CHAPTER VI.
“Mummie,” remarked Miss Daye, as she pushed on the fingers of a new pairof gloves in the drawing-room, “the conviction grows upon me that Ishall never become Mrs. Ancram.”
“Rhoda, if you talk like that you will certainly bring on one of myheadaches, and it will be the third in a fortnight that I’ll have tothank you for. Did I or did I not send home the order for your weddingdress by last mail?”
“You did, mummie. But you could always advertise it in the local papers,you know. Could you fasten this? ‘_By Private Sale—A Wedding Dressoriginally intended for the Secretariat. Ivory Satin and Lace. Skirtthirty-nine inches, waist twenty-one. Warranted never been worn._’Thanks so much!”
“Rhoda! you are capable of anything——”
“Of most things, mummie, I admit. But I begin to fear, not of that!”
“Are you going to break it off? There he is this minute! Don’t let himcome in here, dear—he would know instantly that we had been discussinghim. You _have_ upset me so!”
“He shan’t.” Miss Daye walked to the door. “You are not to come anyfarther, my dear sir,” said she to the Honourable Mr. Ancram among theJapanese pots on the landing: “mummie’s going to have a headache, anddoesn’t want you. I’m quite ready!” She stood for a moment in thedoorway, her pretty shoulders making admirably correct lines, in aclinging grey skirt and silver braided zouave, that showed a charmingglimpse of blue silk blouse underneath, buttoning her second glove.Ancram groaned within himself that he must have proposed to her becauseshe was _chic_. Then she looked back. “Don’t worry, mummie. I’ll let youknow within a fortnight. You won’t have to advertise it after all—youcan countermand the order by telegraph!” Mrs. Daye, on the sofa, threwup her hands speechlessly, and her eyes when her daughter finally leftthe room were round with apprehension.
Ancram had come to take his betrothed for a drive in his dog-cart. It isa privilege Calcutta offers to people who are engaged: they arepermitted to drive about together in dog-carts. The act has the bindingforce of a public confession. Mr. Ancram and Miss Daye had takenadvantage of it in the beginning. By this time it would be more properto say that they were taking refuge in it.
He had seen Mrs. Church several times since the evening on which he hadput her into her carriage at the gates of Hastings House, and got intohis own trap and driven home with a feeling which he analysed aspurified but not resigned. She had been very quiet, very self-contained,apparently content to be gracious and effective in the gown of theoccasion; but once or twice he fancied he saw a look of waiting, a gleamof expectancy, behind her eyes. It was this that encouraged him to askher, at the first opportunity, whether she did not think he would beperfectly justified in bringing the thing to an end. She answered him,with an unalterable look, that she could not help him in that decision;and he brought away a sense that he had not obtained the support onwhich he had depended. This did not prevent him from arriving verydefinitely at the decision in question unaided. Nothing could be moreobvious than that the girl did not care for him; and, granting this, washe morally at liberty, from the girl’s own point of view, to degrade herby a marriage which was, on her side, one of pure ambition? If heraffections had been involved in the remotest degree——but he shrugged hisshoulders at the idea of Rhoda Daye’s affections. He wished to Heaven,like any schoolboy, that she would fall in love with somebody else, butshe was too damned clever to fall in love with anybody. The thing wouldrequire a little finessing; of course the rupture must come from her.There were things a man in his position had to be careful about. Butwith a direct suggestion——Nothing was more obvious than that she did notcare for him. He would make her say so. After that, a direct suggestionwould be simple—and wholly justifiable. These were Mr. Lewis Ancram’sreflections as he stood, hat in hand, on Mrs. Daye’s landing. They wereless involved than usual, but in equations of personal responsibilityMr. Ancram liked a formula. By the intelligent manipulation of a formulaone could so often eliminate the personal element and transfer theresponsibility to the other side.
The beginning was not auspicious.
“Is that _le dernier cri_?” he asked, looking at her hat as she camelightly down the steps.
“Papa’s? Poor dear! yes. It was forty rupees, at Phelps’s. You’ll findme extravagant—but horribly!—especially in hats. I adore hats; they’resuch conceptions, such ideas! I mean to insist upon a settlement inhats—three every season, in perpetuity.”
They were well into the street and half-way to Chowringhee before hefound the remark, at which he forced himself to smile, that he supposeda time would arrive when her affections in millinery would transferthemselves to bonnets. The occasion was not propitious for suggestionsbased on emotional confessions. The broad roads that wind over theMaidan were full of gaiety and the definite facts of smart carriages andpretty bowing women. The sun caught the tops of the masts in the river,and twinkled there; it mellowed the pillars of the bathing-ghats, andwas also reflected magnificently from the plate-glass mirrors with whichRam Das Mookerjee had adorned the sides of his barouche. A white patch amile away resolved itself into a mass of black heads and draped bodieswatching a cricket match. Mynas chattered by the wayside, stray notes ofbugle practice came crisply over the walls of the Fort; there was aneffect of cheerfulness even in the tinkle of the tram bells. If thescene had required any further touch of high spirits, it was supplied inthe turn-out of the Maharajah of Thuginugger, who drove abroad in apurple velvet dressing gown, with pink outriders. Ancram had a finesusceptibility to atmospheric effect, and it bade him talk about theMaharajah of Thuginugger.
“That chap Ezra, the Simla diamond merchant, told me that he went withthe Maharajah through his go-downs once. His Highness likes pearls. Ezrasaw them standing about in bucketsful.”
“Common wooden buckets?”
“I believe so.”
“How satisfying! Tell me some more.”
“There isn’t any more. The rest was between Ezra and the Maharajah. Idare say there was a margin of profit somewhere. What queer weather theyseem to be having at home!”
