It is our fate as a nation, head and heart of a world empire, that much of our manhood must pursue its career far away from home. And it is our strength that these English sons of ours have taught themselves to make it home wherever they find their work.
The fervid land of India had become home to Raymond Bethune for so many years that it would have been difficult for him to picture his life elsewhere. The glamour of the East, of the East that is England's, had entered into his blood, without, however, altering its cool northern deliberate course; that it can be thus with our children, therein also lies the strength of England.
Raymond Bethune, Major of Guides, loved the fierce lads to whom he was at once father and despot, as perhaps he could have loved no troop of honest thick-skulled English soldiers. He was content with the comradeship of his brother officers, men who thought like himself and fought like himself; content to spend the best years of existence hanging between heaven and earth on the arid flanks of a Kashmir mountain range, in forts the walls of which had been cemented by centuries of blood; looked forward, without blenching, to the probability of laying down his life in some obscure frontier skirmish, unmourned and unnoticed. His duty sufficed him. He found happiness in it that it was his duty. Such men as he are the very stones of our Empire's foundation.
* * * * *
Yet though he was thus intimately satisfied with his life and his life's task, Bethune was conscious of a strange emotion, almost a contraction of the heart, as he followed the kitmutgar to Lady Gerardine's drawing-room in the palace of the Lieutenant-Governor, this October day.
The town below hung like a great rose jewel, scintillating, palpitating, in a heat unusual for the autumn of Northern India. Out of the glare, the colour, the movement, the noise; out of the throng of smells—spice, scent, garlic, the indescribable breath of the East—into the dim cool room; it was like stepping from India into England! And by the tug at his heart-strings he might have analysed (had he been of those that analyse) that, after all, the old home was nearest and dearest still; might have realised that his content beneath the scorching suns, amid the blinding snows of his adopted country, arose after all but of his deep filial love of, and pride in, the distant English isle.
He put down his bat and looked round: not a hint of tropical colour, not a touch of exotic fancy, of luxuriant oriental art anywhere; but the green and white and rosebud of chintz, the spindle-legged elegance of Chippendale, the soft note of Chelsea china, the cool greys and whites of Wedgwood. From the very flower-bowl a fastidious hand had excluded all but those delicate blossoms our paler sunshine nourishes. Some such room, dignified with the consciousness of a rigid selection, reticent to primness in its simple yet distinguished art, fragrant with the potpourri of English gardens, fragrant too with memories of generations of wholesome English gentlefolks, you may meet with any day in some old manor-house of the shires. To transport the complete illusion to the heart of India, Bethune knew well must have cost more labour and money than if the neighbouring palaces had been ransacked for their treasures. It was obvious, too, that the fancy here reigning supreme was that of one who looked upon her sojourn under these splendid skies with the eyes of an unresigned exile.
"The wife of the Lieutenant-Governor can evidently gratify every whim," he said to himself, bitterly enough, the while he still inhaled the fragrance of home with an unconscious yearning.
In the distance the tinkle of a piano seemed to add a last touch to the illusion. In India one so seldom hears a piano touched during the hot hours. And scales, too—it was fantastic!
Suddenly the music ceased, if music it could be called. There was a flying step without. The door was thrown open. Raymond Bethune turned quickly, a certain hardness gathering in his eyes. Their expression changed, however, when he beheld the newcomer. A young, very young girl, hardly eighteen perhaps, of the plump type of immaturity; something indeed of a cherubic babyhood still lurking in the round face, in the buxom little figure, and in the rebellious aureole of bronze hair rising from a very pink forehead. It was evidently the energetic musician.