When they were alone, she tried a little bluster too, but he met it with a smile. 'My dear lady,' he said, 'it only wants a very little to kick Lucanaster out of the club, so please look at the business unselfishly. It is always a pity to risk one's position for a trifle.'
As he handed Mrs. Chris into the dogcart, duly fortified by hot soup, Chris tried to wring his hand and say something grateful, with the result that Jack Raymond felt he had been a fool to interfere, since the catastrophe must come sooner or later.
The sooner the better. It was always a mistake to prolong the agony in anything.
He felt unusually low in his mind, and so, after having waited to the very last as in duty bound, to turn any would-be revellers decently out of the club, he lit another cigar--his first one having been interrupted--and wandered out into the Garden Mound again. Most of the lights were out, only a belated lantern or two swung fitfully among the trees, but a crescent moon was showing, and there was just that faint hint of light in the sky which tells of dawn to come. He sat down on the step of the granite obelisk, which held on all four sides the close-ranged names of those who had given their lives to keep the English flag flying, and, full of cynical disgust at much he had seen that evening, asked himself if Nushapore was likely to bring such heroism again to the storehouse of the world's good deeds?
Perhaps; but even so, it would have to be something very different from that past story,--something that Englishmen and women could not monopolise. For if, after forty years of government, our rule had failed to win over the allegiance of men--like Chris Davenant, for instance--would not that, in itself, be a condemnation?
And had it won such allegiance? With that scene fresh in his memory, Jack Raymond doubted if it were possible.
Truly the conditions had changed, indeed! As he had said, Brian O'Lynn's breeches were not in it for topsyturveydom!
But with the thought came also the memory of what he had said about Jerry and the carrying on of British rule; and with that came the memory of what the Thakoor had said about the boy.
Dear little chap!
A great tenderness swept through him for the child. And for the child's mother, the woman who had refused----?