter of fact I am devoted to things like Vedic Books. If I had nothing else to do I should dig and delve in the archaic from morning till night.”
“The implication being,” returned Mr. Ancram sweetly, “that I have nothing else to do.”
Mrs. Daye compressed her lips in the manner of one whose patience is at an end. “It would serve you perfectly right,” she exclaimed, “if I didn’t tell you what a long review of it I saw the other day in one of the home papers.”
Ancram looked up with an almost imperceptible accession of interest.
“How nice!” he said lightly. “A fellow out here always feels himself in luck when his odds and ends get taken up at home. You don’t happen to remember the paper – or the date?”
“I’m almost sure it was the Times,” Mrs. Daye replied, with rather an accentuation of rejoiceful zeal; “but Richard can tell you. It was he who drew my attention to the notice.”
Mr. 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. “He gave Pierson a quarter of a lakh, for instance, to get his ethnological statistics together. It was easy to persuade him to recognise the value of these things.”
“It won’t be easy to get this man to recognise it,” persisted St. George. “He’s the sort of fellow who likes sanitation better than Sanscrit. He’s got a great scheme on for improving the village water-supply for Bengal, and I hear he wants to reorganise the vaccination business. Great man for the people!”
“Wants to spend every blessed pice on the bloomin’ ryot,” remarked Captain Delaine, with humorous resentment.
“Let us hope the people will be grateful,” said Ancram vaguely.
“They won’t, you know,” remarked Rhoda Daye to Mr. Pond. “They’ll never know. They are like the cattle – they plough and eat and sleep; and if a tenth of them die of cholera from bad water, they say it was written upon their foreheads; and if Government cleans the tanks and the tenth are spared, they say it is a good year and the gods are favourable.”
“Dear me!” said Mr. Pond: “that’s very interesting.”
“Isn’t it? And there’s lots more of it – all in the Calcutta newspapers, Mr. Pond: you should read them if you wish to be informed.” And Mr. Pond thought that an excellent idea.
When a Lieutenant-Governor drops into the conversational vortex of a Calcutta dinner-party he circles on indefinitely. The measure of his hospitality, the nature of his tastes, the direction of his policy, his quality as a master, and the measure of his popularity, are only a few of the heads under which he is discussed; while his wife is made the most of separately, with equal thoroughness and precision. Just before Mrs. Daye looked smilingly at Mrs. St. George, and the ladies flocked away, some one asked who Mrs. Church’s friends were in Calcutta, anyway: she seemed to know hardly any one person more than another – a delightful impartiality, the lady added, of course, after Lady Spence’s favouritism. The remark fell lightly enough upon the air, but Lewis Ancram did not let it pass. He looked at nobody in particular, but into space: it was a way he had when he let fall anything definite.
“Well,” he said, “I hope I may claim to be one. My pretension dates back five years – I used to know them in Kaligurh. I fancy Mrs. Church will be appreciated in Calcutta. She is that combination which is so much less rare than it used to be – a woman who is as fine as she is clever, and as clever as she is charming.”
“With all due deference to Mr. Ancram’s opinion,” remarked Mrs. Daye publicly, with one hand upon the banister, as the ladies went up to the drawing-room, “I should not call Mrs. Church a fine woman. She’s much too slender – really almost thin!”
“My dear mummie,” exclaimed Rhoda, as Mrs. St. George expressed her entire concurrence, “don’t be stupid! He didn’t mean that.”
Later Ancram stepped out of one of the open French windows and found her alone on the broad verandah, where orchids hung from the roof and big plants in pots made a spiky gloom in the corners. A tank in the garden glistened motionless below; the heavy fronds of a clump of sago palms waved up and down uncertainly in the moonlight. Now and then in the moist, soft air the scent of some hidden temple tree made itself felt. A cluster of huts to the right in the street they looked down upon stood half-concealed in a hanging blue cloud of smoke and fog. Far away in the suburbs the wailing cry of the jackals rose and fell and recommenced; nearer the drub-drubbing of a tom-tom announced that somewhere in the bazar they kept a marriage festival. But for themselves and the moonlight and the shadow of the creeper round the pillars, the verandah was quite empty, and through the windows came a song of Mrs. Delaine’s about love’s little hour. The situation made its voiceless demand, and neither of them were unconscious of it. Nevertheless he, lighting a cigarette, asked her if she would not come in and hear the music; and she said no – she liked it better there; whereat they both kept the silence that was necessary for the appreciation of Mrs. Delaine’s song. When it was over, Rhoda’s terrier, Buzz, came out with inquiring cordiality, and they talked of the growth of his accomplishments since Ancram had given him to her; and then, as if it were a development of the subject, Rhoda said:
“Mrs. Church has a very interesting face, don’t you think?”
“Very,” Ancram replied unhesitatingly.
“She looks as if she cared for beautiful things. Not only pictures and things, but beautiful conceptions – ideas, characteristics.”
“I understand,” Ancram returned: “she does.”
There was a pause, while they listened to the wail of the jackals, which had grown wild and high and tumultuous. As it died away, Rhoda looked up with a little smile.
“I like that,” she said; “it is about the only thing out here that is quite irrepressible. And – you knew her well at Kaligurh?”
“I think I may say I did,” Ancram replied, tossing the end of his cigarette down among the hibiscus bushes. “My dear girl, you must come in. There is nothing like a seductive moonlight night in India to give one fever.”
“I congratulate you,” said Miss Daye – and her tone had a defiance which she did not intend, though one could not say that she was unaware of its cynicism – “I congratulate you upon knowing her well. It is always an advantage to know the wife of the Lieutenant-Governor well. The most delightful things come of it – Commissionerships, and all sorts of things. I hope you will make her understand the importance of the Vedic Books in their bearing upon the modern problems of government.”
“You are always asking me to make acknowledgments – you want almost too many; but since it amuses you, I don’t mind.” Rhoda noted the little gleam in his eyes that contradicted this. “Sanscrit is to me now exactly what Greek was at Oxford – a stepping-stone, and nothing more. One must do something to distinguish oneself from the herd; and in India,