“It’s delicious to live in a place that hasn’t any weather—only apermanent fervency. I like this old Calcutta. It’s so wicked and so richand so cheerful. People are born and burned and born and burned, andnothing in the world matters. Their nice little stone gods are so easyto please, too. A handful of rice, a few marigold chains, a goat or two:hardly any of them ask more than that. And the sun shines every day—onthe just man who has offered up his goat, and on the unjust man who haseaten it instead.”
She sat up beside him, her slender figure swaying a little with themotion of the cart, and looked about her with a light in her grey eyesthat seemed the reflection of her mood. He thought her chatterartificial; but it was genuine enough. She always felt more than herusual sense of irresponsibility with him in their afternoon drives. Theworld lay all about them and lightened their relation; he became, as arule, the person who was driving, and she felt at liberty to become theperson who was talking.
“There!” she exclaimed, as three or four coolie women filed, laughing,up to a couple of round stones under a pipal tree by the roadside, andtook their brass lotas from their heads and carefully poured water overthe stones. “Fancy one’s religious obligations summed up in acooking-potful of Hughli water! Are those stones sacred?”
“I suppose so.”
“The author of ‘The Modern Influence of the Vedic Books,’” she suggesteddemurely, “should be quite sure. He should have left no stone unturned.”
She regarded him for a moment, and, observing his preoccupation, justperceptibly lifted her eyebrows. Then she went on: “But perhaps biground stones under pipal trees that like libations come in the secondvolume. When does the second volume appear?”
“Not until Sir Griffiths Spence comes out again and this lunatic goesback to Hassimabad, I fancy. I want an appropriation for some furtherresearches first.”
The most
enthusiastic of Mr. Ancram’s admirers acknowledged that he wasnot always discreet.
“And he won’t give it to you—this lunatic?”
“Not a pice.”
“Then,” she said, with a ripple of laughter, “he _must_ be a fool!”
She was certainly irritating this afternoon. Ancram gave his Waler assmart a cut as he dared, and they dashed past Lord Napier, sitting onhis intelligent charger in serious bronze to all eternity, and roundedthe bend into the Strand. The brown river tore at its heaving buoys; thetide was racing out. The sun had dipped, and the tall ships lay in theafter-glow in twos and threes and congeries along the bank, along theedge of Calcutta, until in the curving distance they became meresuggestions of one another and a twilight of tilted masts. Under theirkeels slipped great breadths of shining water. Against the glow on it acountry-boat, with its unwieldy load of hay, looked like a floatingbarn. On the indistinct other side the only thing that asserted itselfwas a factory chimney. They talked of the eternal novelty of the river,and the eternal sameness of the people they met; and then he lapsedagain.
Rhoda looked down at the bow of her slipper. “Have you got a headache?”she asked. The interrogation was one of cheerful docility.
“Thanks, no. I beg your pardon: I’m afraid I was inexcusablypreoccupied.”
“Would it be indiscreet to ask what about? Don’t you want my opinion? Iam longing to give you my opinion.”
“Your opinion would be valuable.”
Miss Daye again glanced down at her slipper. This time her prettyeyelashes shaded a ray of amused perception. “He thinks he can do ithimself,” she remarked privately. “He is quite ready to give himself allthe credit of getting out of it gracefully. The amount of flattery theydemand for themselves, these Secretaries!”
“A premium on my opinion!” she said. “How delightful!”
Ancram turned the Waler sharply into the first road that led to theCasuerina Avenue. The Casuerina Avenue is almost always poetic, andmight be imagined to lend itself very effectively, after sunset, to thefuneral of a sentiment which Mr. Ancram was fond of describing tohimself as still-born. The girl beside him noted the slenderness of hisfoot and the excellent cut of his grey tweed trousers. Her eyes dweltupon the nervously vigorous way he handled the reins, and her glance oflight bright inquiry ascertained a vertical line between his eyebrows.It was the line that accompanied the Honourable Mr. Ancram’s Bills inCouncil, and it indicated a disinclination to compromise. Miss Daye,fully apprehending its significance, regarded him with an interest thatmight almost be described as affectionate. She said to herself that hewould bungle. She was rather sorry for him. And he did.
“I should be glad of your opinion of our relation,” he said—which wasvery crude.
“I think it is charming. I was never more interested in my life!” shedeclared frankly, bringing her lips together in the pretty composurewith which she usually told the vague little lie of her satisfactionwith life.
“Does that sum up your idea of—of the possibilities of our situation?”He felt that he was doing better.
“Oh no! There are endless possibilities in our situation—mostly stupidones. But it is a most agreeable actuality.”
“I wish,” he said desperately, “that you would tell me just what theactuality means to you.”
They were in the Avenue row, and the Waler had been allowed to drop intoa walk. The after-glow still lingered in the soft green duskiness overtheir heads; there was light enough for an old woman to see to pick upthe fallen spines in the grass; the nearest tank, darkling in thegathering gloom of the Maidan, had not yet given up his splash of redfrom over the river. He looked at her intently, and her eyes dropped tothe thoughtful consideration of the crone who picked up spines. It mighthave been that she blushed, or it might have been some effect of theafter-glow. Ancram inclined to the latter view, but his judgment couldnot be said to be impartial.
“Dear Lewis!” she answered softly, “how very difficult that would be!”
In the sudden silence that followed, the new creaking of the Waler’sharness was perceptible. Ancram assured himself hotly that this wassimple indecency, but it was a difficult thing to say. He was stillguarding against the fatality of irritation when Rhoda added daintily:
“But I don’t see why you should have a monopoly of catechising. Tell me,sir—I’ve wanted to know for ever so long—what was the first, the veryfirst thing you saw in me to fall in love with?”