"Yes! for fifteen hundred," interrupted the Major, in unmistakable defiance. "A long price, but there was hanky-panky in that match. Greyman tried fussing to cover it. You never can trust professionals. However, I and my friends won, and I shall win again with the horse. Take you evens in gold mohurs for the next----"
There was always a sledge-hammer method in the Major's fence, and the subject dropped.
The room was heavy with the odors of meats and drinks. Dark as it was, the flood of sunshine streaming into the veranda outside, where yellow hornets were buzzing and the servants washing up the dishes, sent a glare even into the shadows. Neither the furniture nor appointments of the room owed anything to the East--for Indian art was, so to speak, not as yet invented for English folk--yet there was a strange unkennedness about their would-be familiarity which suddenly struck the latest exile, young Mainwaring.
"India is a beastly hole," he said, in an undertone--"things are so different--I wish I were out of it." There was a note of appeal in his young voice; his eyes, meeting Alice Gissing's, filled with tears to his intense dismay. He hoped she might not see them; but she did, and leaned over to lay one kindly be-ringed little hand on the table quite close to his.
"You've got liver," she said confidentially. "India is quite a nice place. Come to the assembly to-night, and I will give you two extras--whole ones. And don't drink any more madeira, there is a good boy. Come and have coffee with me in the drawing room instead; that will set you right."
Less has set many a boy hopelessly wrong. To do Alice Gissing justice, however, she never recognized such facts; her own head being quite steady. But Major Erlton understood the possible results perfectly, and commented on them when, as a matter of course, his long length remained lounging in an easy-chair after the other guests had gone, and Mr. Gissing had retired to business. People, from the Palais Royale playwrights, downward--or upward--always poke fun at the husbands in such situations; but no one jibes at the man who succeeds to the cut-and-dried necessity for devotion. Yet there is surely something ridiculous in the spectacle of a man playing a conjugal part without even a sense of duty to give him dignity in it, and the curse of the commonplace comes as quickly to Abelard and Heloise as it does to Darby and Joan. So Major Erlton, lounging and commenting, might well have been Mrs. Gissing's legal owner. "Going to make a fool of that lad now, I suppose, Allie. Why the devil should you when you don't care for boys?"
She came to a stand in front of him like a child, her hands behind her back, but her china-blue eyes had a world of shrewdness in them. "Don't I? Do you think I care for men either? I don't. You just amuse me, and I've got to be amused. By the way, did you remember to order the cart at five sharp? I want to go round the Fair before the Club."
If they had been married ten times over, their spending the afternoon together could not have been more of a foregone conclusion; there seemed, indeed, no choice in the matter. And they were prosaically punctual, too; at "five sharp" they climbed into the high dog-cart boldly, in face of a whole posse of servants dressed in the nabob and pagoda-tree style, also with silver crests in their pith turbans and huge monograms on their breastplates; old-fashioned servants with the most antiquated notions as to the needs of the sahib logue, and a fund of passive resentment for the least change in the inherited routine of service. Changes which they referred to the fact that the new-fangled sahibs were not real sahibs. But the heavy, little and big breakfasts, the unlimited beer, the solid dinners, the milk punch and brandy pâni, all had their appointed values in the Gissings' house; so the servants watched their mistress with approving smiles. And on Mondays there was always a larger posse than usual to see the old Mai, who had been Alice Gissing's ayah for years and years, hand up the bouquet which the gardener always had ready, and say, "My salaams to the missy-baba." Mrs. Gissing used to take the flowers just as she took her parasol or her gloves. Then she would say, "All right," partly to the ayah, partly to her cavalier, and the dog-cart, or buggy, or mail-phaeton, whichever it happened to be, would go spinning away. For the old Mai had handed the flowers into many different turn-outs and remained on the steps ready with the authority of age and long service, to crush any frivolous remarks newcomers might make. But the destination of the bouquet was always the same; and that was to stand in a peg tumbler at the foot of a tiny white marble cross in the cemetery. Mrs. Gissing put a fresh offering in it every Monday, going through the ceremony with a placid interest; for the date on the cross was far back in the years. Still, she used to speak of the little life which had come and gone from hers when she was yet a child herself, with a certain self-possessed plaintiveness born of long habit.
"I was barely seventeen," she would say, "and it was a dear little thing. Then Saumarez was transferred, and I never returned to Lucknow till I married Gissing. It was odd, wasn't it, marrying twice to the same station. But, of course, I can't ask him to come here, so it is doubly kind of you; for I couldn't come alone, it is so sad."
Her blue eyes would be limpid with actual tears; yet as she waited for the return of the tumbler, which the watchman always had to wash out, she looked more like some dainty figure on a cracker than a weeping Niobe. Nevertheless, the admirers whom she took in succession into her confidence thought it sweet and womanly of her never to have forgotten the dead baby, though they rather admired her dislike to live ones. Some of them, when their part in the weekly drama came upon them, as it always did in the first flush of their fancy for the principal actress in it, began by being quite sentimental over it. Herbert Erlton did. He went so far once as to bring an additional bouquet of pansies from his wife's pet bed; but the little lady had looked at it with plaintive distrust. "Pansies withered so soon," she said, "and as the bouquet had to last a whole week, something less fragile was better." Indeed, the gardener's bouquets, compact, hard, with the blossoms all jammed into little spots of color among the protruding sprigs of privet, were more suited to her calm permanency of regret, than the passionate purple posy which had looked so pathetically out of place in the big man's coarse hands. She had taken it from him, however, and strewn the already drooping flowers about the marble. They looked pretty, she had said, though the others were best, as she liked everything to be tidy; because she had been very, very fond of the poor little dear. Saumarez had never been kind, and it had been so pretty; dark, like its father, who had been a very handsome man. She had cried for days, then, though she didn't like children now. But she would always remember this one, always! The old Mai and she often talked of it; especially when she was dressing for a ball, because the gardener brought bouquets for them also.